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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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Sticking with this week’s general topic of storied landscapes, and what that means for place, I would like to discuss two somewhat related issues. First, I am curious to probe further our discussion of rock art – in part because it connects to what we read for this coming class, and in part because of how the discussion of it in class revolved around prehistoric senses of place. Second, I want to return, very briefly (because I think someone else’s response might be about this), to the notion of movement, and how this impacts how we think of place.

In class, rock art was talked about as an interesting phenomenon that appeared to offer insight into the psyche of, for our class, south African peoples. We spoke of rock art as a sort of bridge between the ‘real’ world and an ‘other’ world. In our construct, rock art acts as a point of comparison between to the Dreaming of Australian indigenous populations, representing a glimpse of another, perfectly real set of places, accessed at the point of rock art production. (We spoke of trances at this point.) This was all part of our discussion of how different groups access and conceive of Place. Thus, rock art was assumed to be a point of that access to place, with transferable sets of meaning. In short, you can come to know something of the other landscape and of other places through the rock art. There is, however, an alternative perspective to this view which might come in handy as we progress throughout the semester. Rock art might not be representational at all - at least in some contexts. Sven Ouzman, for instance, has written about rock art as places of very real power, and rather than their significance being limited to the very instance of creation, many examples from south Africa (Botswana and South Africa in particular) show clear signs that people have, for many many years, returned to these sites to touch the depictions, coming into physical contact with something potent. As such, these depictions are perhaps best understood not as linking this and another world, but as having immediacy and power for people here and now. Such a perspective is interesting because it cautions us about how we engage with material manifestations of place, and even about stories of those places.

Movement is another important issue, and appeared in only one article from last week. Places of artistic or depictive production often involve networks that carry people and material across diverse and meaningful terrain. This links up with Ingold’s discussion of never leaving the limits of place A to eventually enter place B, but always moving along networks of place with inherent complications and overlaps. How, then, do we discuss place in a fruitful manner? If a road can act as a network producer between different locales, surely that road can be spliced into its own complicated set of networks, further spreading the place throughout constituent parts. But is there a whole?