Wounded Animals and Where to Find Them. The Symbolism of Hunting in Palaeolithic Art
Representations of wounded animals and humans in European Upper Palaeolithic art have traditionally been conceived as figures related to the hunting activities of hunter-gatherer societies. In this paper, we propose an analysis of Franco-Cantabrian figurative representations showing signs of violenc...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Estado: | Versão publicada |
| Data de publicação: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Salamanca (USAL) |
| Repositório: | GREDOS. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Salamanca |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:gredos.usal.es:10366/164672 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10366/164672 |
| Access Level: | Acceso aberto |
| Palavra-chave: | Rock art Portable art Multivariate analysis Upper Palaeolithic Symbolism Paleolithic art 5504.05 Prehistoria 5505.01 Arqueología 5506.02 Historia del Arte |
| Resumo: | Representations of wounded animals and humans in European Upper Palaeolithic art have traditionally been conceived as figures related to the hunting activities of hunter-gatherer societies. In this paper, we propose an analysis of Franco-Cantabrian figurative representations showing signs of violence between 35,000 and 13,000 cal. bp to qualify the interpretations of hunting and death in Palaeolithic art. To this end, both multivariate statistical analyses and hypothesis tests have been used to highlight the formal, thematic, chronological and regional similarities and differences in these types of artistic representations. The results show that wounded graphic units are mythograms coded by different variables that do not seem to reflect the actual hunting of the animal, but rather a more complex meaning. It was also discovered that, in early times, the artist preferred to wound secondary or less frequent animals, like deer. This changed in more recent times, when the main animals, such as bison, are wounded under greater normativity and homogeneity in the Pyrenees or the Cantabrian region. |
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