Probing Prehistoric Cultures: Data, Dates and Narratives

Abstract

The first part of this paper raises some epistemological issues relevant to the construction of a scientific knowledge of pre-Historic cultures. It shows the interplay between data and narratives and calls for explicit methodological procedures. The second part takes as an example the treatment of hands in rock art and suggests that early assumptions have biased the way in which hand data have been construed and interpreted so far. It claims that these biases have curtailed the full exploitation of the information available and that there is ground in principle for a wider range of hypotheses. The final part tentatively examines the script hypothesis that could provide a basis for construing hand clusters as symbolic rather than deictic. The interest of this hypothesis is that, contrary to most interpretations, it could be easily falsified.

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