Rock art, ontology and cosmopolitics in the Southern Andes

Abstract

The affective and agentive capacities of other-than-humans have been widely assessed by archaeological approaches dealing with ancient and indigenous ontology. However, less attention has been given to how human, other-than-human and social practices were engaged in historical cosmopolitics. This paper aims to discuss how social practices related to rock art production and use, weaving a field of relations among carved rocks, landscapes, humans and other-than-humans in the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile, during the Inka period. Our results show these relationships participated in a cosmopolitics that emphasised the Inkas’ capacities to relate with ‘Earth-Beings’, to use de la Cadena’s term, central in the socio-political reproduction of local communities. This research provides an example of the understanding of rock art as a relational, historical, and social practice, rather than an exclusive focus on its visual features.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.