SCENES AND NON-SCENES IN ROCK ART

Abstract

The Problem of Scenes in Rock Art One of the constant descriptors of Paleolithic cave art has been that there was little or no representation of scenes. The purpose of this chapter and of those by other authors in the book is to examine that proposition and explore the implications of the presence or absence of scenes in both the Paleolithic art of Western Europe and rock and cave art elsewhere in the world. It will be important, in considering this, to understand that we are dealing only with images on rock surfaces produced before written accounts could record any description of what the producers of the art may have intended. The issue becomes one of how we observers can interpret sets of images without either the benefit of experience of the production of those images or a cultural connection to the traditions within which the art was produced. This book will present a number of approximations to what is meant by a scene. The first requirement will be a definition of "scene" relevant to rock or cave art (or its mobile equivalents), particularly in the context of the absence of any account contemporary with the production of the art. None of the obvious dictionary defi nitions is quite suitable, but the closest one seems to be related to works written for the theater or cinema; Merriam-Webster defines a scene as "a division of an act in a play during which the action takes place in a single place without a break in time." The important part here is that action takes place. For the purposes of this chapter, a scene can be identified from a set of images in spatial proximity to each other from which, without any knowledge other than the images themselves, an observer can infer actions taking place among the actors represented in the images. Much of the discussion of the presence or absence of scenes in Paleolithic cave art has not had the benefit of such a definition and has relied instead on intuition (but Villaverde's Chapter 15 makes productive use of distinctions defined by Delporte). Moreover, the general statements about absence of scenes as a characteristic of the art belies the knowledge that some scenes have been recognized. Some Paleolithic scenes are in fact very famous, including those from Parpalló in eastern Spain (Pericot García 1942) (Figures 1 and 2 in Chapter 15), which were executed on small slabs or plaquettes of stone (and one on bone), and those from Lascaux in southern France, which were produced on the walls inside a deep cave. Contrary to the popular image beloved of cartoonists who show stick figure humans hunting herds of animals, scenes were not an important part of Paleolithic cave art, or so it has been said. Yet the same is not said about rock art elsewhere. One of the most famous examples of a hunting scene (in the post-Paleolithic Levantine Art of eastern Spain) is discussed by Villaverde in Chapter 15 (and his Figure 5).

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