The Divide Between ‘European’ and ‘Indigenous’ Rock Arts: Exploring a Eurocentic Bias in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

Abstract Rock art studies are a field of research that includes many different (and diverse) national traditions. While most of these traditions have their own research histories and trajectories, during most of the twentieth century, rock art literature was marked by a certain prominence of European Palaeolithic art. The privileged position of the European record was the result of a combination of factors, including the traditional focus on European archaeology, the abundance of and research support for decorated caves in Southern France and Northern Spain, and, especially, a number of ethnocentric prejudices against Indigenous peoples. However, in a context marked by globalization, a number of developments in the past decades have called into question the divide that favours European cave art at the expense of other rock art corpuses. For instance, new dating techniques have showed that the traditional belief that the temporal ‘origins’ of rock art was in Europe cannot be sustained. Similarly, innovative theoretical approaches mainly based on Indigenous rock art have generated many new avenues of research for the meaning, the making, and the context of rock images. With reference to the history of research, we argue that we need to overcome the divide that privileges the European record in rock art research. However, the favoured position of the European caves is deeply rooted in many conscious and unconscious biases. For this reason, we explore in this paper a number of strategies that can help us to counteract Eurocentrism, including the abandonment of traditional narratives, the focus on the materiality, making, location, and contents of rock images, and the development of new styles of theorizing.

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