A case for idle graffiti

Abstract

This article engages critically with the interpretative approaches to prehistoric art, demonstrating a marked resurgence of semiotic hypotheses in recent years. This ‘semiotic resurgence’ is challenged through a case study of the portable art of Mesolithic South Scandinavia. Through a quantification of this early to middle Holocene corpus, this article proposes that passive cultural drift has likely governed the bulk of the ornamentation practice within this otherwise socially complexifying period. This implies that a primarily decorative, ‘art for art’s sake’ interpretation is deemed the most likely for this particular corpus – a salute to the near-forgotten notion of ‘somebody’s idle moments’, tentatively suggested by JGD Clark in The Mesolithic settlement of Northern Europe (1936). To contextualise this argument, the various interpretative approaches to prehistoric art are outlined and discussed.

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