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Making Rock Art: Correspondences, Rhythms, and Temporalities

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Abstract

Non-representational approaches (to rock art) have highlighted the relevance of making processes. Rhythm, temporality, and taskscapes emerge from every act of making, and are deeply engaged with the affective properties of these practices. In this paper, we outline a rhythm-analysis perspective to rock art discussing how it can shed light on the affective properties of this materiality, the emergence of landscapes, and the impact this practice had on the lived temporalities of the peoples that carried them out. We apply our approach to three case studies related to hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and Incaized communities in different areas of the Southern Andes. As a result, we discuss the relevance of approaching the relationship between making, rhythm, correspondences, and taskscapes to better understand rock art and avoid the pitfalls of an ahistorical relational perspective in archaeology.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues who have worked with us in researching in North-Central Chile, particularly to Francisca Moya-Cañoles for her support and comments to this article; also to the anonymous referees for their comments, which allowed us to improve many weak points of the first version of the manuscript; and to ANID who financed this research through grants FONDECYT 1200276, FONDECYT 1040153, and CONICYT-USA 2013/0012.

Funding

This research has been funded by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación Científica-Chile grants FONDECYT 1200276, FONDECYT 1040153, and CONICYT-USA 2013/0012.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Andrés Troncoso

  2. Department of Anthropology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile

    Felipe Armstrong

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Correspondence to Andrés Troncoso.

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Troncoso, A., Armstrong, F. Making Rock Art: Correspondences, Rhythms, and Temporalities. J Archaeol Method Theory 30, 611–635 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-022-09571-9

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