Abstract
Collective, plural or individual, memory is inherent to humans, enabling us to perceive our surrounding world. Biologically, memory provides mechanisms for survival by affording environmental awareness, and culturally it offers strategies for identity and social cohesion. Ethnographic studies have shown us that rock art can be an important vehicle for maintaining collective memories and cultural transmission. To a certain extent, this can be verified in archaeological contexts through diachronic studies of relationships between different types of rock art and the in-depth analysis of gestures involved in making processes. Although we no longer have access to the worldviews of past societies, archaeology is well-positioned to explore relationships between the materiality of rock art and memory since the former is essential to the emergence and establishment of the latter. This paper explores the reciprocal relationship between the past and the present embodied through rock art by looking at sites of different traditions and chronologies from Iberia to Britain and Ireland. It discusses the appropriation, adaptation and sometimes transformation of rock art’s materiality and its effects on their meanings and surrounding landscapes. The paper considers how the acculturation and transposition of prehistoric rock art sites to modern collective memories contributed to their physical integrity and preservation. The prevalence of practices involved in rock art’s production demonstrates a strong engagement between people, landscape and the significance of particular places—an assemblage that perpetuates acts of remembrance.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lara B. Alves for inviting me to participate in the EAA 2018 session on Rock Art and Memory. I am also grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions of the reviewers, which contributed much to the improvement of this text. Finally, a very big thank you to Leslie F. Zubieta for working with me on this paper, while we navigated the obstacles that 2020 offered.
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Valdez-Tullett, J. (2022). The Role of Landscape and Prehistoric Rock Art in Cultural Transmission and the Prevalence of Collective Memory. In: Zubieta, L.F. (eds) Rock Art and Memory in the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96942-4_5
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