Keywords

1 Introduction

While it would be an exaggeration to assert that rock art studies have been shaped by a Eurocentric bias (after all, this is only true from a Western European perspective), it is fair to affirm that, during most of the twentieth century, the European caves were favored ‘places’ in rock art research (David 2017; Moro Abadía and Tapper 2021). For instance, at that time, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians took for granted the idea that global rock art originated in Europe at the beginnings of the Upper Palaeolithic. Similarly, until recently, renowned practitioners were persuaded that Palaeolithic cave art was almost exclusive to Southern France and Northern Spain (see, for instance, Mellars 2006). This Eurocentrism has been somewhat reinforced by a powerful imagery that has privileged the European record for more than a century. For example, rock art textbooks typically feature on their covers a number of images that, until very recently, were inevitably chosen from emblematic European caves, such as Altamira, Lascaux, and Niaux (Conkey 2010). The same can be said about the images illustrating the news related to rock art research in websites and social media. This situation has significantly evolved in the last decades, at least in the academic milieu. In fact, recent discoveries such as Sulawesi or Blombos, together with the development of new dating techniques (see Georges Sauvet’s chapter in this volume), have made clear that the traditional European view about the origins of rock art is incorrect, and that Europe is just one among many regions in which rock art making occurred (something of which non-European specialists have been long aware).

Although the view that favors Europe over other places can be considered one of the factors preventing the advent of a genuinely global discipline of rock art research, Eurocentrism has received little scholarly coverage in comparison to other aspects of rock art research (Porr 2019; Moro Abadía and Tapper 2021). This may be related to a number of factors. In particular, ‘Eurocentrism’ itself is, in a way, a Eurocentric view of rock art research: i.e., a view that ‘peripheralizes’ a number of rock art traditions that developed independently from the European one. For instance, the American rock art tradition developed separately from the European one, and the same can be somehow said about the Australian and South African traditions (even if these two were more connected to Europe due to the ties between their universities and the British ones). This may explain the lack of interest in Eurocentrism as a topic of research. However, the fact remains that, still today, explicit ethnocentric views are not rare, especially in Europe, and a number of more or less unconscious biases still operate in rock art research. In this setting, the correct identification of the many facets of Eurocentricity seems crucial in order to promote an alternative paradigm in rock art studies. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that Eurocentrism is not just an evil that we can exorcize by naming it; rather, it is a deeply-rooted set of views that has heavily shaped (and continues to shape) our understanding of rock images since the beginning of the twentieth century. For these reasons, reflection on Eurocentrism is relevant not only to better understand the foundations of our discipline but, more importantly, to promote effective action in regard to the marginalisation of non-European rock art (especially in Europe).

In an attempt to counter Eurocentrism in a productive way, this chapter explores the divide that, from a European perspective, has historically separated Palaeolithic cave art in Europe from other rock art traditions. By ‘divide’ we mean the view establishing that European cave art is intrinsically different from (and artistically superior to) other deep-time rock images. This European view is the product of a number of factors. To begin, it is related to the richness of the European record. Without negating the importance of other, worldwide, imagery manifestations, no one can deny the extent and richness of the European Upper Palaeolithic caves. Similarly, while some old art has been reported in other places (see, for instance, recent discoveries in Indonesia and Australia), the concentration of decorated Pleistocene caves in Europe is certainly remarkable. Admitting these facts is the first step in suggesting an acceptable alternative to the Eurocentric view. However, the privileged position of European cave art is in fact grounded on a number of biases and prejudices. For instance, this is related to their more ‘realistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ styles, attributes that are more highly valued in the Western conceptions of ‘art.’ Similarly, as we examine in this chapter, the primacy of Eurocentrism in Europe is also grounded on a number of prejudices and biases about Indigenous peoples, prejudices that are particularly relevant in this part of the world.

As we examine in the second section, Eurocentrism in European rock art research has its origins in the years immediately after the authentication of Palaeolithic cave art in France in 1902. At that time, European archaeologists assumed that the decorated caves from Europe were older, more sophisticated, and artistically more relevant than the so-called ‘primitive’ art from Australia, South Africa, and America. These conceptions remained largely unchallenged during most of the twentieth century. As we show in the third section, it has been only in the last three decades that a number of developments have converged to call into question Eurocentrism. First, the internationalization of archaeological research, together with new technical developments, has showed that many of the boundaries that differentiated European Palaeolithic art from other rock art corpuses are, in fact, European constructions. Second, in a milieu marked by the postcolonial critique, archaeologists have become more aware of the prejudices that have oriented their research in the past. These developments have generated a demand for the constitution of a global discipline of rock art research beyond traditional constructs. However, as we examine in this section, this is easier said than done. The mere proclamation of our anti-ethnocentrism does not automatically suspend Eurocentrism. For this reason, we conclude by examining a number of strategies to abolish the ‘great divide’ (i.e., the divide between European and non-European rock art) that has oriented rock art research in Europe for a long time. In particular, we suggest that we need to (A) discard a number of traditional narratives, (B) promote approaches that focus on the making, materiality, location, and context of rock images (rather than on chronology, culturally constructed notions of ‘style,’ and relative sophistication), and (C) develop agile forms of theory that can operate at multiple levels and in multiple directions.

Before examining these questions, three methodological clarifications are in order. First, this chapter is mainly circumscribed to the European case: i.e., we are mainly referring to the European Palaeolithic (not global) research. Second, and related to the previous point, we focus on Palaeolithic cave art without referring to Holocene art. We understand that, in Europe, Palaeolithic art is just one among many other rock art traditions (including Mesolithic art from Northern Scandinavia; Levantine art, macro-schematic and schematic art from Spain, Atlantic Megalithic art, and Iron age rock art; see, for instance, Robb 2015), but the analysis of such an extraordinary variety of more recent rock art imagery is far beyond the scope of this paper. Moreover, it is our impression that, for a number of reasons that we seek to unravel in this chapter, in Europe, Pleistocene cave art has occupied a privileged position in the interpretation of rock images. Finally, we use the notion of ‘Indigenous arts’ to refer to a diversity of rock images – including those from Pleistocene age contexts – from many places around the world. While this label is Eurocentric itself (i.e., it contributes to reducing an extraordinary variety of images and image-making contexts and histories into a single monolithic category), one of the goals of this paper is, precisely, to understand the reasons why very different images (from very different places) have been uncritically amalgamated into the homogeneous category of ‘Indigenous art.’

2 Rock Art Divided: Palaeolithic Art Versus Indigenous Arts

Narratives about the ‘discovery’ of rock art illustrate, probably better than any other episode in the history of research, how European scholars established very early a ‘divide’ separating the European record from other rock art traditions. In many prehistoric textbooks, we are told that rock art was authenticated at the beginning of the twentieth century when, following the discovery of a number of caves in France, Émile Cartailhac authenticated the Altamira paintings discovered by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1879 (e.g., Bahn and Vertut 1997: 17–22, Clottes 2002: 1–2). The plot typically starts when Sautuola’s eight-year-old daughter, María, first noticed the paintings on the ceiling of the cave. It continues with Sautuola’s enthusiastic fight to support the prehistoric antiquity of the paintings against the skepticism of French and Spanish archaeologists. The story happily concludes when Sautuola, who had passed away in 1888, was vindicated by Cartailhac’s paper (1902). This narrative has transcended archaeological literature (see, for instance, Hugh Hudson’s film Finding Altamira) but it is not without problems. Besides the fact that the idea of the ‘discovery’ of rock art is a very Eurocentric one (these images have been made and used by different people for centuries), in places such as Australia and North America, rock images were documented and published long before the ‘discovery’ of Altamira. For instance, in North America, Cotton Mather reported the petroglyphs of Dighton Rock in Massachusetts as early as 1714 (Keyser and Whitley 2006: 3). More significantly, two continental synthesis of North American rock art were published long before Cartailhac’s paper. In 1851–1857 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft published his Historical and statistical information respecting the history, condition and prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States in which he suggested that the images made by the ancestors of Algonquian peoples were a form of “picture-writing” (Schoolcraft 1851–1857, 333). Similarly, Garrick Mallery (1894) suggested that rock images were a form of picture-writing in his Picture-writing of the American Indians (for a more detailed account, please see the introduction to this volume).

If the authentication of Palaeolithic cave art at the turn of the twentieth century did not mark the beginnings of rock art research, in Europe this event was the starting point of two related processes: First, for European scholars, the notion of ‘primitive art,’ which was originally developed to fit the art of living Indigenous communities, was expanded to incorporate European Palaeolithic art. Second, in Europe, the first years of the twentieth century witnessed the establishment of a divide within the concept of ‘primitive art,’ i.e., a split that separated Palaeolithic cave art from other forms of the then-called ‘primitive rock art.’ This boundary was already evident in La Caverne d’Altamira à Santillane, près Santander (Espagne), one of the foundational texts of Palaeolithic art studies (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906). In the first part of the book, Cartailhac and Breuil reviewed the recent discoveries of Palaeolithic art in Europe, including those at Altamira, La Mouthe, Pair-non-Pair, Chabot, Les Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, Marsoulas, Mas d’Azil, Bernifal, and Teyjat. Their examination included two chapters on mobiliary (portable) art. In the second part of the book, the authors focused on the ‘art of living primitive people’ (l’art des primitifs actuels’). In fact, they devoted almost one hundred pages to examining the art from the Indigenous peoples of America, African Indigenous populations, and Australian Aboriginal peoples.

Two ideas are recurrent in Cartailhac and Breuil’s account (and in most European accounts): First, the notion that European cave art was artistically more sophisticated than non-European rock images and, second, the idea that it was significantly older. To begin, with the exception of some South African images “worthy of our Quaternary painters” (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 191), Cartailhac and Breuil depicted Indigenous arts as inferior to the “grandiose and truly artistic” Palaeolithic cave paintings (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 145). For instance, talking about the rock art of the United States, they wrote: “This is not the style of our Paleolithic engravings and paintings. Figures are never so fine, so exact, so skillful” (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 155). Concerning Australian Aboriginal peoples, they argued that “the singular blend of convention and natural representation that is characteristic of their paintings is hardly better, artistically speaking, than what young children do” (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 222). This was related to their claim that “most of these drawings [did] not seek to satisfy an artistic need,” but they were created for ceremonial purposes (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 241). In the second place, Cartailhac and Breuil took for granted the idea that European cave art was significantly older than the rock art from Australia, South Africa, or the United States. For instance, while they situated the origins of European cave art at the end of the Aurignacian and the beginning of the Solutrean, they argued that North American rock art originated only just before the arrival of Europeans (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 156) and South African rock images were probably (only) about four hundred years old (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 178). The idea that European rock art was significantly older than other rock images is relevant because it allowed these (and other) European authors to place sites such as Altamira and Font-de-Gaume at the beginnings of art history. The emphasis on chronology, early dates, and the highly valued search for ‘origins’ has long influenced European narratives about image-making.

La Caverne d’Altamira also inaugurated an approach in the search for the meaning of cave images (the so-called ‘art-as-magic theory’) that established a particular kind of relationship between Palaeolithic art from Europe and non-European rock art. While Cartailhac and Breuil were certainly not the first to use ethnographic parallels in archaeology, in Europe they were pioneers in using them for elucidating the sense of rock images. In a context very much marked by evolutionism, Cartailhac and Breuil’s hypothesis was straightforward: Palaeolithic and Indigenous peoples lived in a primitive stage of cultural development and, therefore, their images had to reflect similar concerns and views (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 146). Following Salomon Reinach (1899, 1903), they suggested that rock images were related to “superstitious ceremonies” (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906: 241). For instance, they evoked the case of Australian Aboriginal people (e.g., the Arrernte people) to illustrate the use of rock art for promoting successful hunts. Hunting-magic became pervasive theorizing in rock art studies for most of the twentieth century. This theory was rooted in an asymmetrical interpretation in which ‘Indigenous arts’ served to ‘explain’ European images, but European cave art was rarely evoked as elucidating the meaning of other rock images. Moreover, while the paintings from Spain and France were placed at the beginnings of art history (on the basis of their high antiquity and ‘striking realism’) and, therefore, they were studied by archaeologists and art historians, Indigenous rock arts were often excluded from the Western European history of art and fell under the domain of anthropologists and the anthropology of art.

In short, by the 1910s, the ‘great divide’ was established in Europe (please see Fig. 6.1). That said, and while this split remained largely unchallenged on this continent during the twentieth century, the ways of conceptualizing the relationship between European and non-European rock art changed through time. For instance, the first half of the twentieth century witnessed an interesting discussion among European scholars about the relationship between European cave art and African rock art. The publication of the paintings from El Cogul in 1908 (Breuil 1908) was followed by the finding of numerous rock art sites generally attributed to the so-called ‘Levantine art’ of eastern Spain (Breuil and Cabré 1909, Cabré 1915). While these images differed from the cave art of Northern Spain and Southern France in a number of ways (for instance, human representations were much more common in Levantine art), Breuil and his Spanish-German archaeologist colleague Obermaier believed that “the paintings of eastern Spain [were] unquestionably of Paleolithic age […] the animal pictures common to both regions betray the same realism, the same artistic conception, the same style and finish- similarities that could hardly be a coincidence” (Obermaier 1924: 254; see also Breuil and Cabré 1909: 20). Moreover, Breuil, Obermaier, and others suggested then that the makers of the rock art from Eastern Spain were related to the Capsian, a Palaeolithic North African culture different from the industries of Northern Spain and Southern France. In light of a number of similarities with Saharan rock art, they argued that the rock art from Eastern Spain was, in fact, contemporary with the Aurignacian cave art from the Franco-Cantabrian region. The interesting point is that, for the first time in the history of research, European archaeologists suggested an African origin of (some) Palaeolithic images. This, however, did not diminish the Eurocentrism dominant in this part of the globe at that time. During the first half of the twentieth century, European scholars commented on the “surprising similarities [between] these Capsian paintings and those in South Africa which are commonly ascribed to the Bushmen” (Obermaier 1924: 218). For instance, Leo Frobenius argued that “the African branch of this [Capsian] culture […] had moved even southward towards the moist interior, that it had penetrated as far even as South Africa […] Bushmen of South Africa today actually still paint pictures on the rock […] there was still the question to be faced of whether or not these daubs could be a last remainder, degenerated to be sure, but still a remainder of a culture which had flourished once in Spain” (Frobenius 1937: 16). Similarly, Breuil suggested that the most ‘advanced’ paintings from South Africa were probably related to the ‘exotic’ influence of Mediterranean civilizations “dating back to a fairly remote era” (Breuil 1954: 34). For instance, he argued that the “fullness and majesty” of the so-called ‘White Lady of Brandberg’ (Namibia) was “of a pronounced Mediterranean type” (Breuil 1954: 40). In Breuil’s mind, the West always remained “the homeland of great rock art” (L’Occident, patrie de l’art rupestre, Breuil 1957) (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.1
A table lists the chronology, kind, location, studied by, and style for European Paleolithic art and non-European rock art.

The divide between European and non-European rock art

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Fig. 6.2
A photograph of Henri Breuil and Leo Frobenius interacting with each other.

Henri Breuil and Leo Frobenius in an expedition to Southern Africa (1928–1930). (Photo number FoA 09-10144, Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

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In Europe, Eurocentrism was reinforced during the 1960s and the 1970s. To begin, the theory of an African origin of Palaeolithic paintings was progressively abandoned. As we have mentioned, this theory was founded on the belief that the rock paintings from Eastern Spain belonged to a Capsian culture that had originated in Africa during the Palaeolithic (e.g., Obermaier 1924: 218, Breuil and Lantier 1959: 247). However, starting in the 1960s, numerous authors adopted the ideas of Hernández Pacheco (1924) and Cabré (1925), suggesting that these Levantine paintings were, in fact, post-Palaeolithic (e.g., Jordá 1966; Ripoll 1968). The establishment of the Neolithic chronology for Levantine art resulted in the widely held belief that Palaeolithic art was exclusive to Northern Spain and Southern France. This Eurocentric view was fuelled by the prevalence of the ‘human revolution’ model in the fields of paleoanthropology and human evolution in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., White 1982; Chase and Dibble 1987; Mellars 1989). This theory suggested that the most important changes in the archaeological record had occurred in Europe associated with the replacement of archaic populations (Neanderthals) by anatomically modern people (Homo sapiens) within a short period of time (the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic). The ‘explosion’ of artistic behavior associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens was considered one of the defining traits of this ‘revolution.’ In the field of cave art, this theory is implicit in Annette Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-Gourhan’s works. In the 1960s, they suggested that cave art was first developed by Homo sapiens during the Aurignacian. Interestingly, these French scholars discarded the use of ethnographic parallels in rock art research. They warned against “the dangers of ethnographic comparison” (Leroi-Gourhan 1958: 307) and proposed to instead carry out careful examinations of the location and the content/subject matter of Palaeolithic cave art (Laming-Emperaire 1962: 289). In this setting, Laming-Emperaire and Leroi-Gourhan showed little interest in other rock art traditions. More significantly, their ascendency in European rock art research explains why rock art scholars in this part of the world paid little attention to other contributions to the field. For instance, early rock art researchers in Australia, John Clegg (1971, 1981), Leslie Maynard (1979) and Peter Ucko (1977) generated new theoretical approaches to style and form in Aboriginal art. In South Africa, the works of Patricia Vinnicombe (1976), and David Lewis-Williams’ early works (1980, 1981) provided new insights into the understanding of San rock art. Similarly, in Canada, Vastokas (Vastokas and Vastokas 1973), Jones (1981), and others showed the connections between Algonquian rock images and the landscapes of which they are part. The importance of these contributions was rarely recognized in Europe.

In short, from the 1960s to the 1980s, European scholars typically ignored developments in rock art research from Africa, America, and Australia. In the 1990s, however, the situation started to evolve. At that time, substantial research on shamanism was conducted in South Africa and the Americas, a phenomenon that marked a theoretical resurgence of Indigenous arts in rock art research (e.g., Lewis-Williams 1992; Whitley 1992; Lewis-Williams and Clottes 1998). In this context, the center of rock art research somewhat shifted to places other than Europe, and European scholars evoked shamanistic interpretations to interpret European caves. For instance, Jean Clottes argued that people who are at a similar stage of cultural development tend to elaborate similar ways of thinking (Clottes 2002: 115). Additionally, he suggested that ‘caves are universally considered another world […] as many modern explorers have experienced, caves often have a kind of hallucinogenic character, where cold, humidity, darkness, and sensory deprivation facilitate visions. We can logically suppose that in ancient times people also experienced caves in this way” (Clottes 2002: 117–118). The impact of shamanistic theories marked the beginning of a new relationship between European and non-European rock art, even though many scholars were critical towards the shamanism model (e.g., Quinlan 2000; McGall 2007; Bahn 2010).

3 Beyond the Divide Between European and Indigenous Arts

As we have seen in the previous section, the divide that privileged the European record at the expense of other rock art traditions was rooted in three widely held beliefs among European scholars during most of the twentieth century: (A) The assumption that the rock paintings from France and Spain were artistically more sophisticated than any other rock image; (B) the idea that European cave art was significantly older than the rock art from America, Africa, and Australia; and (C) the notion that cave art (at least the oldest images) was, if not exclusive to Europe, mainly located in the Franco-Cantabrian region. In the last three decades, however, a number of social, scientific, and intellectual developments have converged to call into question these beliefs.

From the turn of the twenty-first century, social scientists have exposed the complex ways in which Eurocentrism has shaped scientific research since the nineteenth century. These scholars have questioned colonialism and have insisted on the capital role that Western imperialism played in the foundations of social sciences. While critical accounts on colonialism can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Said 1978; Spivak 1987, Ashcroff et al. 1989), it was from the 1990s to the 2000s that these views developed in an unprecedented dimension, also in Europe. Postcolonial studies originated in literary studies as a trend to document and challenge the marginalization of non-Western literatures (e.g., Ahmand 1992; Bhabha 1994; Lazarus 2002, 2004). The swift popularity of postcolonialism “rapidly migrated beyond literary analysis, to find a happy home in other disciplines. It was most visibly in history and anthropology, but its influence soon spread to other scholarly domains” (Chibber 2013: 1). Postcolonial authors argued that “most of the world has been affected to some degree by nineteenth-century European imperialism” and they sought to “make clear the nature and impact of inherited power relations, and their continuing effects on modern global culture and politics” (Ashcroff et al. 1998: 1). Since the turn of the millennium, the postcolonial critique has diversified in a number of ways. Initially, postcolonialism found an echo in recent critiques of globalization, capitalism, and subaltern studies (e.g., Amin-Khan 2012; Chibber 2013; Slobodian 2018). Then, in countries such as the United States and Australia, the critique of colonialism was entwined with recent developments in Indigenous and Native land rights and studies (e.g., Byrd 2011; Simpson and Smith 2014). In anthropology, for instance, the development of community-based and participatory projects has greatly contributed to make practitioners more aware of the prejudices and biases that have shaped their research.

In this globalized context, archaeologists have also been critical of Eurocentrism (e.g., Orser 2012; Montón-Subías and Hernando 2017). For instance, in the past years, paleoanthropologists have called into question the traditional privilege of the European record in the field (e.g., Ames et al. 2013; Trinkaus 2018). Broadly speaking, this began in the 1990s when analysis of mitochondrial DNA suggested that Anatomically Modern Humans originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago. While the ‘Out-of-Africa’ hypothesis did not necessarily contradict previous interpretations, it enabled archaeologists to look at the archaeological record of Africa with fresh eyes. For instance, in 2000, Africanist researchers Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks published an influential paper in which they argued that the ‘Human Revolution’ model “[stemmed] from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record” (McBrearty and Brooks 2000: 453). They suggested that many of the archaeological signatures of modern human behavior traditionally claimed to appear in Europe about 50 thousand years ago had originated or could be evidenced in Africa thousands of years earlier. While their viewpoint was still Eurocentric (they evaluated the African record with reference to the criteria used to define the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe), their paper opened new avenues of research. For instance, a number of authors have suggested that the package of cultural innovations traditionally used to define ‘modern human behavior’ (new lithic technologies, new occupation strategies, long-distance procurement of raw materials, new symbolic behaviors including rock art and symbolism) may be adequate for explaining the European record, but it cannot be used in places such as Australia (Habgood and Franklin 2008, but see Balme et al. 2009). Others, such as John Shea, have warned against the danger of using concepts such as ‘behavioral modernity.’ According to him, “using one region, even a well-known one such as Europe, as a model for global patterns of human evolution inevitably risks equating the uniquely derived characteristics of human adaptation in that region with universal trends” (Shea 2011: 6–7). In the past decade, the discontent with Eurocentrism has increased and has led some authors to propose a more radical decolonisation of human origins (e.g., Porr and Matthew 2020; Steeves 2021).

It is in this context that archaeologists and anthropologists have questioned traditional views of rock art. To understand this process in Europe, we need to consider several factors. To begin, during most of the twentieth century the field of rock art research was dominated by French scholars (Capitan, Cartailhac, Breuil, Leroi-Gourhan, Laming-Emperaire, etc.). However, beginning in the 1980s the French hegemony in Europe began to decline. This was partly related to the fact that French scholars kept publishing their works in French and Spanish, marginalizing themselves in a context now marked by the dominant Anglophone world. Additionally, with the global expansion of the university system and scientific research, scholars from other places began to play a major role in the transformation of rock art studies (Moro Abadía and Tapper 2021). These scholars called into question the idea according to which “the technical, naturalistic and aesthetic qualities of European Paleolithic images remain unique for the moment” (Bahn and Vertut 1997: 27). As archaeologists and anthropologists started to look at rock images with less biased eyes, it became evident, also for European scholars, that many Aboriginal, San or Algonquian images (to quote a few examples) were technically and conceptually as complex as any parietal painting from Europe. Additionally, historians of science demonstrated how rock art scholars’ traditional fascination for naturalistic paintings in fact replicates the prevalence and privileging of realism in traditional art history (Moro Abadía et al. 2012).

In the second place, the development of new dating methods has challenged the belief in a European origin of rock art (Taçon et al. 2012, Sauvet et al. 2017, please see also Brumm et al.’s paper in this volume). In particular, the application of radiocarbon and U-Th dating to rock images has demonstrated that Pleistocene art was by no means exclusive to Europe (for a more detailed account, see Aitor Ruiz, this volume). The cases of Australia (Finch et al. 2021) and Indonesia (please see also Brumm et al.’s paper in this volume) illustrate this point. In this part of the world, the past fifteen years have witnessed an extraordinary number of rock art ‘discoveries’ based on new scientific techniques, some of them very old. For instance, the dating of Nawarla Gabarnmang in the Arnhem Land Plateau in Australia in 2006 significantly pushed back the antiquity of rock art production in Australia. At this place, archaeologists reported a charcoal painting circa 28,000 years old framed in a stratigraphic context dated between circa 13,000–40,000 years BP (David et al. 2013). Similarly, a number of recent discoveries in Indonesia have revolutionized our ideas about the ‘origins’ of rock art. In 2014, archaeologists dated the calcite layers covering a number of representations in Sulawesi. Using U-series dating, they were able to establish a minimum age of ca. 35,000 for a babirusa (a ‘pig-deer’) and almost 40,000 years for a stencil (Aubert et al. 2014). In 2018, the same team found similar representations (animals and hand stencils) at the cave site of Lubang Jeriji Saléh in Borneo. Interestingly, U-series dating provided a minimum age for these paintings very similar to that of Sulawesi (Aubert et al. 2018). More recently (Brumm et al. 2021), archaeologists reported a minimum age of 45.5 thousand years ago for painting of a suid (a wild pig) at Leang Tedongnge (Maros-Pangkep). Besides the fact that Leang Tedongnge is the oldest figurative art in the world to date, these discoveries demonstrate the existence of distinctive rock art making in Indonesia about 40,000 years ago. Additionally, today it is pretty obvious that Pleistocene art (i.e., rock art older than 11,000 years) is not exclusive to Europe, Australia, and Indonesia. For instance, in Africa, the painted stone plaquettes from Apollo 11 (that archaeologists have known since the 1970s), dated to about 28,000 years ago, indicate the existence of rock painting in the Middle Stone Age. More recently, in 2005, a team of archaeologists discovered petroglyphs covered by deposits of wind-blown sediments at the site of Qurta in Egypt (Huyge et al. 2011). Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) provided a minimum age of about 15,000 calendar years for these deposits. In America, an impressive number of red-ochre rock art images – including humans, animals, and geometric figures – have been located in the rock shelter walls of Serranía La Lindosa in the northwest Colombian Amazon. The paintings, which include a number of now-extinct animals, are archaeologically associated with populations from the late Pleistocene. This suggests an early colonisation of the area between ca.12,600 and 11,800 cal BP (Morcote-Ríos et al. 2021). For an excellent and comprehensive publication on the many rock art images at a global scale, see Fritz (2017).

As these examples illustrate, European paintings are neither necessarily more sophisticated nor older than rock art from other areas. That said, the extraordinary concentration of rock art sites in Europe remains unique in many ways. This leads to different and more interesting questions, anthropologically speaking. As we have suggested elsewhere, it remains true that “Europe is still the area that has yielded the greatest number of Pleistocene artworks in the world” (Moro Abadía and Tapper 2021: 69). There are several contributing factors to this abundance, which include the preservation characteristics of limestone caves in regions where there has been easy access, as well as an abundance of researchers and research support for more than a century. While there is no contradiction between recognizing the richness of the Franco-Cantabrian Upper Palaeolithic record and calling into question the traditional Eurocentrism of rock art research, it is important to keep in mind that in places such as Australia and South Africa there are thousands of rock images that remain to be recorded and dated. In this setting, with the development of new scientific methods and support for increased research, the geography and distribution of rock art will significantly change in the next decades.

4 Conclusion

The Eurocentric orientation of rock art research was the product of a number of beliefs and a specific research history that have been progressively challenged and discarded during the past decades. In Europe, reflecting on the history of these beliefs and assumptions is a necessary step to challenge the view that favors European rock art over other traditions, but it does not offer practical ways to set aside this polymorphous phenomenon. For this reason, we conclude by suggesting three interrelated strategies to destabilize the still-prevailing Eurocentrism on the European continent: (A) The discarding of biased and uncritical narratives, and their replacement with new, less-biased and less-uncritical narratives more closely aligned with the archaeological evidence; (B) the development of global comparative programs of research; and (C) the elaboration of new ways of theorizing.

To overcome the Eurocentric tendencies that dominated rock art research in Europe for almost a century, we need first to discard biased narratives that may not be relevant in the present context. These narratives are in conflict with archaeological evidence and also with now outdated evolutionist and originalist assumptions. To begin, rock art research in Europe (and probably everywhere else) has been marked by the search for origins (for a critique of this approach, see Wobst 1983, Conkey and Williams 1991, Gamble and Gittins 2004). The title of a number of recent papers can illustrate this point (Hoffmann et al. 2018; Brumm et al. 2021). While it is understandable that archaeologists keep looking for the ‘origins of art’ (they need the recognition and support of funding organizations, journals, and academic institutions who seem to privilege origins research and the ‘earliest’), in light of the current evidence, it seems that image-making is a pan-human skill that arose independently in many different places depending on a number of circumstances. In this setting, the old European question of “who did it first?” is simply of little relevance in modern professional research (although it is perhaps more significant in the public’s mind). Similarly, we need to abandon the aesthetic prejudice that, still today, privileges ‘realistic’ images (see Gombrich 1960). In fact, ‘naturalism’ is one among many styles of representation, is culturally defined, and there is no reason to consider images that are perceived by some viewers as naturalistic to be superior to other images. We need to reject the primacy of realism as culturally-constructed and focus on understanding the complexity and the contexts of rock images and their making, no matter what the so-called style.

Further, instead of establishing fictitious boundaries between European cave art and other rock art corpuses, we should concentrate on a number of elements that are relevant to different image-making traditions, no matter their location. As John Robb (2015) has recently suggested, rock art has been rarely treated as a global specialized form of material culture. This is somewhat surprising since almost any rock image can be examined with reference to a number of cross-cultural criteria, including its making, materiality, location, content, and sociocultural contexts. In fact, if we consider all forms and contexts of rock art as equally important, then comparative research may constitute a significant step forward in the process of transforming rock art studies into a more global discipline. Moreover, developing comparative programs of research does not mean to reduce the diversity of rock images into a number of already-established categories. Rather, these programs can help us to understand the diverse ways in which different groups face similar problems.

There are four areas of comparative research that may be particularly fruitful in this regard. First, groups separated by thousands of kilometers (and/or years) often use similar materials for creating their rock images. In this setting, studies on the materiality of rock art (from the chemical analyses of rock images to pigment characterization) can shed new light on the material basis of rock images. Second, and related to the previous point, comparative approaches can also be relevant for a better understanding of the actual making of rock art. While image-making technologies vary from group to group, rock art makers employ a number of similar techniques and are subjected to similar physical/environmental constraints. Third, as many recent landscape studies have demonstrated, the location of rock images is essential to the act of image-making. Landscapes not only constitute the physical and ecological place of rock images, but they are active and sentient in an ontological way. In this sense, we need more global studies examining the different ways in which the relationship between location and image is structured and made manifest. Fourth, research on the content of rock art may also be relevant for studies dealing with global diversity. In fact, despite the great variation of themes and images all around the world, there are also important analogies. For instance, recent discoveries have demonstrated that certain motifs traditionally claimed to be exclusive to Europe (hand stencils) also appeared in Indonesia at a very early stage and have been claimed to be almost ‘universal,’ albeit with probable different motivations and social contexts. It would be interesting to examine why people separated by thousands of kilometers – and indeed globally – developed analogous imageries.

Finally, we argue that there is a pressing need for a critical reflection on the ways in which we think about theory in rock art research. Traditionally, Europe occupied a privileged position in world archaeology. This was related to a number of factors, including the preeminence and privileged role of Europe in archaeology, the initial identification of a rock art concentration in Western Europe, and the Eurocentric biases against Indigenous arts. As we have examined in this paper, in Europe, Indigenous arts were initially evoked only to elucidate the meaning of the ‘great’ European cave art: not only how they could be similar (in motivation), but also how they were different. This consolidated a unidirectional mode of theorizing in rock art studies in which information derived from understandings of Indigenous art were applied to European cave art. However, once the privileged position of Europe has been dismantled, we need to develop and elaborate new theoretical frameworks that are multidirectional (from European rock art to Indigenous arts and vice versa). The distinction between these two categories certainly needs to be called into question. A new conceptualization of a theoretical framework that can be brought to any corpus of rock art is, after all, happening in certain areas of rock art research. For instance, during the past decades, Indigenous arts have had a huge impact on ontological approaches to rock images in many places around the world, and they are now starting to be applied to the European record (see, for instance, the collection of papers in Moro Abadía and Porr 2021). This is a nice example of how Indigenous rock images can be a source of theory that can help us to think about rock art in new and more productive ways.