Rock Art Research and Knowledge-Production in the Context of Globalizations. A Comparative Approach to the Cases of Patagonia-Argentina and Eastern Canada

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the impacts different globalizations (in plural) have had on the development of rock art research in Argentina and Canada over time. In particular, we focus on: (1) the initial or pioneer views on deep-time rock art in Eastern Canada and Patagonia (those of voyagers, explorers, militaries, and missionaries); (2) the development of archaeologies of art in the strict academic sense of the term (e.g. culture-history and stylistic approaches as well as processual approaches, following and creatively adapting international academic trends); and (3) a number of new theoretical approaches associated with post-processualism, including landscape archaeology, ecological approaches, materiality, and, more recently, the ‘ontological turn’. These three periods in the history of Western thought on deep-time rock art emerged in different contexts and under specific historical conditions, yet are characterised by the globalization of theoretical concepts from central areas of traditional academic theoretical production (i.e. Europe and USA), towards South America and Canada. In sum, we show how interpretations of deep-time Indigenous rock art in Eastern Canada and in Argentinean Patagonia were conceived under different conceptual frameworks according to different contexts of globalizations over time.

1 Introduction: Exploring Rock Art from the Peripheries of the Globalised World

In this chapter we examine the histories of rock art research in Eastern Canada and Argentinean Patagonia, seeking to reveal the effects that globalizations have had in both regions. Following the standpoint of several researchers, we argue that globalization is a multifaceted worldwide process but which cannot be considered as a single phenomenon; rather, there have been multiple stages throughout human history with different effects upon the various regions and societies impacted (Bartolomé 2006; Sheffield et al. 2013; Mir et al. 2014). We also show how the discourse on globalization often refers to plural and multi-directional interactions among nations within a ‘global village’, while what happened in the past, and is still happening today, is a mostly uni-directional interaction between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, following a neo-colonial logic which is only starting to get fully deconstructed. Taking Eastern Canada and Argentinean Patagonia as two different kinds of ‘peripheries’, we explore how these regions not only incorporated theories, methods and values from the academic ‘centres’, but also adapted these in creative ways and even produced original theoretical and methodological positions and frameworks which have remained comparatively invisible within the international dialogue. Relevant factors underpinning such invisibility in global academia are pinpointed in this chapter.

Our case studies are located at both ends of the Americas. Rock art is found across Eastern Canada, the area comprising Ontario, Québec, and the Atlantic provinces (approx. 2.8 million km²). The vast majority of the estimated 800 pictograph sites (mainly red ochre paintings) unevenly dispersed across the Canadian Shield (from Saskatchewan in the west to Québec in the east) are concentrated in northern Ontario. Petroglyphs sites are rare in the Shield, but are the dominant type of rock art in the Atlantic Canada. Most rock art is thought to date from the Woodland period onward (within the past two millennia), although some sites postdate European contact and a few continued to be made until the early twentieth century. The graphic content comprises a wide range of figurative and abstract imagery that includes animals, objects of material culture, powerful other-than-human beings, anthropomorphs, and geometric and indeterminate figures. Ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources indicate that much rock art was based in shamanism and the animisms of the various Algonquian-speaking peoples of this huge region. In the Maritime provinces of Atlantic Canada, rock art is also closely related to Indigenous experiences of European contact and colonisation.

In turn, Argentinean Patagonia extends over an area of 787,291 km² (including Tierra del Fuego) and its landscape consists of three main biogeographical areas: the Andean mountain ranges and foothills in the west, including a number of river valleys, lakes and some glaciers; a central portion characterised by plateaus and canyons, steppe vegetation and desert climate; and an eastern flatland portion which reaches up to the beaches, dunes and cliffs of the Atlantic coast, where the main rivers that intersect Patagonia from west to east flow into the sea. Archaeological evidence shows that Patagonia has been inhabited from at least 11,000 years BP by hunter-gatherer groups. Historical-ethnographic sources indicate that continental Patagonia is the ancestral territory of a number of First Nations, including Mapuche, Gününa-Küna and Aonikenk. Currently, more than 1000 rock art sites have been reported. These are characterised by painted or engraved images of guanacos (Lama guanicoe), negative hand stencils and positive hand prints, animal and human footprints, numerous geometric motifs (both simple and complex) and some anthropomorphic figures. Horse-rider figures attest to Indigenous rock art production during contact, invasion and colonisation by European populations. Detailed reports on the findings and interpretations of rock art sites in Patagonia can be found in Podestá (1996) and the subsequent chapters published quinquenially in the edited series Rock Art News of the World.

In order to explore the histories of research in both regions within a global setting, we first present some key concepts regarding globalization and academia.

2 Theoretical Framework: Rock Art Research in Globalised Academia

The initial date and characteristics of globalization are a matter of current debate among experts in a number of disciplines, including economics, political science, history, sociology and anthropology. We consider globalization to be a multi-dimensional process of intensification of international relations and connectivity through which raw materials, manufactured goods, financial resources, information, ideas, values and people circulate at an intercontinental scale, generating economic, political and socio-cultural effects in each and every region involved in the process (Bartolomé 2006; Sheffield et al. 2013; Mir et al. 2014). Such circulation is neither random nor symmetric among the involved parties, insofar as it follows the economic logics of capitalism—it is “uneven and asymmetric in pace, scope and impact” (Hodos 2017, 4). Some authors identify the end of the Cold War between the capitalist USA and the former communist USSR as the historical moment linked to the onset of contemporary globalization (e.g. Hodos 2017). This process led to the growth of capitalism ‘in extension’—achieving its expansion at a global scale—and also ‘in depth’—increasing the imposition of liberal free market rules in otherwise different countries.

However, ‘globalization’ is by no means new to human history. This process somewhat replicates, at a different scale and using different policies and technologies, what happened in the Americas since the onset of colonialism during the sixteenth century. At that time, the establishment of a global economy was based on a true colonial ‘triangular market’ characterised by: a) the transportation of enslaved African persons to do forced labour in the Americas, where Indigenous peoples were also enslaved, dominated or killed in order to invade their ancestral lands and to exploit their natural resources; b) the transportation of resources to Europe to produce manufactured goods, and c) the consumption of these goods by local privileged classes and by élites in the newly established colonies. Following complex socio-economic and technological changes driven by the industrial revolutions (from the late 18th to early 20th centuries), the capitalist system replaced enslaved workforces with ‘free’ workers who were often paid minimum wages. Parallel to this socioeconomic process, a number of political changes occurred: former colonies achieved their independence, starting with the United States of America in 1776. Later, the Declaration of Independence of the Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata (1816) led to the formation of Argentina, while the passage of the Constitutional Act (1791) and the British North America Act (1867) established the Dominion of Canada as a self-governing entity within the British Empire. In time, these socioeconomic and political changes led to the repositioning of some countries from peripheral to central positions, the USA being the clearest example of all.

Rooted in colonial times, the international division of labour persists into the present, and constitutes a world-system structured along a centre/periphery logic which endorses not only an unequal economic system but also an unequal flow of ideas—albeit with different impacts on different ‘peripheral’ countries, according to their specific socioeconomic and cultural trends (Wallerstein 2004). However, a number of authors have also noted that globalization entails not just a cultural expansion from centre to periphery, but true hybridisations, convergences and heterogeneous mixtures which are often inharmonious, convoluted and even contradictory (García Canclini 1997; Hodos 2017). It is for this reason that we contend that several globalizations (plural) have occurred throughout world history and are still operative today (e.g. Sheffield et al. 2013). Qualification of the world-system model avoids simplifying the centre/periphery relationship and allows us to explore the complexity of the connections between and within ‘central’ countries and number of ‘peripheral’ territories. We argue that the consequences of colonial and post-colonial¹ globalizations go much further than the economic arena, and involve the circulation of people (e.g. voyagers, merchants, scientists, etc.) and information (e.g. Eurocentric theories, methods, practices etc.) that deeply affected/affect rock art research. We focus here on two different kinds of peripheries: Eastern Canada (situated in a ‘developed country’) and Patagonia (situated in a ‘developing country’), each with their own histories and written sources on rock art—starting in the seventeenth century in Canada and in the nineteenth century in Argentina.²

We suggest that from this centre/periphery system stems a mainstream/marginal logic in academia. In particular, this has led to a ‘central rock art discourse versus a peripheral rock art discourse’ dichotomy, which has operated internationally and has deeply affected the development of rock art research within the peripheries. Any literature review can demonstrate that the former has often had a much wider platform, better visibility and greater academic recognition than the latter. However, as will be shown below, rock art studies conducted in the ‘peripheries’ have long and rich histories, which go beyond the mere existence of interesting, deep-time rock art sites.

Consequently, we propose that there was, and remains, a ‘periphery effect’ operating in the production, dissemination, discussion and application of rock art research within global academia. Bearing this centre/periphery relationship in mind, we draw attention to the changes that occurred throughout the histories of rock art research in Eastern Canada and in Argentinean Patagonia, and to the contradictions between discourse and practice in the current globalization context of rock art research.

3 Eastern Canada: Idolatry, Picture-Writing, Landscapes and Ontologies

3.1 17th–18th Centuries: ‘Devilish’ Rock Art in the Early Colonies

The European colonisation of North America was integral to the formulation of the modern international economy, and “the encounter between these two worlds amplified the process of realisation of the modern project” (Delâge and Warren 2001, 311). Essentially, modernity could not have emerged without the counterpoint of the so-called ‘non-modern,’ yet Indigenous participation in this modernity was qualified. First, within a pervasive degenerationist paradigm, Indigenous peoples were considered primitive and barbaric outcasts, having lapsed as a result of their remoteness to Christendom (Ouellet and Tremblay 2001, 163). Later, Enlightenment ideas of ‘progress’ recast them as the “childhood of humanity”, rendering them analogous to ‘prehistoric Europeans’ (Trigger 2006, 92, 116). While considered to share psychic unity with Europeans, representations of Indigenous people “ran the full range from child of Eden to descendant of Cain” (Ouellet and Tremblay 2001, 160). Whether scorned or admired, Indigenous cultures were deemed to have yet achieved the hallmarks of civilised societies, such as the production of art (e.g. Thwaites 1989–1901: Vol. 7, 7–9).

The earliest accounts of rock art date to the seventeenth century, and in the context in which European descriptions of the beliefs and image-making of Indigenous peoples promulgated racist stereotypes of the ‘savage,’ ‘blood-thirsty Indian’ or the ‘superstitious Indian’ (Francis 1992; Ellingson 2001), rock images were generally treated by missionaries and explorers with disdain (Zawadzka 2016, 171). For example, in the Canadian Shield, in what is now Québec and Ontario, the dearth of direct references to rock art somewhat reflects a general disregard or even hostility towards it among European explorers and missionaries. While they observed the ways in which their Indigenous companions undertook travel-related rituals—such as at the famous Rocher à l’Oiseau site on the Ottawa River (e.g. Caron 1918, 37; Sagard 1939[1632], 171; Thwaites 1896–1901: Vol. 10, 165, 167)—they made no mention of the rock art found there (Zawadzka 2016, 60) (Fig. 7.1). Few explorers and fur traders mentioned what was actually depicted on the rocks—they simply noted “red figures” (Mackenzie 1902: Vol. 1, cxxi) or “various figures of animals &c” (Gates 1965, 84–85)—but none discussed the potential meanings of these images. In other instances, rock art sites, as well as rock effigy sites, were often deliberately targeted and destroyed by missionaries who considered them idolatrous (de Bréhant de Galinée 1875, 41–42; Thwaites 1896–1901: Vol. 55, 193; Vol. 58, 43). In these cases, the other-than-human persons –manitous—considered to reside in these significant places were variously termed ‘Devils’ and ‘Demons’ by the missionaries (Thwaites 1896–1901: Vol. 10, 167). Today, toponyms including the word ‘Devil’ are common across the rock art landscapes of Eastern Canada (Zawadzka 2016). These early accounts, in which rock art was treated as a superstition or curiosity, were part of a larger trend of derogatory descriptions of Indigenous spirituality which continued well into the nineteenth and sometimes twentieth century (Zawadzka 2020). While colonial encounters during this period were largely characterised by European economic opportunism (Greer 2019), interpretations of rock art were often framed within a religious centre/periphery model with Europe at the centre, and North America at the periphery.

Fig. 7.1

Rocher à l’Oiseau rock art site on the Ottawa River was the site of Indigenous travel-related rituals in the seventeenth century although the rock art itself was not mentioned by the European explorers. In recent years many of the red ochre pictographs have been damaged and obscured by modern graffiti. In the panel on the bottom-right pictographs underlying graffiti are visualised using DStretch. (Images. D. Zawadzka)

3.2 1800–1950s: ‘Picture-Writing’ and ‘Othering’ in the Time of Nation-Building

The nineteenth century was the beginning of rock art studies in North America. With the emergence of evolutionist anthropology, the earliest syntheses of North American rock art were framed within the unilineal cultural evolutionism that would culminate in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). For example, in opening his six volumes on the history of the Indigenous peoples of the United States, ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1851–1857: Vol. 1, v) wrote that, “the antiquities of the United States are the antiquities of barbarism, and not of civilization.” He suggested that the perceived cultural inertia among Indigenous groups in the three and a half centuries following European contact reflected biological and cognitive inferiority. He wrote that Indigenous people did not exhibit “progressive physical development” and that they appear to have “no intellectual propulsion, no analytical tendencies. It [the Indian mind] reproduces the same ideas in 1850 as in 1492.” (Schoolcraft 1851–1857: Vol.1, 41).

This notion of a stagnant culture was coupled with extinction tropes, such as the Romanticist notions of the ‘noble savage’ and ‘vanishing Indian’ or accounts that asserted the primacy of European settlers in civilising and ordering the continent (Ellingson 2001; O’Brien 2010). Essentially, Indigenous peoples were regarded as ahistorical, and were denied modernity and the ability to change. These ideas were expressed in the concept of “picture-writing” where rock art was seen by the leading ethnologists and archaeologists of the period as a developmental stage leading to writing (Schoolcraft 1851–1857: Vol. 1, 333; Mallery 1886; Boyle 1896, 44) (Fig. 7.2). In The Indians of Canada, John Maclean (1892, 91) wrote, “Picture-writing is the lowest stage of writing in use amongst men.” In his magnum opus, Picture-Writing of the American Indians, Garrick Mallery (1893, 26) asserted:

The importance of the study of picture-writing depends partly upon the result of its examination as a phase in the evolution of human culture. As the invention of alphabetic writing is admitted to be the great step marking the change from barbarism to civilization…. It is inferred from internal evidence, though not specifically reported history, that picture-writing preceded and generated the graphic systems of Egypt, Assyria, and China, but in America, especially in North America, its use is still current. It can be studied here without any requirement of inference or hypothesis, in actual existence as applied to records and communications.

These evolutionist ideas about Indigenous pictography, heritage and material culture emerged during a period of colonial nation-building (Canadian confederation began in 1867) and a widespread Social Darwinism that denigrated the Indigenous cultures that Euro-settler governments were seeking to assimilate, and which were ultimately used to justify the ongoing seizure of land and resources (McNeil 1999; Klotz 2020). For example, between 1864–1912, archaeological evidence debated by the Nova Scotian Institute of Science (NSIS) concerning the origins of the Mi’kmaq was implicated in the colonial government’s policy of Indigenous assimilation (Lelièvre 2017). During this period the NSIS was an active participant in global Victorian scientific enquiry in which prehistoric and evolutionary archaeologies were developing in Europe (Trigger 2006, 163; Lelièvre 2017, 408). For example, the ‘Stone Age’ category of Thomsen’s Three Age System was used to organise precontact material culture (e.g. Piers 1896). In this context, theories of “progressivism”, “antiquation”, “migrationism” and “degenerationism” were variously used to separate contemporary Mi’kmaq from their precontact past while also placing them within a “narrative of progress that underlay the nationalistic settler project in Nova Scotia” (Lelièvre 2017, 401; see McNiven and Russell 2005). At this time, Mi’kmaw petroglyphs from Kejimkujik Lake in southwest Nova Scotia were described as “picture-writings” by Mallery and among these petroglyphs he also identified non-Mi’kmaw (settler) inscriptions as “marked outlines… …made by civilized men or boys” (Anon. 1888, 4).

Fig. 7.2

Extract from Schoolcraft (1851–57: 1, Plate 57) showing pictographs (‘picture-writing’) from the shores of Lake Superior. Those shown in Plate A are reproductions of images made on birchbark, which were themselves copies of pictographs recorded on the Namabin/Carp River in Michigan, United States. Plate B shows a reproduction of Chingwauk’s recollection, also made on birchbark, of pictographs recorded at the Agawa rock art site in Ontario

The idea of rock art as an early form of writing was widespread in North America and beyond (see Mallery 1893), and its roots can be traced back to the eighteenth century French philosopher Condillac who proposed that language and art derived from a primeval gesture language and to the rationalist idea that visual expression is subordinate to language (Molyneaux 1977, 5–6). This led to the application of philological approaches to the study of rock art (e.g. Schoolcraft 1851–1857). Nevertheless, some researchers also entertained the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ where art is divorced from any social function. For example, Mallery (1893, 469) wrote: “Micmacs… …had gained the idea of practicing art for itself, not merely using the devices of pictography for practical purposes, such as to record the past or to convey information.” In concluding his volume, Mallery pondered that “markings may be mere graffiti, the product of leisure hours, or may be of… [a] …more serious [nature]” (Mallery 1893, 769). There was also, then, the inkling of an emerging valorisation of Indigenous visual practices as “the first crude efforts of graphic art” (Boyle 1896, 45).

Interpretations of rock art during this period were founded in anthropological and archaeological theories imported from Europe and the United States. Yet, with the development of Boasian anthropology and culture-history archaeology at the beginning of the twentieth century, more nuanced understandings of the cultures and spiritual lives of Algonquian-speaking peoples began to emerge (e.g. Jones 1905; Radin 1914). Nevertheless, the interest in cultural relativism and historical particularism emphasised the acquisition of “ethnographic and linguistic data about Indigenous peoples…before their old ways disappeared… [and meant] … there was little government funding for archaeological research [in Canada] before the 1960s.” (Trigger 2006, 312). In this context, the difficulty of ascertaining the cultural affinity and chronology of rock images along with a general disinterest for art and religion in archaeology, meant that there was a lull in rock art research in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century (Zawadzka 2016, 66).

3.3 1960s Onward: The Emergence of an Archaeology of Rock Art

A resurgence in rock art research began in the late 1950s with the first comprehensive catalogue and typology of Canadian Shield rock art from around the Great Lakes (Dewdney and Kidd 1962). Within the broader context of the emergence of New Archaeology, pioneers such as Selwyn Dewdney (e.g. 1969) strove to apply the scientific method in their work (although it does not appear that Dewdney conceived his research in terms of processual archaeology). Yet, even though researchers sought to elaborate styles and various dating methods (e.g., Dewdney 1970; Rajnovich 1981), attempts to produce generalised chronological and stylistic classifications of Canadian Shield rock art (e.g. Maurer and Whelan 1977; Whelan 1983) faltered because styles were never properly determined (Molyneaux 1981; Zawadzka 2016, 57), and researchers began to identify geographically distinct cultural traditions (e.g. Rajnovich 1981; Conway 1984). Nonetheless, the development of innovative methodological approaches to record, protect and conserve rock art were predominant concerns well into the early 1990s as researchers attempted to document the wealth of data (e.g. Wainwright 1985, 1990; for a summary see Zawadzka 2016, 68–76).

From the beginning, researchers had sought to reveal the meanings and purposes of rock art from their Indigenous guides and informants, although according to Dewdney “most of the little I could glean was hearsay or conjecture” (Dewdney and Kidd 1962, 13). Yet, the resurgence of ethnographic fieldwork and interest in symbolism and contextualism that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s prepared the ground for interpretations increasingly informed by Indigenous knowledges and oral histories. This enabled researchers to reflect on the ideological drivers of making and using rock images (e.g. Vastokas and Vastokas 1973; Rajnovich 1989; Conway 1992). In fact, it has been argued that the ‘ontological turn’ widely discernible in archaeology since 2010 was actually “foreshadowed” in shamanistic rock art research in North America much earlier, but has been overlooked in current theoretical debates (Whitley 2021, 66). In Eastern Canada, “the road towards relational ontologies was initiated in the early 1970s” (Zawadzka 2021, 271), which in the work of Joan Vastokas (1973, 31) emphasised the importance of acknowledging the “world view” of Algonquian groups in the interpretations of the materiality and landscape significance of imagery.³ In some ways, her work and that of others (e.g. Molyneaux 1980, 1983) can be considered to have pre-empted some aspects of landscape archaeology and the interest in phenomenology and materiality that emerged in the 1990s in Europe. However, it is noticeable that such pioneering work has seemingly had limited impact beyond Canada because its rock art was poorly known outside of the country. Furthermore, the interest in rock art landscapes was not limited solely to symbolic and religious concerns. Some researchers (e.g. Reid 1980; Rajnovich 1981; Lambert 1983) also examined how landscape characteristics were implicated in site selection. For example, observations of riverine and lacustrine topography, the cardinal orientation of sites, and their relation to habitation places indicated that visibility and sunlight may have played important roles in determining rock art locations (Zawadzka 2016, 79–80).

These landscape-based approaches prepared the ground for rock art research in Eastern Canada that from the late 1990s began to echo and frame itself within global trends in rock art discourse. In particular, the discovery of deep-time parietal and mobile art in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas meant that some former ‘peripheries’ came to the fore in global rock art research in which the collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples significantly reorientated and advanced theoretical and methodological approaches in the discipline (Chippindale and Taçon 1998; Moro Abadía and Tapper 2020). In Eastern Canada, an initial concern with the exploration of sacred landscapes and landscape phenomenology (e.g. Arsenault 1998; Zawadzka 2008), was followed by an interest in the multifunctional nature of rock art that transcended preoccupations with the sacred (Norder 2003; Zawadzka 2013). More recently, the so-called ‘ontological turn’ has drawn attention to the relationality of rock images in the creation and maintenance of reciprocal relationships between communities of humans, non-humans and other-than-humans in the landscape (Creese 2011; Norder 2012; Zawadzka 2019) (Fig. 7.3). Furthermore, while rock art research has, historically, mainly been conducted by non-Indigenous researchers, recent years have seen the growing contribution of Indigenous scholars (e.g. Allen et al. 2008; Allen et al. 2013; Weeks 2012; Norder 2012; Twance 2017). Increasingly, rock art research in Eastern Canada has the potential to contribute to international theoretical archaeological debates that advocate relational approaches that acknowledge and privilege Indigenous realities and which challenge, compliment and extend conventional archaeological methods (e.g. Norder 2012; Creese 2021; Zawadzka 2021).

Fig. 7.3

(Left) Fairy Point is an important pictograph site on Missinaibi Lake, Ontario. Located on a major travel route, the various motifs indicate that the site likely served multiple purposes. (Right) Landscape characteristics have long been studied by rock art scholars. At this rock art site on Lake Anima Nipissing in northeastern Ontario, a large crack bisects the cliff and white precipitate covers portions of the rock’s surface. As with many rock art sites in the eastern Canadian Shield, the images tend to be abstract. Here, a series of parallel lines (visualised using DStretch) are among the most prominent motifs. (Images. D. Zawadzka)

Today, many rock art sites found throughout Eastern Canada are thought to have originated in the dream visions of medicine people seeking spiritual power and guidance from other-than-human beings, or else with the vision questing experiences of youths undertaking rites of passage (Dewdney and Kidd 1962; Vastokas and Vastokas 1973; Rajnovich 1994; Zawadzka 2019). Yet, it is also apparent that rock art sites served other purposes too, they structured human engagement and memory in the landscape (Creese 2011; Norder 2012), they were used to help people navigate the labyrinthine networks of waterways throughout the boreal forests (Zawadzka 2013), and were used to negotiate the social boundaries of group territories (Zawadzka 2016). They also served to document Indigenous experiences of European contact and adaptations and responses to colonisation (e.g Molyneaux 1988; Tapper 2021). Furthermore, archaeometric studies of Canadian Shield pictographs have begun to throw light on the various technical processes and social complexities involved in the acquisition, manufacture and application of ochre pigments in the creation of rock art (e.g. Aubert et al. 2004; Bonneau 2016; MacDonald 2015). In sum, it is evident that recent research in Canada continues to contribute to the production of original theoretical insights rather than just importing them from hegemonic global centres.

4 Patagonia: Inscriptions, Styles, Communication and the Materiality of Art

4.1 Walichus and Inscriptions in the Nineteenth Century

Although written records about Patagonia and its Indigenous inhabitants go back to the sixteenth century, the first texts reporting rock art date to the nineteenth century. Two of these sources were written by European authors, and two by Argentinean authors. Their attitudes towards the images ranged from merely descriptive to highly value-laden interpretations; they show the application of what were current academic concepts mostly created in Europe.

Swiss naturalist Georges Claraz, who explored central Patagonia in 1865–1866, mentioned the presence of yellow, white, red and black “drawings” in two different caves (Claraz 2008, 158). He noted that red was the best-preserved colour—an early observation still accurate in the twenty-first century.

From 1876 onwards, Argentinean naturalist Francisco P. Moreno, who founded and directed the Museo de La Plata, described motifs found on a Walichu (sacred stone) in Northern Patagonia, and noted that Indigenous people “seem to see there some ostrich [Rhea americana] tracks and human and lion [Puma concolor] footprints” (Moreno 1876, 188–189). In this description, Moreno provided the first and most direct evidence of an Indigenous interpretation of what later would be defined by Menghin as the ‘footprint style’ (see below). In 1879, Moreno (2004) published his findings from Punta Walichu in Southern Patagonia, in which he described geometric images, “shapeless animal figures” formed by red dots, and what we now call ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ hands. He considered these images to be “signs” or “inscriptions” likely to have been made by “an extinct race”, constituted by “men who were morally more perfect” than their descendants—the contemporary Tehuelche (Moreno 1876, 188–189). Such contempt for the Tehuelche reflected a degenerationist approach towards their artistic capabilities. Moreno (2004, 366–367) stated that the interpretation of these “ancient American signs” would require “an American Champollion”⁴—thus making an explicit connection with Egyptian hieroglyphics. He (2004, 365–372) also made an explicit analogy between these “extinct men” and those of the French Stone Age, who shared “the same mode of life and the same degree of intellectual culture” in zones which were geographically apart, but ethnographically close. Though avoiding hyper-diffusionism, such intercontinental comparison shows that Egyptology and Palaeolithic archaeology were key—central—standards for interpreting other—peripheral—regions.

A few years later, in 1887, Argentinean army officer and first Governor of Santa Cruz territory, Carlos Maria Moyano, published the results of his explorations, where he describes a number of “bows, hands, arrows, ostrich feet and other capricious strokes” painted in red and yellow pigments in a cave near Guer-aiken. He refused to consider these paintings “hieroglyphs” or “conventional signs,” since he thought that “prehistoric Indians” were “barbarian” populations unable to produce them (Moyano 1887, 20–22). Instead, he attributed these images to contemporaneous Indigenous women, following an implicit evolutionist rationale.

Finally, German naturalist Karl Hermann Burmeister, who directed the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales in Buenos Aires, published the results of his expedition to Santa Cruz, including a description of Yaten-najen canyon, where he found painted geometric drawings in a cave, and ostrich and puma tracks chiseled or pecked on open-air walls—the first engravings reported in Patagonia (Burmeister 1892). He suggested that the Indians must have engraved these during their “spare time” (Burmeister 1892, 238), thus showing an early use of the European ‘art for art’s sake’ concept applied to rock art.

In sum, the first reports on Patagonian rock art in the nineteenth century drew on both evolutionist and degenerationist conceptions of ‘Indigenous otherness,’ as well as on contradictory conceptions of Indigenous images as ‘signs’ versus ‘non-signs’. What unified all these perspectives was their Eurocentric origin and partial reliance on Palaeolithic chronologies.

4.2 Modernity in the Periphery: The Stylistic Era in Patagonia and its Links with Post-World War II

The first half of the twentieth century saw an increase in the number of expeditions to Patagonia that reported rock art data. These trips were still led both by European and Argentinean academics, and while some research was highly empiricist, and other publications retained European classifications as key guidelines for archaeological practice, it was during this period that Patagonia’s stylistic sequence was first constructed.

Empirical descriptions were abundant in the early twentieth century, such as those made by German naturalist Carlos Bruch (1902, 173), who published site-specific reports from Northern Patagonia, including the first observations of “painted sculptures”, thus offering an early account of an infrequent mixed technique consisting of painting previously engraved motifs. Some years later, Felix Outes, an Argentinean pioneer in ethnology and archaeology who worked at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Buenos Aires, co-authored with Bruch Los Aborígenes de la República Argentina, in which they summarised information about the European Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron ages, and applied these periods to the Prehistoric Peoples of Argentina (Outes and Bruch 1910). They also presented information about the “Historical Peoples of Patagonia” and included rock art within a section on “Linguistic characters”, where they explained that the Patagones, like other “primitive Americans” who lacked an alphabet, drew on rocks and caves “signs, ostriches, human feet, etc… …maybe to remember diverse facts” (Outes and Bruch 1910, 119).

However, original approaches to rock art were also occurring locally. For example, when reporting the art of Piedra Museo (Santa Cruz), Argentinean archaeologist Francisco De Aparicio (1933–1935) included details on groove depths and made inferences on the sequence of stages required to make the engravings. This anticipated, by several decades, what would later develop as the study of rock art techniques.

A foundational milestone in Patagonian rock art research was produced by Austrian archaeologist Oswald Menghin, who had initially worked at the University of Vienna for several years and as the Minister of Education in the Anschluss-Cabinet for a brief period during the Nazi regime. He moved to Argentina in 1948 in the post-war context, where he became a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata.⁵ After visiting a number of sites in Patagonia, Menghin (1957) defined seven rock art styles: hands, scenes, footprints, frets [grecas], parallels, miniatures and complex symbols—the first four are still currently in use (Fig. 7.4). He also proposed criteria to develop relative chronologies in order to create a diachronic stylistic sequence.

Fig. 7.4

Examples of: (a–b) hand stencils; (c) dotted geometric motifs; (c) grecas motifs at Viuda Quenzana locality, Santa Cruz province, Patagonia, Argentina (Images. D. Fiore and A. Acevedo)

The ‘stylistic era’ was thus inaugurated in the archaeology of art in Patagonia. Menghin’s work was permeated by German/Austrian culture-history concepts and approaches, including: (1) the use of diffusion as a key mechanism to explain the presence of certain styles in Patagonia; (2) the search for the origin of such styles outside Patagonia, in other regions and even in other continents (i.e. hyper-diffusionism); (3) the association between cultural diffusion and migrations of “racial groups”; (4) the essentialist notion that a style is originally a pure and homogenous entity whose change implies “degeneration” and/or which can be “replaced” or “contaminated” by a new style; and (5) the notion that some zones were more receptive to the “triumph” of new “more advanced and disciplined” styles, while other more “conservative” zones preserved their “ancient and primitive” styles (Menghin 1957, 81). Finally, Menghin (1957, 61–62), also proposed some symbolic interpretations of the images based on associations with ethnographic information and landscape features (e.g. springs), although he noted that “the same ritual manifestations might correspond to two or more different aims,” thus addressing the issue of equifinality at an early stage of the history of the archaeology of art.

Not only were theoretical and methodological approaches still being imported from the global centre, but, as a peripheral actor within the world-system, Argentina admitted Menghin within the academic staff of two of its key universities. The event stands as a painful paradox in the history of Argentinean archaeology and as a concrete metaphor of the effects of globalization: the first rock art sequence of Patagonia was built by a European researcher suspected to have been linked to the Nazi regime.

4.3 From Theory Importation to Theory Creation: Adapting processualism and Addressing Materiality

The second half of the twentieth century was partly characterised by: (a) the refinement and expansion of the stylistic sequence initially proposed by Menghin; (b) the original work of local researchers who adapted processual concepts to the analysis of Patagonian rock art, and (c) the first involvement of female archaeologists as rock art researchers.

A refined version of Patagonia’s rock art sequence was first presented to an international audience by Carlos Gradin at the XXXVII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, held in Argentina (Gradin 1966). Using culture-history criteria which moved away from the German/Austrian diffusionist framework used by Menghin, and which were closer to the normative French and American frameworks, Carlos Gradin, Annette Aguerre and Carlos Aschero published the stylistic sequence of the key site of Cueva de las Manos, and soon after they broadened it to cover the whole of the Río Pinturas locality (Fig. 7.5). They defined a sequence of six stylistic groups (A, B, B1, C, D and E) which they correlated with diachronic cultural levels, thus forming the backbone of the Patagonian rock art stylistic periods (Gradin et al. 1976, 1979) (Fig. 7.6). Subsequently, Gradin (e.g. 1988) redefined each of these styles into ‘stylistic modalities’ and ‘stylistic trends’, and through mapping motifs found at numerous Patagonian sites contributed to the foundation of a macro-regional archaeology of rock art. Such research was accompanied by the first archaeometric analyses (e.g. x-ray diffraction) carried out on rock art pigment samples and on pigment residues found in dated layers of Cueva de las Manos (Iñiguez and Gradin 1977).

Fig. 7.5

Examples of: (a) guanacos; (b) schematic antropomorphic figure; (c) stenciled hand and rhea footprints; (d) superimposed hunting scenes at site Cueva de las Manos, Santa Cruz Province, Patagonia, Argentina (Images. D. Fiore)

Fig. 7.6

Contact period motifs: (a) horse-rider, geometric motifs and grecas motifs at site Puerto Tranquilo 1, Isla Victoria, Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, Río Negro Province, Patagonia, Argentina; (b) images in photo “a” visualised using DStretch; (c) schematic horse-rider, anthropomorphic figure and geometric motifs at site El Trebol, Río Negro Province, Patagonia, Argentina; (d) engraved initials reproducing branding marks made to livestock by cattle drivers (arrieros) at Yaten Guajen canyon, Northern Margin of Santa Cruz River region, Patagonia, Argentina. (Images a, b and c: courtesy of Emmanuel Vargas; image d: D. Fiore)

Another key breakthrough of this period was the adaptation of Schiffer’s (1972) archaeological-context/systemic-context flowchart by Carlos Aschero to model the activities involved in the production of rock art paintings, in order to predict the archaeological residues generated by each activity (Aschero 1983, 1988). This model was used to interpret the archaeometric results of samples from site Cerro Casa de Piedra 5 in Southern Patagonia and represents the earliest known application of this kind of processual approach to the study of rock art. This local adaptation of the imported model entailed an original line of reasoning, which led to the explicit recognition of rock art as part of the archaeological record, breaking away from its artificial separation from the rest of the material culture evidence that had pervaded most of rock art research worldwide (and still does, in some countries). Later, a more complex production sequence model was presented to the 1995 IFRAO International Rock Art Congress. This model emerged from a theoretical perspective that explicitly broke away from the Cartesian mind/body split that had associated rock art with ideology/symbolism, and focused on its economic side instead. The model involved three interrelated chaînes opératoires: one dealing with tool production, one dealing with paint production and one dealing with image-making itself. It aimed to provide analytical tools to address and disentangle the diverse technological processes and choices—e.g. raw materials, tools, technical gestures, etc.—and economic aspects—e.g. resources management, labour organization, labour investment—underlying the creation of painted and engraved images (Fiore 2007).

By the end of the 1990s, the first attempt to date rock art in Northern Patagonia was produced via a collaboration of Argentinean and British researchers (Boschín et al. 1999). In 1999, Cueva de las Manos was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List due to its “outstanding collection of prehistoric rock art which bears witness to the culture of the earliest human societies in South America” (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/936/). Archaeometric studies, site management and conservation practices gathered pace at this and other Patagonian sites, leading to more informed analyses combined with more sustainable archaeological practices (e.g. Wainwright et al. 2000; Onetto 2006). The pioneer collaboration between Wainwright, Podestá and other Argentinean colleagues working in Patagonia deserves to be highlighted here as a key ‘periphery/periphery’ contribution which led to concrete results in the archaeometry of rock art paintings, including both the production of detailed information about paint recipes and conservation processes. This, in turn, is a good example of how a developed country such as Canada provided a developing country such as Argentina not only with sheer results, but with valuable methods and criteria which paved the way for future archaeometric studies.

Consistent with the increasing hegemony of the USA within the world-system, and partly as a result of the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983) which had re-oriented the country’s socioeconomic links with this new global centre, processualist concepts and archaeometric techniques were mostly imported from the USA. However, new links emerged—such as those with Canada –, while the links with Europe were still operative. In all cases, however, what becomes evident is the active role taken by Argentinean researchers in the production of original insights on Patagonia’s rock art.

4.4 Originality Also Emerges from the Periphery

The final decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century led to the development of a number of regional archaeologies of rock art across Patagonia. In spite of the usual shortage of funding, numerous (sometimes dozens) of sites within specific regions were—and still are—regularly studied over several decades by the same research teams, thus producing consistent results. The research questions, models and/or hypotheses used by these researchers express a great variety of underlying theoretical frameworks, which include both the application of ideas found in foreign bibliographies, as well as the proposal of original concepts and/or methodological techniques.

Several approaches are based on an ecological-evolutionary framework, which has its adepts in Patagonia, although it has not often been applied to rock art research at the international scale. This includes: a) analyses of rock art images as ‘systems of information transmission’, tackled via the study of the number, frequency and proportion of motif types in the Cardel-Strobel region (Re 2010); b) ‘mutual information networks’ which have been used to track motif correlations and their spatial distribution in Northwest Patagonia, with the aim of determining the paths followed by cultural transmission processes (Caridi and Scheinsohn 2016); and c) ‘formal network analysis’ used to detect the topology of different communities, contrasting these with their environmental locations, for example forest versus steppe in Northwest Patagonia (Vargas et al. 2019).

Other authors have followed a post-processual standpoint, focusing on rock art’s capacity to contain symbolic information both in the images themselves and within the landscape where they are displayed, thus being an active form of ‘dwelling’ (Carden 2013).

New conceptions contributing to the ‘material turn’ in rock art studies have also emerged from Patagonia. Spatial analysis has yielded the notion of ‘rock art landscapes,’ which has been proposed as a concept that reveals the ways in which people engage with space and transform it through visual marking—thus rendering their agencies archaeologically visible. The study of rock art landscapes via the application of GIS-based viewshed analyses of the Southern Deseado Massif have demonstrated how the variety, frequency, density, and distribution of motifs and motif types reflect different strategies of occupation and resource acquisition in the past (Acevedo et al. 2019). In turn, the materiality of rock art has also been theoretically addressed by revealing the relationships between technology, economy and cognition that underlie the practices of making and engaging with rock art. Case-studies from Santa Cruz province show that labour investment seems to have been oriented towards maximising image visibility and enduring erosion/weathering, more than towards minimizing effort in its making. The study of large databases (e.g. 366 sites) shows that labour investment was partly in line with a cost-benefit logic (e.g. by displaying engraved images in unsheltered panels), but partly defied it (e.g. by engraving harder bedrocks and painting softer ones) (Fiore 2018). In addition, the identification of certain motif types which maintained their designs through space-time but were produced using different techniques, indicates that the former had a slower rate of change than the latter, probably due to the fact that such designs carried more—but not all—informative/symbolic/ideological contents and/or aesthetic values (Fiore 2018) (Fig. 7.7). In addition to this, theoretical and methodological proposals originally emerging from—and applied to—Patagonian rock art are now circulating at an international scale. This includes, for example, the presentation of a systematic method to identify painting episodes and analyse colour superimpositions in order to build diachronic rock art painting sequences (Carden and Miotti 2020); and a new method which provides criteria to identify and interpret “minimal”, “maintenance”, “recycling”, “obliteration” and “circumstantial” motif superimpositions (Re 2016). These original contributions also deal with the proposal and discussion of new concepts which are applicable not only to rock art but also to portable art and body art, such as “techno-visual affordances” and “performative affordances”, which shed new light on different aspects of human engagement with images-objects and image-making techniques (Fiore 2020). As a result, theoretical perspectives which were originally created and used in South America, such as the “economy of art” framework, are now starting to be applied in other continents: this is the case of recent studies of Levantine rock art in Spain (Santos Da Rosa 2019).

Fig. 7.7

Examples of engraved motifs: (a) human footprints, geometric motifs and bolas, Yaten Guajen canyon sector I; (b) bird and feline footprints, Yaten Guajen canyon sector II; (c) anthropomorphic figure, Yaten Guajen canyon sector I; (d) guanaco figure, El Lechuza canyon; (e) irregular accumulation of pecked dots, El Lechuza canyon; (f) circles and zigzags, La Barrancosa (LB08-UT06) (Images. D. Fiore and A. Acevedo). All these localities are in Santa Cruz Province, Patagonia, Argentina. Notice the design similarities of these engraved motifs with some of the painted motifs in previous figures

Finally, the development of experimental approaches to rock art (e.g. Alvarez et al. 2001; Carden and Blanco 2016) which have also circulated internationally, as well as of archaeometric analyses carried out entirely by Argentinean teams using local equipment (e.g. Aldazabal et al. 2019) or as part of international collaborations (e.g. Rousaki et al. 2018), also illustrate the new effects of globalization in the current state of rock art studies in Patagonia. Presently, all these collaborations tend to involve not just a one-way importation of ideas but a two-way interactive endeavour, in which Patagonia does not only offer interesting sites, but interesting researchers—many of whom are women.

5 Discussion: Deconstructing Invisibility from the Peripheries

The histories of rock art research in Eastern Canada and Patagonia show a number of similarities and differences linked to the global development of the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology in relation to Europe. In Eastern Canada, 17th and 18th centuries references to rock art based in religious discourses disregarded rock images as non-artistic idolatrous manifestations of the beliefs of ‘degenerate’ Indigenous peoples. In Patagonia, early European settlers did not mention rock art sites.

In the nineteenth century, earlier Enlightenment notions of ‘progress’ were reinforced by anthropological applications of evolutionist theories which promulgated colonialist notions resulting in Indigenous peoples (in both Eastern Canada and Patagonia) being considered culturally inchoate (e.g. ‘noble savage’) or else degenerate versions of ancestral groups (e.g. ‘lazy Indian’). In this context, Indigenous rock images were described as ‘figures’ or ‘drawings’ and conceived as ‘signs,’ ‘inscriptions,’ ‘picture-writing’ or ‘hieroglyphs,’ associated with early forms of writing considered indicative of pre-modern cultures. In Eastern Canada, this resulted in evolutionist interpretations in which rock images reflected the stagnancy of Indigenous cultures (e.g. Schoolcraft 1851–1857; Mallery 1893), whereas in Patagonia rock images were framed within both degenerationist (e.g. Moreno 1876) and evolutionist (e.g. Moyano 1887) terms. In either case, Indigenous rock images were framed within Eurocentric chronologies using Palaeolithic/prehistoric sequences as a key comparative standard (e.g. Mallery 1893; Outes and Bruch 1910): thus, past and living Indigenous peoples were cast as analogies of prehistoric European populations. However, some scholars began to accept the ‘artistic’ nature of rock images by implicitly applying the European notion of ‘art for art’s sake’—a clear example of how globalization of archaeological theory was already following a unidirectional path (e.g. Burmeister 1892; Mallery 1893, 469). In the application of the ‘art for art’s sake’ concept we also detect heterogeneous and even paradoxical attitudes towards Indigenous peoples: while some authors considered that Indigenous societies could afford the ‘leisure time’ to make rock images, other authors stereotyped Indigenous people as ‘savage’ and ‘lazy’. In this context, the socio-economic hegemony wielded by colonial governments allowed anthropologists and archaeologists to relegate Indigenous ontologies to the positions of mistaken epistemologies (see Alberti and Marshall 2009).

While rock art research experienced a lull in Canada during the early part of the twentieth century, Patagonian rock art research experienced an increase in empirical approaches relating to the recording of sites. Later, this would culminate with the start of the ‘stylistic era’ in Patagonia, setting a key milestone in the archaeology of South American rock art. Such a milestone, however, was based on culture-history approaches imported from central Europe by a suspected Nazi: as noted above such an event epitomises the effects of globalization over the periphery. In both Eastern Canada and Patagonia, the culture-history approaches that dominated research from the late 1950s to early 1970s developed models of regional rock art styles and various relative dating methods. However, the correlation between styles and diachronic cultural levels that characterised Patagonian work gained less traction in Eastern Canada where largely abstract imagery, a lack of superimpositions and ability to associate images with secure archaeological contexts hindered attempts to produce chronological and macro-regional classifications.

From the 1980s onward, the impact of processualism was modelled in original ways in both regions. In Patagonia it was mostly adapted towards the characterisation of rock art production processes (e.g. Aschero 1983), which was later complemented with the use of French concepts. In turn, some Canadian researchers had begun to recognise the limits of deductive epistemology, since the distribution of rock art sites could not be predicted solely on the basis of archaeological and environmental criteria (e.g. Reid 1980; Rajnovich 1981).

Both regions also pioneered approaches to key aspects of rock art which later constituted mainstream frameworks in the archaeology of rock art. Some researchers in the Canadian Shield showed an early interest in the landscape archaeology and materiality of rock art sites (e.g. Vastokas and Vastokas 1973; Molyneaux 1980) which heralded more contextual approaches that recognised the importance of Indigenous worldviews in the interpretations of images. In Patagonia, early proposals on how to delve into the technological, economic and landscape features of rock art have largely superceded empirical accounts to tackle ways in which people engage with the materiality of images (e.g. Aschero 1988; Fiore 2007). Later, diverse approaches to the systematic study of the communicative aspects of rock art viewed from ecological-evolutionist perspectives (e.g. Scheinsohn 2011 and others quoted above) opened new conceptual and methodological insights. Interestingly, each country has led these changes from different epistemologies and towards different directions. Thus, Canadian researchers anticipated elements of post-processual approaches, such as the focus on the phenomenological aspects of archaeological landscapes, as well as the importance of Indigenous knowledges to rock art interpretation as emphasised in the ‘ontological turn’ over the past decade. Conversely, while in Patagonia Indigenous knowledges have been only partially incorporated into academic rock art studies (Moreno 1876; Casamiquela 1960), some Argentinean researchers have developed ecological approaches to art as communication based on neopositivist epistemologies. Others have contributed from an early stage to the ‘material turn,’ which is currently in full swing at an international scale. Interestingly, in both countries, rock art research stresses the socio-ideological dimensions of rock art. Both Eastern Canada and Patagonia also show an increase in the archaeometric studies of rock art, occasionally engaged with other ‘former peripheries’ in the Canadian case (e.g. South Africa; see Bonneau 2016) and with ‘current centres’ of the global system in the Patagonian case (e.g. Europe and USA). Collaborations between both ‘peripheries’, such as the Canada-Patagonia partnership led by Wainwright and Podestá mentioned above, also emerged during this process.

When comparing these two histories of research, the growth of original insights that emerged from Eastern Canada and Patagonia is quite apparent. Nevertheless, there are several barriers that have hindered the effective flow of ideas from these ‘peripheries’ to the historic ‘centre’ of rock art research—Europe—and to the new ‘centres’ of rock art research that emerged in the 1990s as part of the latest globalizations—i.e. USA, Australia, South Africa. It is evident that, historically, rock art has been poorly known outside of the regions under discussion—the Patagonian case being the least well known. It is also evident that the centre/peripheries academic interactions have reproduced the logics of the globalised world-system triangular market: Europe and the USA have long operated as active centres of theoretical and methodological innovation, while peripheries (many of which are former colonies of European states) have tended to be relegated to passive roles of ‘consumption’ of such innovations, with their contributions to conceptual discussions in rock art research often unacknowledged and unused. Thus, peripheries have been reduced to the role of suppliers of the only apparently possible relevant contribution to global archaeology: empirical data, particularly those dealing with early sites and imagery of such outstanding significance that is worth considering as ‘world heritage’.

To conclude, we argue that the limited visibility of Eastern Canadian and Patagonian rock art research is related to the existence of three main barriers: language, funding and implicit cultural biases operating within academia. First, a major impediment continues to be the language barriers that exist in the processes of global archaeological publishing. Given the prevalence of English in academia, research written in Spanish and French (e.g. Québec) remains, relatively, less visible, resulting in scholars from the ‘linguistic periphery’ facing obstacles when seeking to publish their work (Canagarajah 2002, 34–43). This linguistic barrier hinders the connectivity and flow of ideas emanating from the peripheries where English is not dominant. Moreover, even when non-native speakers publish in English, their literature tends to be less frequently cited, which, for example, exacerbates the invisibility of the theoretical and methodological contributions made from Argentina (Ramírez-Castañeda 2020 and references therein).

Second, the scarcity of funding evidently affects the development of rock art research—this factor is more evident in the Patagonia case, given its location in a developing country. However, while lack of funding limits fieldwork, laboratory work and, particularly, archaeometric analyses (which are currently standard in international academia), the development of theoretical concepts and low-tech methods can be—and has been—achieved even in low-funding ‘peripheral’ contexts. It is their dissemination, discussion and use at an international scale, what is still lacking at present.

This leads us to the third key factor: global academia, led by the ‘centre,’ has fetishised ‘peripheral’ rock art by placing an emphasis on certain properties such as its antiquity, size, complexity or perceived ‘authenticity’, thus celebrating the exotic rather than valuing the richness, and depth of analyses, interpretations and management strategies associated with them. In these terms, much of the rock art of Eastern Canada has failed to capture the attention of international audiences, while rock art in Patagonia is often narrowly identified with the Cueva de las Manos World Heritage site. Such attitudes contradict the academic published discourses regarding multivocality and decolonisation, insofar as, in practice, the voices of researchers working from peripheral countries often remain invisibilised and unheard by those at the centre. However, recent publications do show an increasingly open attitude towards contributions from these ‘peripheries’ (e.g. Troncoso et al. 2018; Nowell and Davidson 2021; Moro Abadía and Porr 2021; Smith 2021).

It is evident that Eastern Canada and Patagonia have long and rich histories of research, that not only demonstrate the similar historical relationships that these so-called ‘peripheries’ have had with the global world-system ‘centres’—i.e. Europe, USA –, but which also produced innovative approaches that attend to the unique characteristics of the rock art of both regions. Such approaches have much to offer international rock art research, including a contribution to the ongoing readjustment of the historic centre/periphery model that has long dominated the discipline—in which this very book plays a part—and an open attitude towards a truly international dialogue that fosters a constructive interaction involving academics, Indigenous groups and communities as a whole. Yet publishing original theory and methods authored by academics from developing/peripheral countries is only a first step: if colleagues in developed/central countries are not prepared to read them, cite them and open a dialogue with them, then the virtuous circle will never be completed, and invisibility will prevail.

As part of such dialogue, this chapter has sought to raise awareness of a fundamental paradox created by globalization: while its discourse promotes homogeneity of rights and respect for cultural heterogeneity within the ‘global village’, in practice, it reproduces inequalities rooted in colonial times. If we are to break away from the negative globalization effects in constructive partnership with colleagues at the global ‘centres’, it is by challenging those discourses and practices from the very margins of the world-system.