Content uploaded by Robert G. Bednarik
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Robert G. Bednarik on Jul 23, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
L’art pléistocène dans le monde / Pleistocene art of the world / Arte pleistocénico del Mundo
Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art
Robert G. BEDNARIK
Abstract: In this broad overview the corpus of world rock art is defined and
compared with the known distribution of Pleistocene rock art. The discrepancies are
related to relative research efforts, to the taphonomy of rock art, and to issues
relating to the age estimation of rock art. As each of these factors is examined, it
becomes apparent that there have been significant distortions in the ways
Pleistocene rock art has been characterised and defined. Most particularly, the
taphonomic distortions remain inadequately understood and their effects are
identified and explained.
The first qualified attempt to quantify the world’s surviving rock art was undertaken by
Anati (1984), who arrived at the estimate that the existence of over 20 million motifs
has been demonstrated worldwide, and that a grand total of ‘well over 50 million’ rock
art figures can safely be postulated (Fig. 1). Since then, much survey work and
countless new reports and discoveries have occurred, and yet Anati’s rough estimate
has stood the test of time (cf. world map in Chakravarty & Bednarik 1997: 201). With
all the progress we have seen in our knowledge of world rock art since the early
1980s, today’s estimate would still be that there are certainly in excess of 50 million
rock art motifs, and quite possibly even more than 100 million.
Fig. 1. Emmanuel Anati’s world map of rock art of 1984.
These are, however, very unevenly distributed around the globe. Today, the world
map of rock art is much more complete, although there remain very major gaps in it
still, especially in Asia, Africa and perhaps Latin America. However, it seems justified
to observe the very obvious unevenness in the way it is distributed (Fig. 2). There are
some manifest limitations of where it could be expected to occur: it can only be found
where rocks are exposed, and where people lived. One might add that it would be
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
2
expected to find the greatest concentrations of rock art where, historically, the
densest human populations existed. This, however, is obviously not the case. On the
contrary, most of the world’s major corpora occur in arid or semi-arid regions that are
not assumed to have supported high population densities. It would then appear that
the two main factors determining today’s distribution patterns are the occurrence of
the practice of making rock art on the one hand, and the taphonomy acting on this
body over time. Clearly, not all past societies have created rock art, and some of
those who did may have been far more productive than others. That is evident
through reasonable extrapolation from ethnography, and needs to be considered as
one key determinant in quantification. The other factor, taphonomy, demands a more
detailed examination.
Fig. 2. The global distribution of known rock art sites.
The preferential survival of rock art in deserts is attributable not only to their low
rainfall and high ambient pH regimes, but often precisely to the lack of human
population centres, which means significantly lower exposure to potential
iconoclasm. To some degree the same may be said of cave sites, because many
societies tend to have cultural avoidance practices relating to caves. But there are
still more intricate considerations.
Consider the fact that some of the largest regional bodies of rock paintings or
pictograms are those of southern Africa, India, Brazil and Australasia. Between them
they account easily for more than half the world’s pictograms. What is it that links
them?
Rather unexpectedly, the answer is found in geology. These four regions, together
with the Antarctic, formed the supercontinent Eduard Suess named Gondwanaland
well before continental drift was considered (Fig. 3). Apart from the occurrence of
similar plant fossils, one of the factors demonstrating the ancient connection were the
similar geological strata, particularly the successions of sandstone facies in these
four regions. Of all the rock types, these sandstones happen to be the most suitable
for facilitating the formation of rockshelters, and sandstone is also one of the best
media to absorb paints applied to rocks, especially those based on iron pigments. It
then comes as no great surprise that the extensive sandstone regions of Gondwana
have promoted the survival of rock paintings. Similarly, the preservation of
petroglyphs is often entirely dependent upon ferromanganeous accretionary deposits
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
3
that are not sustainable in low-pH environments, so this form of rock art is found
mostly in desert and semi-desert areas.
Fig. 3. Gondwanaland about 360 Ma ago (Carboniferous).
Taphonomy
These are just some of the variables determining the taphonomy of rock art, which in
turn determines the composition of the surviving corpus of world rock art. Present
distribution or apparent changes in rock art ‘styles’ over time are not necessarily
functions of economic, environmental, cultural, social or even religious factors (Tangri
1989). Neither is apparent stylistic continuity proof for cultural (or any other)
continuity. Even if it were it would be of no help, in view of archaeologists’
ambivalence as to where style resides in an artefact (Conkey & Hastorf 1990). In
contrast to other variables, style does not exist until it is perceived to exist. Thus
direct correlation between ‘quantifiable’ archaeological ‘data’ and rock art poses
serious problems, and the lack of reliable dating for nearly all rock art in the world
only aggravates these.
To make matters worse, the principal tool in the archaeological analysis of rock art,
statistics, is scientifically invalid when applied to quantitative rock art data.
Taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994a) decrees that such data can only be relevant in
describing a present state of a corpus of rock art; they are not directly related to the
archaeological significance of the art. The most serious limitation of statistical
analyses in palaeoart research is that posed by the inherent subjectivity of the data.
Irrespective of the actual method used, statistics that address the content of rock art
corpora always involve a taxonomy of motif elements, because the grouping of motifs
perceived to be similar is a prerequisite for such treatment. Yet any such
taxonomising process is entirely based on the iconographic perceptions or graphic
and depictive conventions defining the researcher’s own system of reality, and does
not necessarily reflect the artists’ graphic cognition. Therefore it should be expected
to be false.
The second major encumbrance of statistics of rock art is the severe limitation
imposed by its taphonomy. Taphonomy (Efremov 1940) deals with the logical
underpinning of the idea that the quantified characteristics of a record of past events
or systems are not an accurate reflection of what would have been a record of the
live system or observed event. Without the use of taphonomic logic and concepts
such as taphonomic lag-time or taphonomic threshold, very limited scientific
understanding of rock art is attainable (Fig. 4). Most rock art can be assumed to have
been lost over time; hence the extant rock art is a result primarily of taphonomic
processes, and secondarily of art production. Thus the cultural significance of extant
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
4
statistics is subordinate to their taphonomic significance. Perceived trends in the
ways rock art presents itself to our subjective perception and cognition are often
presented as evolutionary, chronological (by circular argument) or empiricist
evidence. In addition to geomorphological biases, many other factors can also greatly
distort the statistical characteristics of rock art. Among them are location, recorder’s
bias, historical responses to alien iconographies, or indeed any process that
contributes to the degradation of the art. In short, no rock art represents a random
sample of a tradition, style or culture. Lithology, site morphology, micro- and macro-
climate, site biology and a host of other taphonomic factors have all contributed to
selective survival and to alterations of both the appearance and statistical
characteristics of the surviving corpora. Any interpretation using variables such as
distribution, location, style or technique is doomed to failure unless informed by
taphonomic logic.
Fig. 4. The principles of taphonomic logic.
The most debilitating aspect of rock art taphonomy, whatever the physical, biological
or chemical processes responsible for it may be, is that it distorts evidence
systematically rather than randomly. It selects the most deterioration-resistant forms
for survival so that its truncation of the record is highly discriminate. The forms of rock
art that can survive longest are paintings and engravings in deep limestone caves
with their stable speleoclimate; and at open sites deeply executed petroglyphs on the
most weathering-resistant rock types, preferably occurring in favourable climatic
settings. It is at once obvious that all rock art credibly attributed to the Pleistocene
falls into these two categories.
Dating and other flaws
The issue of Pleistocene rock art is rendered even more complex by our continuing
inability of securing reliable dating of most rock art. With few exceptions, such as the
carbon isotope determination of beeswax figures (Taçon et al. 2004; Morwood et al.
2010), rock art age estimations so far presented are generally experimental, ranging
from the credible to the fictitious (for critiques see Bednarik 1996, 2002). In that
respect I draw your attention to the presentation in this symposium by Paul Taçon
and Michelle Langley. In particular, the attribution of rock art to the Pleistocene, on
whatever basis, remains in many cases most tenuous, and one of the reasons for
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
5
this outside the traditional distribution of Franco-Cantabrian cave art is that the
discipline has developed distorted expectations of what should constitute Pleistocene
rock art. Across Eurasia, a practice has developed of considering any motifs of semi-
naturalistic animals, especially equine and bovine figures, to have to be of the
Pleistocene. In some cases, such as in Mongolia, this is even proposed where the
zoomorphs clearly postdate the most recent glacial striations on the panels
concerned. In others, such animal figures occurring in conditions of high-kinetic
fluviatile narrow valleys of very soft rock, subjected to rapid erasure by suspended-
load quartz sands are attributed to the Pleistocene. This is despite their degree of
erasure, calibrated by engraved dates, indicating a recent historical antiquity
(Bednarik 2009).
Therefore the present perception of what is or is not Pleistocene rock art, globally, is
also greatly distorted by false datings, often based on stylistic perceptions and similar
subjective variables. Finally, there is the issue of relative regional research efforts,
which has also contributed significantly to distortions concerning this topic. It is
evident that the number of books, scholarly and non-scholarly publications produced
about the most intensively studied corpus of any rock art, the French and Spanish
cave art, would far exceed 10,000 titles. It has created an expectation, a perhaps
subconscious belief, that this is the principal body of Pleistocene rock art in the world.
Other Ice Age corpora, by comparison, have been almost ignored. For instance, on
present evidence it appears that the largest surviving corpus of Pleistocene rock art
is that of Australia. But apart from my own pitifully inadequate efforts, there is not a
single publication dedicated specifically to the generic issue of Pleistocene rock art in
Australia. Similarly, there has only been one publication on the generic topic of early
pan-Asian palaeoart (Bednarik 1994b). The situation is even worse in Africa, where
at present there is no publication dedicated to a pan-continental review of
Pleistocene palaeoart.
At this stage, the distortion is already incredible. If there were such a severe
geographical bias in another discipline, say, plate tectonics or palaeontology, we
would certainly reject that discipline as farcical, as biased and as lacking in any
credibility. If 99.9% of the scientific literature on plate tectonics were dealing
exclusively with one small region, say, France and northern Spain, we would totally
reject that discipline as being unrepresentative and unsound.
But to illustrate that the present condition is even worse in our field, let us consider
the possibility that my rough estimates of the number of Australian petroglyphs are
right in terms of order of magnitude. If it were correct that there are at least one
million Australian petroglyphs surviving from the Pleistocene, that would indicate that
in one country alone, there is between twenty and fifty times as much such material
as there is in south-western Europe. It also means that we have, in very round
figures, perhaps two or three publications per motif about Franco-Cantabrian art, but
there are only two publications reviewing the issue of the much larger Australian
Pleistocene corpus of early rock art, so the distortion is in excess of one to a million.
Similarly, with only one publication attempting a pan-continental review of Asia, the
largest continent, this is so hopelessly inadequate that the point should not need to
be demonstrated. This is truly a spectacular distortion, showing that this specific field
is in dire need of major and revolutionary revision.
But that is only part of the problem. For over a century, the academic system of
knowledge production and consumption has refined the message that ‘art’ began
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
6
with the Upper Palaeolithic evidence of Franco-Cantabria. The only site cited as a
possibly Middle Palaeolithic production was La Ferrassie, with its sepulchral cupule
block over juvenile Neanderthal burial No. 6 (Fig. 5). In Australia, all rock art
produced by people of the Pleistocene and early Holocene is undeniably the work of
traditions of Mode 3 technocomplexes. It belongs, in the parlance of European
researchers, to Middle Palaeolithic contexts. Australia was settled by Middle
Palaeolithic seafarers from Asia, who retained their Mode 3 industries until mid-
Holocene times. In the case of Tasmania, Mode 3 continued right up to British
colonisation around 200 years ago, therefore all rock art of Tasmania, necessarily,
could be defined as Middle Palaeolithic (Fig. 6). There are simply no Upper
Palaeolithic elements or modes of production. This means, then, that there is many
times as much surviving “Middle Palaeolithic” rock art in just one country, than there
is Upper Palaeolithic in France and Spain.
Fig. 5. The sepulchral cupule block from La Ferrassie Neanderthal burial.
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
7
Fig. 6. Tasmanian cupules, BT-3 site, Meenamatta.
At this stage it becomes apparent that the falsities that have been propagated about
the generic subject of Pleistocene rock art are so extensive that the entire construct
based on the popular archaeological folklore are merely a house of cards. For
instance, almost no graphic art of this period outside the Franco-Cantabrian core
area is figurative, there are only two or three notable exceptions (Bednarik 1993).
Other “Palaeolithic” graphic art is almost exclusively noniconic, and resembles the art
of the Jarawas of the Andamans. But it has been discovered recently that the
Jarawas’ children have superb figurative drawing talent (Fig. 7), and that these
people may regard iconic depiction as juvenile or non-serious (Sreenathan et al.
2008). By the same token, it has been shown that there is ample forensic support for
the proposition that much if not most of the Franco-Cantabrian cave art is the work of
children and teenagers, while there is no evidence at all that it is substantially an
adult art (Bednarik 2008a). For over a century we have been subjected to concepts
emphasising the gravity of this corpus, its meaning and cultural roles, yet on
reflection none of these notions are compatible with the actual evidence. Indeed,
taphonomic logic implicitly rejects the very idea that this is a cave art, replacing it with
the demand to see this corpus as the small surviving remnant of many traditions that
usually found expression in many media, but managed to survive only in the unusual
environment of limestone caves. In short, most of the strongly held beliefs about this
cave art appear to be without any scientific support.
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
8
Fig. 7. Drawing abilities of the Jarawa boy Enmay.
Pleistocene rock art
It is from this revolutionary perspective that we need to reconsider the generic
question of Pleistocene world rock art. First of all, we need to accept that if any rock
art has survived from this earliest period of hominin history, it is only under most
unusual conditions of preservation, and it is in fact surprising that any has survived at
all. We would do well to preface any consideration of this subject with the idea that
far less than 1% of all the rock art ever produced in the Pleistocene has survived to
the present. Next, we need to ask: what were the conditions that enabled such rare
survival? It is only from that perspective of viewing the surviving remnants as the
result of long-term taphonomy that we may legitimately consider questions of
distribution, location, style or technique of any rock art we may be inclined to attribute
to the Pleistocene. Or to restate: the scientific study of Pleistocene rock art has not
yet begun. It will begin when researchers learn to approach the issue from a scientific
rather than intuitive and subjective perspective. Just as it is impossible to know what
object is depicted in palaeoart, it is impossible for the highly conditioned,
brainwashed modern human observer to obtain any valid comprehension of the
meaning, significance or interpretation of this symbol system. A modern European is
totally and fundamentally incapable of comprehending the construct of reality
determining the world inhabited by, for instance, a traditional Aboriginal savant. Only
the overbearing ontological views of Europeans prevent them from accepting this
truism. Yet the producers of graphic symbols produced tens of thousands of years
ago are far more remote from us culturally, cognitively and intellectually, yet the
figurative rock art seems to communicate with us — or so we tend to think. We need
to escape the gravity pull of our own cognitive, academic, cultural, linguistic and
intellectual conditioning before we can attempt this task, and we need to begin from a
scientific base.
This may explain why archaeological explanations of the human past tend to be
mistaken, and are usually refuted. Consider, for instance, the claim that the advent of
cognitive hominin modernity, marked by the appearance of art-like products,
coincides with the invasion of Africans in Europe thirty or forty millennia ago. Not only
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
9
is the empirical basis of this notion false, because art-like symbolling, in the form of
many types of exograms (Donald 1991), occurs long before that time. This absurd
model has no genetic, cultural or palaeoanthropological evidence in its favour
(Bednarik 2008b), yet for the past thirty years it has dominated human evolution and
Pleistocene archaeology to the point of almost eradicating any opposition. A whole
generation of archaeologists had to endure being brainwashed with the African Eve
mistake, one of the most imprudent archaeological blunders in history. One has to be
very optimistic to expect such a poorly based discipline to ever become consistently
credible.
The Pleistocene rock art of the world provides excellent evidence against the
replacement hypothesis of Protsch, Stringer et al., but it has remained largely ignored
so far. It offers Lower Palaeolithic examples from India and possibly Africa (Fig. 8),
and a massive corpus of Mode 3 petroglyphs from Australia. By comparison, the
Mode 4 traditions of south-western Europe are not of great importance because they
are only a small piece in the overall puzzle. Most pieces of this great puzzle have not
yet been found or considered, and a comprehensive story of Pleistocene rock art will
not be written for another century. Indeed, if we do not begin to view this subject in
the balanced perspective it deserves, it may take a great deal longer. And to do so
we need to appreciate that most such rock art has ceased to exist — and why.
Fig. 8. Oldest known rock art of Africa, Korannaberg, Kalahari.
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
10
Fig. 9. Tentative world map of known Pleistocene rock art occurrences.
The global distribution of Pleistocene rock art remains therefore unknown. However,
we are not entirely without relevant information, and we might consider the issue on
the basis of currently available data. If we tried to depict the known or reasonably
assumed world distribution of Pleistocene rock art we could create such a map
(Fig. 9). This is still empirically based, but we need to remember that there are
severe limitations involved in such a pursuit. It does, however, help to gain a more
balanced view of the subject, and it certainly helps in re-focusing our endeavours in
this field. Most certainly, a map of the global Pleistocene rock art will look very
different in a hundred years from now, but this is a first step to securing it.
BEDNARIK R.G., “Dating and taphonomy of Pleistocene rock art”
Congrès de l’IFRAO, septembre 2010 – Symposium : Datation et taphonomie… (Pré-Actes)
IFRAO Congress, September 2010 – Symposium: Dating and taphonomy… (Pre-Acts)
11
REFERENCES
ANATI, E., 1984. “The state of research in rock art. A world report presented to UNESCO”. Bollettino
del Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici 21: 13-56.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 1993.” European Palaeolithic art — typical or exceptional?”. Oxford Journal of
Archaeology 12(1): 1-8.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 1994a. “A taphonomy of palaeoart”. Antiquity 68: 68-74.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 1994b. “The Pleistocene art of Asia”. Journal of World Prehistory 8(4): 351-375.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 1996. “Only time will tell: a review of the methodology of direct rock art dating”.
Archaeometry 38(1): 1-13.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 2002. T”he dating of rock art: a critique”. Journal of Archaeological Science 29(11):
1213-1233.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 2008a. “Children as Pleistocene artists”. Rock Art Research 25(2): 173-182.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 2008b. “The mythical Moderns”. Journal of World Prehistory 21(2): 85-102.
BEDNARIK, R. G., 2009. “Fluvial erosion of inscriptions and petroglyphs at Siega Verde, Spain”.
Journal of Archaeological Science 36: 2365-2373.
CHAKRAVARTY, K. K. and R. G. BEDNARIK, 1997. Indian rock art and its global context. Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, and Bhopal: Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya.
CONKEY, M. W. and C. A. HASTORF (eds), 1990. The uses of style in archaeology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
DONALD, M., 1991. Origins of the modern mind: three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
EFREMOV, J. A., 1940. “Taphonomy: a new branch of paleontology”. Pan American Geologist 74(2):
81-93.
SREENATHAN, M., V. R. RAO and R. G. BEDNARIK, 2008. “Paleolithic cognitive inheritance in
aesthetic behavior of the Jarawas of the Andaman Islands”. Anthropos 103: 367-392.
TAÇON. P. S. C., E. NELSON, C. CHIPPINDALE and G. CHALOUPKA, 2004. “The beeswax rock art
of the Northern Territory: direct dating results and a ‘book of record’”. Rock Art Research 21: 155-
160.
TANGRI, D., 1989. “!Science, hypothesis testing and prehistoric pictures”. Rock Art Research 6: 83-
95.