Cognitive Challenges to Taphonomy

Chakravarty, Kalyan Kumar. 2003. Cognitive challenges to taphonomy, Comment on Earliest Evidence of Palaeoart, by Robert G. Bednarik. Rock Art Research 20(2): 107-109

Cognitive Challenges to Taphonomy

The question of art origins, and since rock art arguably constitutes the largest and earliest surviving body of art, of rock art origins, is inalienable connected, for Bednarik, with the question of cognitive beginnings of humanity. He has relentlessly demolished the theory of rock art origins in the limestone caves of South western Europe, supposedly heralded by sophisticated figurative, zoomorphic depictions in the Aurignacian period, and accompanied by a quantum cultural jump in the material and technologies of an intrusive Cromagnon population. He has also rebutted the theory of subsequent dissemination of rock art from South Western Europe to the entire world. He has shown this theory up to be a hangover of colonial archaeological assumption of the coincidence of racial and cultural superiority of Europe. He has castigated exclusive claims of Palaeolithic age for rock art as coming out of a mythology rooted in dated uniformitarianism, stylistic confirmation, confusion of non anthropic with anthropic markings, and, out of psychic and commercial needs of shoring up ethnic identities.

Bednarik has adduced evidence of Pleistocene portable art and rock art form all over the world to demonstrate that the Aurignacian in Western Europe was really peripheral to the Pleistocene rock art tradition, which began much earlier in Eastern Europe, Near East, South Asia, Africa or Australia. He has pointed out that the non-figurative, geometric art in rest of the world is older and more complex and sophisticated than the figurative art of South Western Europe. He has used the phosphene theory to explain that the non iconic art is also more homogeneous all across the globe. He has shown, with magisterial command over the material, that the capacity to deliberate, set destinations and reach them, to design and create art, by modifying and enhancing nature, was not a monopoly of the European artist, but characteristic of the human cognitive system all over the world in the Pleistocene period. He has explained the sparse evidence of Palaeolithic rock art in the non European world by the taphonomic logic that occurrence of art precedes its physical appearance, that the visible evidence represents a fraction of the evidence that has been destroyed, and that the survival of the evidence is a factor of the environmental conditions, while its availability is a function of the intensity and propensity of research. He has done yeoman’s service to the cause of understanding of human beginnings, by correcting the terms of Eurocentric discourse about rock art origins. He has conclusively proved that the rock art outside Europe is not a clumsy or superseded beginning, a mere stage in the progress to the perfection of European rock art, but a mighty and uncanny beginning, which needs to be thought back to its roots to be thought forwards into the future.

Rock art appears to have represented that unity of life and art, in which art was at once man’s way of experiencing and responding to life. Bendnarik’s article raises the problem of bridging the hiatus between experience and knowledge of life as depicted in rock art. In experiencing life, it was only partially understood by the rock art artist, and, in the process of acquiring its understanding, it is not really being experienced by the rock art researcher, and the latter’s knowledge is inevitably doomed to arrive late on the scene of experience. The time hallowed practice of retouching rock art in Australia, the continuing traditions of folk art on the floors, walls, house hold objects in rural India, or among indigenous communities of the world, attempts of rock art scholars like Lorblanchet to remake the rock art, the project of Bednarik to redo the expedition of ancient sea farers are in line with the mission of this article, which hermeneutically negotiates the distance between the rock art and its interpreter, by recapitulating, retelling, reliving the text and context of the art.

It is essential, as Bednarik insists, that games of chance give way, with respect to assessment of the cognitive roots of rock art, to an appreciation of the metamorphic and taphonomic processes, associated with it. It is, however necessary to ensure that the metamorphic and taphonomic logic is applied not only to the impact of physical factors like force, heat, pressure, moisture etc, but also to our own heuristic approaches to rock art, which are controlled by our own time and place, and by the debris of our historical prejudices and predilections. Taphonomy should be harnessed by bridging, not only the evidentiary gaps but also the cognitive gaps that have widened between the rock artists and us. It has to set itself the task of recovering the blend of form and function, embellishment and necessity, beauty and utility, that may have been characteristic of most of the Pleistocene art and artifacts, which Bednarik terms as non-utilitarian within quotes. If the theory of phosphene universals and entoptic constants is valid, it should be possible to recollect and reposses the simultaneity of creative and pragmatic responses to similar ecological situations, which contributed to the making of rock art.

Bednarik has proposed direct dating approaches as scientific and falsifiable, as against stylistic dating, which was initially adapted in Eurocentric discourse and which he has dubbed as subjective, unscientific and non testable. Bednarik agrees, however, that direct dating, approaches, moreover, often rest on the doubtful assumption of uniformity in physical or thermal rate processes. Once the definition of style is changed, it may become as good a tool for approximating a correct hypothesis for the age of Pleistocene rock art as any one of the direct dating methods, which have to be mutually calibrated, and are subject to several conditionalities. The permutations and combinations of materials and techniques, perspective, line and volume, light and shade, color and location of a large range of rock art in similar biogeographic contexts should provide concrete clues to style, instead of evoking vogue kinaesthetic gut reactions or intuitive imaginings. With growing understanding of the isomorphism of the verbal and genetic codes, the phosphene theory should provide a clue to the movement in the life of the form, to the manner in which the same figure or the same geometric pattern is conceived and modelled differently in different 'styles' in different times and periods. The stylistic aid, so honed and redefined, should be as repeatable and falsifiable as the direct dating methods.

One wonders whether the need and motive f restitution and redemption against Eurocentric theories, which are insistently and stridently present in Bednarik's article, may not result in inappropriate claims of priority or sophistication for Asian or Australian art. We have to be careful that the post colonial reaction to colonial prejudices does not culminate in reverse claims of superiority of the colonized. It may be necessary to guard against the danger of veering to any extreme position to suggest concentration of iconic or noniconic art in Asia or in Europe, or to accept the priority of noniconic over iconic art, as a more complex and sophisticated art. As Bednarik himself observes, the archaic and the modern coexist in rock art. So do the iconic and non iconic, the simple and complex, the concrete and abstract in all phases and areas of rock art. In fact, it is likely that the iconic and non-iconic were performing interchangeable functions in the history of art pictures have server as letters and letters have suggested pictures in the history of language. The iconic and figurative depictions in rock art which appear mutually differentiated, tactile, concrete and 'haptic' from proximity, would appear undifferentiated, visual, abstract and 'optic' from a distance. Bednarik also speaks of the danger of using the perceived nature of Pleistocene traditions as evidence of cohesive cultural entities and cognitive sophistication. As he emphatically proves, cultural and perceived palaeo anthropological divisions do not coincide. On this postulate alone, the Asiatic or the European traditions should not possibly stake claims to priority over each other, in view of taphnomic accidents in the survival of evidence or of gaps in human surveys.

The intensity of rock art has indeed accounted for a hegemonic commodification of rock art in technologically advanced countries, as also for objectification and marginalization of rock art in technologically backward countries. And yet, the consciousness industry, the society of spectacle, which have promoted rock art, have, to no small extent, accounted for its preservation and survival, whereas, countries, which have neglected the heritage tourism industry, have been losing their rock art, due to neglect and vandalizing mega developmental schemes. It is possible, using the, Australian example, to use heritage as an instrument of rock art conservation.

The theory f quantum leaps in the making of rock art needs, no doubt, in deference to Bednarik's argument, to be rejected as applied specifically to South Western Europe. But, once we apurn, with Bednarik, the theory of uniformitarianism, we do probably need to accept moments of sudden illumination, in the making of rock art. In a multilinear rather than diffusionistic, monolinear model, such moments may have occurred as parallel and coordinate occurrences allover the globe. George Kubler describes such occurrences as comparable with a forest fire in its leaping action across distances of the earth, where unconnected centres have blazed into similar activity. It is not like a slow, cumulative, glacial drift (Shape of Time, Yale University Press, 1962. - P 95). Having conceded the fact that biological and cognitive divisions do not coincide, it is necessary to acknowledge the possibility that similar cognitive leaps may have been taken by the human species, irrespective of their biological divisions, in response to similar challenges, with similar developments in their neural or cortical hardware and concephalisation.

The taphonomic and metamorphological argument may have to acknowledge the possibility of scientific discoveries with regard to the process of human cognition which will bring what is today regarded as unscientific, within the domain of falsifiable and replicable scientific tests. Science may not be advanced enough today to yet encompass and comprehend all he steps in the creative process.