A narrative turn in rock art: How iconic, indexical and conventional aspects differ between the earliest and later depicting petroglyphs in the Northern Scandinavian Stone Age

Beskrivning

The first depictions in Scandinavian rock carving traditions appear around 9000 BCE in the form of large images, sometimes life-sized, of game animals such as elk or reindeer. Pictures of humans are exceedingly rare. A distinguishing feature of the animal pictures is an apparent striving for realism, or high degree of iconicity (e.g. Sonesson, 2016), not only with respect to the animals’ sizes, but also their outline shapes and details, making them immediately identifiable on a species level. Further categorization is often possible, of e.g. sex and behaviours. The animals were represented as singular motifs, usually without any interaction with other figures. However, an interaction with the surrounding natural landscape seems to have affected the placement of the images and may have contributed to their meaning considerably (Gjerde, 2010). While the full appreciation of these pictures arguably was dependent on socio-cultural conventions, their positioning in the landscape could also have added indexical meaning. They thus capture all three ways to convey pictorial meaning: through iconicity, indexicality and conventionality. If the pictures had any narrative functions, these stories must have taken place in interaction with the environment, or with an oral culture. Later, around 5000 BCE, a pictorial “narrative turn" seems to have occurred in North Scandinavian petroglyphs (Skoglund et al. 2023). These new pictorial traditions still had game animals as the dominant motif, sometimes together with images of humans. Importantly, the images were now small. Miniaturization makes spatial organization of images more efficient and manipulation of their indexical relationships possible, which affords interpretation of relations and interactions between figures. This would also provide the grounds for more elaborate pictorial narratives (as opposed to dependent on external landscape connections). Hunting scenes or other human-animal relations can now be inferred on the rock-art panels. Objects are depicted in the hands of humans, further distinguishing their activities. While miniature images are often still iconic, they tend to be more schematized, and there seems to be considerably less strive for a high degree of realism. In our presentation we will compare the early and later pictorial traditions with respect to how they differ in the dynamics between iconicity, indexicality, and conventionality, as an effect of miniaturization, and its consequences for pictorial narratives.

Period	2024 aug. 15
Evenemangstitel	The Fifth Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS-5)
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Omfattning	Internationell