Hunting scenes and narrativity in Scandinavian rock art

Beskrivning

Since the beginning of rock art research, Scandinavian petroglyphs have given rise to vivid interpretations, related to stories and myths found in Saami ethnography, Old Norse religion, and Indo-European mythology. Hereby the narrative potential of rock art has almost been taken for granted, without any thorough consideration of e.g. cognitive, semiotic, and narratological issues involved. At a first glance, it certainly does not seem too far-fetched to suspect that petroglyphs are signs intended to tell some kind of stories, or at least to represent simple event sequences. But how can we know for sure if stories are told, and what kind of evidence for various interpretative hypotheses can be provided?
In this paper we will discuss some examples of hunting scenes with narrative implications in Scandinavia, in particular images of wild boar hunting found in the South (e.g. near Norrköping, Sweden dating to c. 1700-1100 BC) and hunting scenes, mainly of deer, in Northern regions (e.g. in Alta, Norway dating to c. 4800-4000 BC). An observation is that there are differences between these regions concerning the narrativeness of the pictures, i.e. the images are putting emphasis on different aspects of the hunting process itself.
A number of rock art panels in the in Alta seem to display several phases, or procedural parts of action scripts, such as tracking and killing the prey, and the anatomical inner details of the hunted species while the Norrköping images are limited to the final killing, or confrontational, phase only. Put in another way, Northern hunting scenes discussed in this paper thus rely more on interrelated images, while the Southern tradition display more minimal narratives in single images and signs. The former are thus more explicitly narrative, while the latter require more cognitive efforts of narrative supplementing on the part of the observer.
The paper gives a number of examples to illustrate these differences. Using these images as a point of departure, we shall further discuss and point to some crucial cognitive aspects of storytelling, not least regarding pictorial material, based on findings from schema and script theory within cognitive psychology.

Period	2019 juni 12
Evenemangstitel	The 15th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Lund, SverigeVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell