I’ve been interested for awhile in how prehistoric cultures trade, migrate, and exchange social knowledge across geographic and political boundaries. Back in the prehistoric past, hunter gatherers traversed wide arrays of forbidden lands, located much needed resources, built sets of maps, and in many ways directed others to things of value like water, food, and perhaps other requirements. Maps are interesting in this regard in the prehistoric new world. One summer, I traveled across the rather beautiful but remote Techachapi Mountains marking on a USGS map locations of prehistoric rock art, trying to look at what I’ll call patterns of their location. My questions were:
- were they spatially located as markers of some kind and if so, could I tell by careful pedestrian survey what it was they were marking
- did they record significant life events or did they instead seem to depict geologic occurences or perhaps geographic travel
- were they located in micro-environments and did that environment lead to their use or perhaps cause it
All of these things are important “indicators” and I felt I had uncovered some interesting patterns of location which allowed me to hypothesize a few things about location, geology, and environments. They all occurred in micro environmental or ecological settings where water flowed. Water is important no matter what. Water means plants and animals. Both of those are things that hunters and gatherers wanted. But more, many of the sites seemed to show bigger picture things. So I created a working theory. Since all basic needs were met in these micro environments, artistry, craftsmanship, and experimentation could ensue. I felt that then if these people could have everything they needed at a central point, that their innate creativity would surface and they would record significant life events, maps, ideas, thoughts. In a word, they were bloggers! They were blogging a world of the past where animals traversed and plants grew and melted away. They acted in certain ways to capture their environments and for some reason created intricate maps, figures, and orbital creations. And they revisited the same areas over and over again up to the historic time. One Native American informant told us that these particular caves were visited to the historic period by small families because life was good there. Ah! Very interesting indeed!!
One of the beauties of anthropology is taking an event like this and transplanting it on our own lives and see how we act and whether there are these patterns that emerge even with our supposed complexity. A friend of mine studied graffiti art for awhile and thought that the markers of some of it went far past simple tagging but may have related rites of passage, socio-environmental forces, and even big-time culture change. Some of the buildings and fences I’ve seen make me remember those old days of that summer spent recording almost 30 rock art sites. These prehistoric folks were recording things that struck them and my friend Ian told me that some of the paintings he recorded in his urban archeological ramblings seemed to hint at a similarity of communication.
Imagine if what we consider junk or a thing with no value actually is a mode of expression. The 2000 year old rock art sites had a certain style and often paintings occurred over the top of each preceding one. Just like modern art on buildings. Its all amazing to me because at the same time we all blog things that affect us, that drive us, that give us our maps. Perhaps the methods of creation have only changed with the medium of creation and the actual messaging is still the same. We desperately need that contact or at least the release. If we are solitary and we are living in quiet desperation as Thoreau said, we need to reach out. Blogging, cave painting, some modern art on buildings may all relate to that. Consider the forces that array against us and what we need to interact and react.
All very interesting…
