Walking on the stones of years. Some remarks on the NW Iberian rock art By Ramon Fábregas Valcarce and Carlos Rodríguez Rellán

https://www.academia.edu/12963877/Walking_on_the_stones_of_years_Some_remarks_on_the_NW_Iberian_rock_art Over the last two decades, the traditional descriptive paradigm has given way to other views focusing on the relationship between petroglyphs and prehistoric landscapes, seeking to understand that artistic phenomenon in the framework of societies undergoing deep socioeconomic changes and increasingly altering their environment. We shall review, in the light of the last discoveries, aspects such as the chronology of the regional rock art, the audience it was meant to address or the archaeological context of the carved rocks. Going beyond the perception of the rock art as a mediating element, open to the different communities inhabiting the land, we might acknowledge its possible role as an active agent through which human groups would negotiate its own identity and association with the surrounding space. The relationship between petroglyphs and landscape would be a dialectic one, so that several factors could regulate the access and reading of the decorated panels, eventually restricting these to certain individuals or sectors of the communities. Lastly, the similarities with the rock art in other areas of Atlantic Europe may be just another example of the circulation along the seaways of goods, ideas and people at least from the early Neolithic. ...