Premium
Andrée Rosenfeld and the Archaeology of Rock‐Art 1
Author(s) -
Taçon Paul S. C.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
archaeology in oceania
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1834-4453
pISSN - 0728-4896
DOI - 10.1002/j.1834-4453.1999.tb00440.x
Subject(s) - emic and etic , rock art , interpretation (philosophy) , meaning (existential) , scholarship , analogy , archaeology , subject (documents) , history , epistemology , sociology , anthropology , linguistics , philosophy , computer science , law , library science , political science
How old is it? What does it mean? These are the common questions of rock‐art research but the answers are nearly always elusive. It is very tempting to impose age or meaning, to be deceived by dating technology or to be blinded by the persuasiveness of certain forms of interpretation when studying rock pictures; too often we fail to question the validity of our answers or to distinguish ‘emic’, ‘etic’ and different levels of interpretation. At the same time, rock‐art research will always be a human science, subject to interpretation, analogy and personal perspectives. But this does not mean that we cannot bring a high level of scholarship to the discipline, as Andrée Rosenfeld has shown in her capacity as a researcher and teacher. She has developed ways of treating rock‐art as data, giving us insight into diverse aspects of the past, as well as better answering the questions of age and meaning associated with unique forms of rock‐art imagery.