Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place

Nine. Rock-Art and Landscapes

I t is not just artists or geographers that define, describe, and depict tracts of land—all of us create landscapes. Indeed, landscapes are more a function of the human mind than we realize, with each of us reacting to particular places or sets of places in ways defined by our individual and cultural experiences. In one sense, there is no such thing as a landscape but rather jumbles of components ordered and bounded through human thought, choice, and experience. The choice of which elements, places, and spaces are included in particular landscapes is, in turn, determined by our perceptions and conceptions. In other words, choices are affected by how we think. For many groups of people, landscapes are not constructed solely on the basis of what is seen; instead, they use a combination of visual cues mixed with sound, smell, temperature, emotional reactions, and other features (Ouzman 1998b). Thus, there can be an infinite number of landscapes, reflecting variation in human relationships to place. Landscapes are also difficult to define in a strict scientific sense. For some people, landscapes consist of natural features only—the topography of an area of land. For others, landscapes are cultural creations or are defined as a mix of natural and cultural elements . Landscapes are political; they are contested, 122 nine Rock-Art and Landscapes Paul S. C. Taçon defended and celebrated (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Bender 1993). They can be places called “home,” exotic locations, or barren wastelands that should be avoided. To be known they must be experienced , but they can never be fully described. This is because not only are they perceived differently by each observer, but also because they constantly and continually change. The passing of seasons, weathering , human intervention, and catastrophic forces of nature combine to transform each and every landscape on an ongoing basis. Thus, for many of us, landscapes exist only as ideals held in the mind—pictures composed of key reference points woven or mapped together through experience (see Ouzman 1998a, b). Essentially, landscapes have to do with mapping and constructing models of reality. Today, it is valid to say that there are no truly “natural” landscapes. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have explored, charted, categorized, settled, harvested, named, and defined every corner, nook, and cranny of the globe. The process began with the emergence of Homo erectus about a million years ago. Homo erectus crafted stone tools, made ornaments from pierced ostrich shell (e.g., Bednarik 1997), engraved bone with crude designs (Marshack 1972), and sailed the first watercraft to islands such as Flores, in present-day Indonesia (Morwood et al. 1997). And Homo erectus may have had other human abilities, such as some rudimentary form of language (Taylor 1997:6)—perhaps first naming some of the world’s landscapes. Homo erectus was also the first great primate explorer, with a wanderlust that took the species far out of Africa, across Europe and Asia, to islands on Australia’s doorstep. Indeed, Homo erectus was the first human ancestor to begin the process of registering and experiencing the world’s great range of natural landscapes. There is much debate as to whether Homo erectus developed into Homo sapiens sapiens in different parts of the world simultaneously—that is, whether Homo erectus really was very different from ourselves —or whether fully modern humans emerged in Africa a few hundred thousand years ago (e.g., see various papers in Mellars and Stringer 1989). For those who believe in the latter, Homo sapiens left Africa about a hundred thousand years ago in a second great wave of migration and exploration. They colonized the Homo erectus lands, eventually not only making them their own, but also inheriting the Earth. Whatever the case, it appears that landscapes were first marked in a widespread symbolic way between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, with rock paintings and engravings being among some of the more long-lasting evidence (Bar-Yosef 1998; Chase and Dibble 1987; Davidson and Noble 1989; Knight et al. 1995; Lindly and Clark 1990; Mellars 1989, 1991; Pfeiffer 1982;Taçon 1994, 2000).This occurred not only in European landscapes (see Clottes 1998), but also in those of Asia (Bednarik 1994), Africa (Wendt 1974, 1976), and Australia (e.g., O’Connor 1995). People mapped, marked, and presumably mythologized every landscape they encountered. Eventually, this behavior spread to the Americas, so that today we find the globe covered with rich and culturally meaningful landscapes. These...