The Dream on the Rock: Visions of Prehistory

3. The Significance of the Research

3 The Significance of the Research Rock Art and Psychology In various parts of this study we have noted the role currently played by psychology in the attempt to understand the often obscure significance of rock art. The psychoanalyst Nicola Peluffo’s comments on this interdisciplinary collaboration are particularly pertinent: [E]ven though many anthropologists do not agree, I believe that for prehistoric man the development of art followed the same lines of development as did his thought as a whole. Here too Haeckel’s law is respected. Human ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in an abbreviated form and therefore light is cast on the development of prehistoric art by the study of child psychology, conscious and pre-conscious, as well as by the direct study of prehistory and tribal art.1 One cannot help but share this line of reasoning, without, however, reducing the two aspects of the phenomenon into simplistic comparisons . More than ever the parallelisms involve cognitive aspects or those relative to a “subdevelopment.” Indeed, everything points to the fact that prehistorical technological man may have been more intelligent, on average, than contemporary man. How else can his survival be explained? This does not mean that such a comparison will immediately resolve the problem of the interpretation of rock art. Rather than focusing on the collected data of the nature of the representations, we would do better to turn our attention to what the “primitive” and the “infantile” categories have in common. To begin with, there are the quantitative data regarding the great number of human and animal 67 68 / THE DREAM ON THE ROCK depictions that appear in both types. On the other hand “house” and “tree,” typically found in childrens’ drawings, are almost completely absent from rock art, while the “sun” is infrequently present, and not in all locations, in petroglyphs and pictograms. But perhaps what they have in common more than the subject matter are formal and structural aspects, such as transparency and superposition in order to show subjectively important aspects that cannot be seen at one and the same time, the overturning and flattening of the image. The war chariots of Bohuslän, for example, have “flat” attached wheels, round and with visible spokes. Relative sizes no longer correspond to reality and objects seen as more important are privileged in their spatial collocation; perspective and a ground line are absent, and the representation is predominantly narrative. It hardly needs to be said that what interests us here are the more complex representations, images, and pictograms in relation to the “immaterial” manifestations of the psyche of a visionary or symbolic -visionary nature. Of less importance to us are the general aspects of rock art, often consisting merely of lines, diagrams, ideograms, and more or less schematic or geometric signs. The functions of rock art could be thought of essentially as a secondary language: after the words have given expression to the thought, the art provides a memory of the activity depicted and a way of recording the emotions stimulated by the mental depiction.2 As for the mnemonic aspects, the first representations could be considered as the beginning of the existence of an ESSS (External Symbolic Storage System), a useful source of information for the internal, biological memory. External memory is a critical feature of modern human cognition, if we are trying to build an evolutionary bridge from Neolithic to modern cognitive capabilities or a structural bridge from mythic to theoretic culture. The brain may not have changed recently in it’s [sic] genetic makeup, but its link to an accumulating external memory network affords it cognitive powers that would not have been possible in isolation.3 Representational art requires a capacity for rêverie, a state of total concentration on the object being created that presupposes a dissociation and a detachment from the surrounding environment and THE SIgNIfICANCE Of THE RESEARCH / 69 from disturbing thoughts, almost a sort of merging of one’s identity with the artistic production. This identification is a meditative silence that permits the ego to exercise the superior organizational functions with which it is endowed, from simple eye-hand coordination to the most sophisticated pictorial techniques. Quite the contrary, the hyperactivity of the brain brought on by psychoactive substances tends to distract the ego from its applicative and rational functions. This is why I believe that prehistoric visionary art was produced during NOSCs (non-ordinary states of consciousness). It...