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T he standard interpretative strategy in rockart studies is one that privileges the visual propensities over other forms of meaning production. In this chapter I examine how the production of petroglyphs impacts on another of the human senses, that of hearing. I propose that in certain contexts the meaning of petroglyphs may not be solely, or most importantly, in the motifs themselves , but also in the noise of their manufacture. We tend to view rock-art only as the end product of a process of social engagement. I argue instead that its social significance may lie in its production. In this sense, rock-art can be considered as a by-product of meaningful social action. I explore this idea through specific case studies derived from fieldwork on the island of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia and on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. THE SOCIALITY OF SOUND Each of the senses—vision, touch, smell, taste, and hearing—is activated as one experiences being in the 93 seven Making Sense of Petroglyphs The Sound of Rock-Art Paul Rainbird world. However, the five senses identified in Western conceptions are not universally recognized as discrete sensual categories; perceptions are culturally specific (e.g., Classen et al. 1994; Finney 1995; MacGregor 1999:263–264). Nevertheless, it may be assumed that hearing, although in Western society not considered the most acute of the human senses, is something generally shared by our species. In archaeology and rock-art studies we obviously privilege the visual aspects because, although perspective may change, the material can be seen; that is, it can be viewed and appreciated as a direct manifestation of the past. The other senses are usually regarded as ephemeral and difficult to capture in the present. However, a more fully interpretative archaeology requires us to attempt to consider other sensual experiences to provide the broader experiential context for social action. In relation to the current interest in the phenomenology of landscapes, Tilley (1999:180) pointed out that “[w]hen we consider landscape we are almost always thinking about it primarily in terms of a visual construct . . . . Landscapes are not just visionscapes but also soundscapes, touchscapes, smellscapes. . . .” Here I am concerned with soundscapes. I suggest that in marking place, social action is not restricted to just visual phenomena. For example, Ingham et al. (1999) researched the social geographies of warehouse parties in the city of Blackburn, England.The warehouse party was a phenomenon of the late 1980s where the music of choice was “house” style, often associated with the drug Ecstasy, and where empty spaces such as warehouses were used to hold large dance parties, usually lasting for one night only. The nonregulated organization of these events soon led to legislation restricting their occurrence, and they were, for the most part, stamped out in urban environments by the passing of the draconian Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Ingham et al. (1999) set out to establish how the short-lived phenomenon of warehouse parties created new soundscapes for derelict industrial buildings . They found that the “academic challenge [is] to overcome the neglect of ephemeral spaces and the ways in which the dynamic of sound interacts with the dynamic of space; and therefore to encounter and examine the critical difference between the mental construction of a sonorous world on the basis of essentially static soundmarks, as against dynamic, impermanent, fuzzily bounded soundspaces ” (Ingham et al. 1999:300). Soundmarks are supposed to be analogous to landmarks and be unique to particular places or communities (Schafer 1976, 1977; Westerkemp 1994 cited in Ingham et al. 1999:286). In general, the soundscapes conceived of in social geography have been dominated by music (e.g., Smith 1997; see also the review of “acoustic ecology” by Waterman 2000), to the detriment of the development of a more fully contextualized understanding that may include the more mundane facets, including human utterances, that have an equal role in establishing the social understanding of place. In anthropology Gell has gone some way to adding this extra, required dimension. Ethnographic experience among the Umeda of northwestern Papua New Guinea highlighted for Gell (1995) that he was a “pronouncedly visual thinker.” His desire to get above the forest and thus through vision to place himself spatially in the landscape was frustrated by the thick forest and lack of a vantage point. He found that the visual world in which he had been socially inculcated was there, in the forest, of very close range...

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