Walking on the stones of years. Some remarks on the north-west Iberian rock art

Abstract

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 altering environments. We shall review, in the light of recent discoveries, aspects such as the chronology of the regional rock art, the audience it was meant to address and the archaeological context of the carved rocks. Going beyond the perception of rock art as a mediating element, open to the different communities inhabiting the land, we acknowledge its possible role as an active agent through which human groups might negotiate their own identity and association with the surrounding space. The relationship between petroglyphs and landscape would be a dialectic one, so that a variety of factors could regulate access and the reading of the decorated panels, perhaps restricting these to certain individuals or sectors of a given community. Lastly, parallels in the rock art from 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.