Paper short abstract:

Prehistoric rock art sites in Europe can be seen as locales where prehistoric people incorporated sensory experience as a form of cosmological knowledge. In them sound contributed to the understanding of the sacred at rock art sites and to the understanding of ensouled landscapes

Paper long abstract:

It has been claimed that a holistic approach to landscape history is needed, for the separation between the economic, the cultural and the cosmological did not exist in the pre-modern past. Yet, there are places in the landscape that seem to indicate that the holistic approach needs nuancing. One such type of places is prehistoric rock art sites in Europe. They can be seen as locales where prehistoric people incorporated sensory experience as a form of cosmological knowledge. To their lack of apparent functional use, and the high degree of symbolism of the depictions produced in them, we can add their peculiar sonorous nature. In the last few years we have undertaken a series of systematic acoustics measurements in a number of rock art landscapes in Mediterranean Europe. Results have pointed to the selection of places with the best acoustic properties in their area, although there are nuances from one area to another implying agency and transformation. Anthropologists have noted that sound and music are systematically present in ritual (even if in the form of silence) and it is our contention that sound contributed to the understanding of the sacred at rock art sites and to the understanding of ensouled landscapes by the hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies that produced the art. In this paper we will discuss these ideas providing new, specific examples derived from our work in archaeoacoustics.