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Art in the Making: Recent Developments in the Study of Pleistocene and Holocene Images Oscar Moro Abadía 1

& Manuel

R. González Morales 2

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract This introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory devoted to Pleistocene and Holocene arts seeks to examine a number of recent developments in the study of deep-time images. We argue that, in a context marked by new technological advances, the study of what was traditionally known as ‘prehistoric art’ has been transformed into a dynamic area of research marked by four main interrelated processes: (A) the inclusion of new corpuses of images beyond traditional conceptualizations of ‘prehistoric’ art, (B) the shift from a ‘contemplative model’ (which treated images and artefacts as ‘already made art’) to a ‘construction model’ that focuses on the processes involved in the making of artwork, (C) the transition from a Eurocentric model to a worldwide paradigm, and (D) the increasing incorporation of Holocene and Indigenous arts into general discussions about ‘prehistoric’ arts. Keywords Pleistocene art . Holocene art . Indigenous arts . Eurocentrism . Globalization

Introduction This special issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory that we are honoured to edit examines some recent developments in the study of Pleistocene and Holocene images. During the last twenty years, the field of ‘prehistoric art’1 has gone through a number of processes that have transformed the ways in which we conceptualize, analyse, date, record and understand past representations. These developments range from the general to the specific in We use the term ‘prehistoric art’ in quotations to indicate its problematic nature. While the term has a long tradition in archaeology, many Indigenous groups from Australia, America and Africa have rightly pointed out that it is grounded in ethnocentric thinking. For instance, in places like Australia, most scholars stopped using the phrase ‘prehistoric’ in the 1980s as Aboriginal people objected to the colonial assumption that this implied that there was no history in Australia before white records.

1

* Oscar Moro Abadía [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article

Moro Abadía and González Morales

scale. First, worldwide developments have had an enduring and vast impact on the study of past images. In particular, globalization has led to an increasing awareness of the fact that Pleistocene and Holocene images were created on every continent except Antarctica (Clottes 2002; McDonald & Veth 2012; Lorblanchet & Bahn 2017; David 2017; David & McNiven 2018). Second, recent research in human and social sciences has fueled new conceptualizations of deep-time art. For instance, the so-called ‘ontological turn’ (Alberti et al. 2011; Alberti 2016) has generated new avenues of research for the meaning of past images (Cipolla 2019; Jones 2017; Jones & Cochrane 2018; Porr 2018; Moro Abadía & Porr 2021). The