Building Bridges Between Form And Technology: Towards A Characterization Of The Stylistic Horizons From The Spanish Levantine Rock Art
Résumé
Spanish Levantine rock art is a unique form of pictorial expression in Holocene Prehistoric Europe, whose cultural complexity and chronology remain uncertain. The more than 1,500 rock shelters identified so far extend across the inland regions of the Iberian Mediterranean basin, over an extensive territory of around 80,000 km2. The potential of information treasured by this graphic tradition is impressive: its territorial boundaries must be read in terms of social and economic dynamics, while its outstanding formal diversity, the figurative nature of its depictions and the strong narrative component of its scenes make this graphic tradition an open-air archive, which allows us to investigate the cultural dynamics, social and economic activities and a wide spectrum of material culture. Despite this potential as a source of information, the lack of reliable methods to date kept Spanish Levantine rock art out of mainstream archaeology, while its characterization has been based solely on formal and thematic features. Technological traits- techniques and sequences of gestures- have been completely disregarded from stylistic approaches, especially as far as the early stages of the graphic operational sequence are concerned. There are several reasons underlying this gap, the main ones being: on the one hand, attention has been focused on the identification of the minerals that make up the pigments, but the size and morphology of the crystals, which is intimately related to the processing gestures, has been neglected. On the other hand, mainstream researches have focused on the isolated study of rock art shelters, completely detached from the cultural debates revolving around this horizon and with a scale of analysis restricted to the panel, so that the sampling strategy of pigments has been completely random. These traditional approaches thus prevent a regional focus on both chaînes opératoires characterizing technical traditions and the mechanisms governing the transmission of the know-how. Both provide crucial insights to address an accurate characterization of the social entities responsible for these paintings. Here we present the first results concerning physical-chemical and morphological analysis of the pigments from two of the stylistic horizons that make up the Levantine sequence of the northern regions of Valltorta-Gassulla (Castellón). Our aim is to evaluate whether there are changes in the operational chains – mineral composition and processing - of the colouring materials used in both stylistic horizons, all from a regional viewpoint that may also reveal differences at a territorial scale. Our analyses rely on scanning electron microscopy coupled to energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDS), thereby permitting to identify the pictorial chemical composition as well as the grain-size or the micromorphology of the chromogenous mineral (haematite). Our preliminary results point out a significant difference between the pictorial layers of the two horizons in terms of their composition and micromorphology. Additionally, our study shows the existence of two distinct chaînes opératoires in pigment production within the 'Civil' horizon, and a higher variability in the chaînes opératoires associated with the figures attributed to the Pachypode horizon.