A new grammar for a changing world: the graphic expression among the Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Iberian Peninsula

Resumen

This lecture attempts to provide a critical view of the available information about the graphic expression of the Mesolithic groups of the Iberian Peninsula, and to provide some reflections on its role within those societies.The Iberian Peninsula is one of the classic areas for the study of the Mesolithic. Hundreds of sites have been catalogued and studied since the mid-nineteenth century, including key references, such as the outstanding cemeteries of Muge and the Sado valley in Portugal, the dense concentration of coastal sites known as the Asturian "culture" in the north, or the "Geometric Mesolithic" of the Ebro valley and Mediterranean Spain in the eastern part of the Peninsula. Yet the analysis of graphic expression has not been a central issue within the research of this period, except in the case of the long debate on the chronology of the so-called "Levantine art". This outstanding naturalistic style, depicting, among other activities, hunting scenes, was attributed during a large part of its long and complex history of research to the Mesolithic. However, the discovery at the end of the 197os of another rock-art style in SE Spain, named "Macro-schematic", challenged that assumption, as the latter, which was dated in the mid sixth millennium cal BC by parallelism with motifs found in early Neolithic cardialpottery, demonstrated in some cases to be earlier than the Levantine, which was superposed on it on the walls of some sites in the Valencia region. Yet recent re-analysis of the Levantine art, including radiometric dating of the depictions, has re-opened the possibility of at least part of the Levantine art corresponding to the Mesolithic. In any case, the research on the Levantine art has traditionally been quite an independent branch of Spanish archaeological research, and even when this style was generally attributed to the Mesolithic, attempts to analyse it within the general context of Holocene hunter-gatherer societies were scarce.This is also related to another classic issue which has lately been re-opened: the supposedly abrupt end of the naturalistic graphic expression at the end of the Pleistocene. In this lecture we will discuss the available evidence on the chronology of the end of rock and portable Palaeolithic art, and the possibilities of some kind of later figurative developments having existed in the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, new data will be provided concerning the graphic expression during the Azilian period, presenting our current research on the Azilian painted cobbles of northern Spain. Other kinds of non-figurative graphic expression in northern Spain and in the Mediterranean region are also discussed.