Early Rock Art of the American West by Ekkehart Malotki & Ellen Dissanayake

Author:Ekkehart Malotki & Ellen Dissanayake
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295743622
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2018-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

6.7 Pecos River Style representational pictographs, Texas

More recently, cognitive scientist Tom Froese and colleagues have made renewed efforts to resurrect and uphold the validity of the neuropsychological model.55 Convinced that shamanic practices played a role in the initial process of developing “abstract imagination,”56 they argue that ASCs were instrumental in bringing about the origin of abstract art. Derek Hodgson has challenged these arguments.57 In his view, abnormal states of consciousness “are neither necessary nor essential to understanding the universality of geometric art.” He, instead, refers to his own neurovisual resonance hypothesis (described below) which, as a neuromechanical scenario grounded in the neural architecture of the visual cortex, better explains abstract-geometric patterns of early paleoart and, moreover, has the advantage of being rooted in normal rather than abnormal perceptual experience.

We readily concede that ASCs as emphasized in the shamanistic hypothesis could have played a role in the creation of some prehistoric art, although not in the rigid three-tiered fashion first proposed by Lewis-Williams. We find this hypothesis most useful when it comes to analyzing imagery distinguished by surrealistic and fantastical motifs as they occur in several of the “biocentric” styles in the American West (fig. 6.8).58 Such imagery could certainly have been inspired by trance, dreams, visions, and hallucinations, although it has been pointed out that simple human imagination “is an entirely sufficient condition of everyday consciousness to evoke the same content of image as hallucination.”59

However, we no longer accept the reductionist model’s theoretical tenets in accounting for the origins and worldwide prevalence of early geometric paleoart. It is simply unthinkable that all the oldest noniconic art, so globally uniform for hundreds of thousands of years, was solely derived from abnormal subjective states such as those experienced by trancing shamans. A crucial weakness of the hypothesis is that it does not explain why indigenous groups that do not practice shamanism or engage in exotic ASCs have the same geometric motifs occurring in their art. Nor is there any way of differentiating elemental noniconic motifs resulting from changed consciousness from those appearing in nonshamanistically oriented cultures.60

Another serious flaw in this model is the fact that phosphenic designs appear to be the universal building blocks in the art of young children.61 Developmental psychologist of art and painter Sylvia Fein has pointed out that children, up to the age of four or so, draw not what they see but what they know, with an “orderly growing complexity,”62 an observation that should not be surprising if the motifs are “hard-wired” into the brain. Nor is altered consciousness necessary to explain the often-geometric doodling behavior of grown-ups. As a product of mild absent-mindedness, these abstract markings, too, are the product of the visual and motor areas of the brain. Ben Watson, for example, in an analysis of contemporary doodling samples, found that among their recurring elements are elementary geometric forms such as straight parallel lines, circles and concentric circles, arcs, radial figures, and so forth, which he suggests are best explained as having their origin in the human nervous system and the structuring of the visual brain.

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