Littlestone
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Hardwired
Mar 06, 2006, 21:36
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I think it was FourWinds who suggested on another thread recently that we are hardwired to see faces in things (stones, trees etc). Apologies FW if it wasn't you. This idea's been kicking around for a while but it bothers me a bit. A brief look at both 'prehistoric' art and art from cultures outside the Greco-Roman influence would suggest that mankind, for most of the time, was more interested in the animal kingdom, or the grandeur of nature, than faces in rocks or trees.
I guess what I'm suggesting is that if we're ever going to get close to what rock art (or megaliths) might have meant to the people who created them we have to start from the premises of what might have been the most important things in their lives.
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Hob
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Re: Hardwired
Mar 06, 2006, 21:45
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>more interested in the animal kingdom, or the grandeur of nature, than faces in rocks or trees
I'd agree, but there's a difference between being interested in something and having it hardwired into your head.
FW was right, humans do have bits hardwired for face recognition. I'll spare everyone the turgid detail, suffice to say it's well documented in many Sciency journals. It probably goes waaay back in evolutionary terms. Well before megalithic stuff, but that's not to say itcouldn't have had an input into the choice of stones/sites.
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Littlestone
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Re: Hardwired
Mar 06, 2006, 22:02
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>....humans do have bits hardwired for face recognition.<
Mmm... but face recognition in what? Recognition of one's mother and father of course (even birds do that) but 'recognition' of a face on Mars? Faces imagined in the multiple facets of the Avebury stones?
Nah... tis all a fancy born of a Greco-Roman conceit :-)
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Hob
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Re: Hardwired
Mar 06, 2006, 22:48
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Face recognition in anything. Clouds, flames, woodgrain, the fronts of automobiles, anything where the basic elements of a face can be detected and grouped together. Like that Cezanne painting of the women by the river that's actually a self portrait.
Of course there's an evolutionary advantage for the recognition of a mother's face by an infant, but it also helps reinforce social bonding and gives a predisposition to detect the subtleties of facial expression that are crucial in effective homind communication.
To stray back on topic, I reckon that if you look carefully at the stones of the Longstone Cove, Adam contains an image of a slightly disgruntled fella with a big quiff, possibly Elvis. Really:
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/44559
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Hob
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Re: errata
Mar 06, 2006, 22:51
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It's Eve innit? not Adam.
'Cos they missed out the 'L' and the 'S' from the ancient spelling of Elvis, which was of course 'Elves'.
Reaching for my coat? Me? Yup.
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nigelswift
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Re: errata
Mar 06, 2006, 22:56
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You were busy the day you went there, weren't you?
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/31642
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Hob
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Re: errata
Mar 06, 2006, 22:59
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That wasn't me, I had no yoghurt that day.
Until just now, I'd not noticed the tiny spider on that lichen smiley.
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FourWinds
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Re: errata
Mar 07, 2006, 07:32
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The Lichen Smiley is cool, but obviously not natural. My fave bit of lichen is at Glencullen, because it's a double spiral
http://www.megalithomania.com/show/image/635
Doesn't show up too well there, because of the angle it's in. There seems to be something odd about lichen growth on quartz/quartite. Certain parts of the stone seem to support lichen while others don't. I have seen circular growth too, which lead me to speculate that early rock art may have been people simply carving where the lichen grew if they found an odd design like that*. Another possibility was that RA was replicating these 'natural' patterns. Being crystal allsorts of patterns could occur.
*Just for the record, I didn't say it's a very good theory :-)
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tiompan
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Re: errata
Mar 07, 2006, 09:20
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Stiof MacAmhalghaidh will have an essay on the the possible visual , not ingested , influence of lichen on RA in the new "Insight" due out soon.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~archaeology/chariot.htm .
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Littlestone
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Re: Hardwired
Mar 07, 2006, 12:03
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>Face recognition in anything.<
Indeed, but how much of that is nature and how much nurture? The point I was trying to make in my opening post was that the West may be conditioned to see 'faces in places' far more than other cultures (past and present) because of the influence of the classical world on us for the last few millennia.
A couple of examples. The West sees the face of a man in the moon - dunno why it should be a man and not a woman but anyway - in the Far East people don't see a face at all, they see a hare pounding rice cakes! <i>Big</i> difference.
We are so obsessed in the West with the human form and the human condition that there's almost no escape from it. I've just got back from the supermarket and checked the magazine racks while there; out of some 200 magazines on sale 99% carry a face on the cover. It has been thus for a long time. While the great masters of European painting were churning out portrait after portrait of some important bod or other their counterparts in the Far East were painting landscapes featuring soaring mountains and crashing waterfalls (and if a figure appeared at all in one of those paintings it was as a tiny insignificant dot somewhere at the bottom). And going back to the beginnings of pictorial art there are the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux - these wonderful creations are predominately of animals with the human figure hardly appearing at all.
Just because we, as modern Westerners, are inclined to see a face in a stone or the trunk of a tree does not mean our ancestors did. Probably what they <i>did</i> see was what was most important to them - and perhaps when we better understand that we will better understand the art and structures those people created.
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