The Western Hemisphere. General term for the Americas following their discovery by Europeans, thus setting them in contradistinction to the Old World of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Ernie L wrote:Perhaps semiotic anthropology would not be a useful tool understanding cupules..why not semiotic archaeology if it does not already exist.
Semiotics, both Saussurean and Piercean have been applied to material culture and rock art but there must be a sign that can be reconised as a signifier or having an iconic , indexical or symbolic meaning ,which is not apparent in a cup mark or combination of cups .
George
Yes I see what you mean.....a cupule Rosetta stone would be nice
The real problem is that cup marks have been engraved for many thousands of years in all parts of the globe and the little we know from ethnography is that they have different "meanings " for different cultures and in some cases might also not signify/represent anything .
Hmm...... so the sign is the same (cupules) but the signified is different......... zig zag lines,whorls and cupules. My intuition tells me these signs go way way back. Before we took to scratching on stone...perhaps even hard wired to some degree.
Ernie L wrote:Hmm...... so the sign is the same (cupules) but the signified is different......... zig zag lines,whorls and cupules. My intuition tells me these signs go way way back. Before we took to scratching on stone...perhaps even hard wired to some degree.
Ethnography shows that the cups have had different cultural meanings too e.g. piko , tally marks ,simple decoration etc .
Yes spirals , zig zags ,chevrons etc are all phosphenes ,the basic motifs that are our genetic inheritance and found in the earliest engravings to the more recent .
uniface wrote:It used to be that whenever they couldn't explain something, they attributed it to "religion."
Now it's "genetics."
New generation, new conceptual garbage can.
Gotta keep up with the times !
The phosphene explanation is far more specific than just genetic .Rock art has a major visual component and phosphenes are directly related to the visual system .Unlike a ritual /religious explanation which is simply conjecture the phosphene explanation is falsifiable .We know the relatively limited repertoire of phosphenes and when compared with the earliest non representational art of external nature world wide there is a 100% fit . The same motifs continue to be used in later art which has developed into more representational styles .
I am far from female.
But I will remind everybody of Carol Diaz-Granados’s opinion that all this imagining is by “Anglo-European Males”
Very few locally educated archeologists/anthropologists and virtually no female ones.
I doubt simultaneous discovery.
Remember, females were a favorite war prize and where traded far and wide.
Once they got to wherever, they had, or found, the same needs as any pregnant woman.
They either transmitted, or learned, the copula “trick” or "belief."
And that knowledge was transmitted with the next war party.
“And the beat goes on.”
My qiuck reasurch is that the local folkore in the US southeast is that, in the cotton growing flatlands, the black female house servents taught the "dirt eating" trick to their white masters.
Meanwhile, in the mountians, the Scot/Irish ladies brought the knowledge with them.
kbs2244 wrote:I am far from female.
But I will remind everybody of Carol Diaz-Granados’s opinion that all this imagining is by “Anglo-European Males”
Very few locally educated archeologists/anthropologists and virtually no female ones.
What imagining ?
As I had mentioned earlier many women have made an impact in rock art studies .
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My qiuck reasurch is that the local folkore in the US southeast is that, in the cotton growing flatlands, the black female house servents taught the "dirt eating" trick to their white masters.
Meanwhile, in the mountians, the Scot/Irish ladies brought the knowledge with them.[/quote]
As also mentioned earlier these are ethnographic accounts from the recent past and only tell us about attitudes and customs from around that period and can't possibly tell us anything about the more temporally and spatially distant .Further there are other ethnographic accounts that have no similarities . Cup marks have been made for many thousands all over the world there are countless different reasons for their creation , pica and Piko are only two .
George
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