See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/249720473

Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Article  in  Semiotica · January 1994

DOI: 10.1515/semi.1994.100.2-4.267

CITATIONS READS

29 376

1 author:

Göran Sonesson
Lund University
81 PUBLICATIONS   423 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Stages in the Evolution and Development of Sign Use (SEDSU) View project

Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Göran Sonesson on 12 August 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Göran Sonesson

Prolegomena to the semiotic

analysis of prehistoric visual
displays 1

‘The data obtained, even if then classified by a computer, must be first

comprehended and assimilated by the human mind to acquire significance and to
ultimately enrich our culture’ (Anati 1976: 163f).

‘Every archaeologist is, by the way, a semiotic researcher” (Nordbladh 1977:68)

Semioticians are not offering (or menacing) to do the archaeologists’ job. We are certainly
not going to do the digging. Semioticians can not be expected to dig up the ground, or to
turn over all the layers, not even in a metaphorical sense: it is not our task to develop full-
blown archaeological theories, nor to explain all the details of concrete, situated,
prehistoric displays. What semiotics generally, and visual semiotics in particular, can bring
to archaeology is, first, a comparative approach, permitting a classification of prehistoric
visual displays, such as petroglyphs and pictograms, in relation to other visual signs, or
other iconical signs, and other sign types generally, and, in the second place, an array of
models, concepts, and methods, developed all through the fairly lengthy history of
semiotics (which is longer, but less concentrated, than that of archaeology), mainly during
the last century and a half, since the time of the proverbial founding-fathers, Peirce and
Saussure, but in particular during the recent decades of intense semiotic research.
What we can offer to do, then, is to take over at least part of the semiotic task the
archaeologist has laid upon himself: but what this means, or could mean, will be more
readily explained once we have defined the nature of semiotic research. What would be
needed, ideally, in the study of prehistoric visual displays, as so often elsewhere, are
scholars having the double competence of semiotician and archaeologist: but for the time
being, the most we can hope for, is to encounter a semiotician with a layman’s knowledge
of archaeology, and an archaeologist more or less well-steeped in semiotics. In the long
run, however, the task of semioticians and archaeologists alike. should be less to justify
the ways of semiotics to archaeologists, or the reverse, than to discover a common
language for us all.
The present contribution is written from the point of view of semiotics, by one who
can claim no more than a superficial knowledge of archaeology. Hopefully, it may offer

1
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

some food for thoughts to archaeologists, although it has been conceived primarily with an
eye to the challenges presented to visual semiotics by prehistoric visual displays, and by
archaeological descriptions thereof. As far as the analysis of prehistoric visual displays are
concerned, this must be considered a very provisional investigation. In fact, we have
mostly tried to summarise the relevant results and issues of recent contributions to
pictorial semiotics (including our own), and to bring them to bear on a few examples of
prehistoric petroglyphs as described in the extant archaeological literature.

On semiotics, signs, and depiction

In arguing for the creation of ‘an archaeology of mind’, also termed ‘cognitive
archaeology’, Colin Renfrew (1982:14), compares this new sub-field to semiotics: in his
view, both are ‘destined to tread an uneasy path between the pretentiously jargon-laden
and the blindingly obvious’. This comparison is made particularly significant to us, by the
fact that prehistoric pictorial representation is presented, by Renfrew, in another
publication (see Renfrew & Bahn 1992:363ff), as one of the principle themes of cognitive
archaeology . In the following, we will try to avoid all jargon, pretentious or not (though,
in the end, we are aware of no clear criteria for determining the limits between a useful
terminological framework and a mere aggregate of nonsense words); yet we will have to
spend quite a long stretch of time in the domain of the self-evident. In spite of all the
jargon and pretentiousness of semiotics (the existence of which we would be the last to
deny; cf. Sonesson 1989a), the comparison with the former may not be all that
‘inauspicious’ to cognitive archaeology, because, if anything, semiotics has taught us to
build on the self-evident, both to reform it and to reclaim it. Not only can one obviousness
hide another from view (as was judiciously observed by Stephen Strasser 1967), but less
self-evident facts may be lurking behind them, or even themselves parade as something
obvious. This is what will hopefully emerge in the following.

Semiotics as a particular science

According to Ferdinand de Saussure, one of its reputed initiators, semiotics (or semiology
as he called it) was to study ‘the life of signs in society’; and the second mythical
founding-father, Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as his forerunner John Locke, conceived
of semiotics as being the ‘doctrine of signs’. Later in life, however, Peirce come to prefer
the wider term ‘mediation’ as a description of the subject matter of semiotics (cf.
Parmentier 1985). And Saussure actually argued that in the semiotic sciences, there was
no object to be studied except for the point of view which we adopt on other objects (see
Sonesson 1989a,I.1.4.). More recently, Greimas has rejected the notion of sign, and his
followers Floch (1986a) and Thürlemann (1982; 1990) have argued the case in the domain
of pictorial semiotics. In a similar fashion, Umberto Eco (1976), at the end of his tortuous
critique of iconicity, substituted the notion of sign process for the traditional sign

2
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

concept.
The sign, then (also termed the semiotic function), is not comprehensive enough to
delimit the field of semiotics: rather, the domain of semiotics is meaning (or ‘mediation’),
in some wider, yet to be specified sense. But since everything, or almost everything, may
be endowed with meaning, any object whatsoever (or almost) may enter into the domain
of semiotics, but only in so far as it is studied from the point of view of its capacity for
conveying meaning.
Nor should we adopt the popular preconception, according to which the semiotic
field is inhabited simply by the followers of Peirce and Saussure. In the first place, there
would be no reason (more than a superficial terminological coincidence) to amalgamate
two such dissimilar doctrines as those represented by the elaborate but fragmentary
philosophy of Peirce, and the marginal, if suggestive, annotations of Saussure. But, more
importantly, in adopting this point of view, we would be unable to account, not only for
the semiotical work accomplished well before the time of our two cultural heroes, be it
that of the stoics, Augustin, the scholastics, Locke, Leibniz, or the ideologues, but also for
much of contemporary semiotics, some parts of which are not particularly indebted to
any of the forefathers.
Our own definition of pictorial semiotics derives from the view we have taken
elsewhere on general semiotics, because we believe that the former should share the goals,
models and procedures which the latter applies to the wider domain of signification, which
includes, among other things, the objects studied by pictorial semiotics (cf. Sonesson
1989a,I.1.). It is impossible to establish a consensus among all semioticians on what
semiotics is all about; and many semioticians will not even care to define their discipline.
However, if we attend less to definitions than to real research practice, and if we leave out
those would-be semioticians who simply do not seem to be doing anything very new
(those who merely go in doing art history, literary history, philosophy, logic, or
whatever), it seems possible to isolate the smallest common denominators of the
discipline.
In the following, then, semiotics will be taken to be a science, the point of view of
which may be applied to any phenomenon produced by the human race. This point of
view consists, in Saussurean terms, in an investigation of the point of view itself, which is
equivalent, in Peircean terms, to the study of mediation (cf. Parmentier 1985). In other
words, semiotics is concerned with the different forms and conformations given to the
means through which humankind believe itself to have access to ’the world‘. The very
term ’point of view’ is, as Saint-Martin (1988:202) notes, a visual metaphor. Yet the
point, which is a standpoint, matters more than the sense modality. For, in studying these
phenomena, semiotics should occupy the standpoint of humankind itself (and of its
different fractions). Indeed, as Saussure argues, semiotic objects exist merely as those
points of view which are adopted on other, ’material’ objects, which is why these points

3
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

of view cannot be altered without the result being the disappearance of the semiotic
objects as such.
Taking the point of view of the users, and trying the explain their particular use, we
cannot, like the philosopher Nelson Goodman (1968), reject the folk notion of picture
because of its incoherence, but must discover its peculiar systematicity. But it does not
follow, as Prieto (1975a) would claim, that we must restrict our study to the knowledge
shared by all users of the system, for it is necessary to descend at least one level of
analysis below the ultimate level of which the user is aware, in order to take account of the
presuppositions underlying the use of the system. Semiotics must go beyond the
standpoint of the user, to explain the workings of such operative, albeit tacit, knowledge
which underlies the behaviour constitutive of any system of signification (cf. Sonesson
1989a,I.1.4).
Moreover, semiotics is devoted to these phenomena considered in their qualitative
aspects rather than the quantitative ones, and it is geared to rules and regularities, instead
of unique objects. This is to say that, pictorial semiotics, like all semiotic sciences,
including linguistics, is a nomothetic science, a science which is concerned with generalities,
not an idiographic science, comparable to art history and most other human sciences,
which take as their object an array of singular phenomena, the common nature and
connectedness of which they take for granted.2 Just like linguistics, but contrary to the
natural sciences and the social sciences (according to most conceptions), pictorial
semiotics is concerned with qualities, rather than quantities — that is, it is concerned with
categories more than numbers. Thus, semiotics shares with the social and natural sciences
the character of being a law-seeking, or nomothetic, rather than an idiographic, science,
while retaining the emphasis on categories, to the detriment of amounts, which is peculiar
to the human sciences. Being nomothetic and qualitative, pictorial semiotics has as its
principal theme a category that may be termed pictorality, or picturehood — which is not,
as we shall see, simply the same thing as iconicity.
Semiotics is not restricted to any single method, but is known to have used analysis
of concrete texts as well as classical experimental technique and imaginary variation
reminiscent of the one found in philosophy. Moreover, semiotics is not necessarily
dependant on a model taken over from linguistics, as is often believed, although the
construction of models remains one of its peculiar features, if it is compared to most of
the human sciences. Indeed, semiotics differs from traditional approaches to humanitas in
employing a model which guide its practitioners in their effort to bring about adequate
analyses, instead of simply relying on the power of the ‘innocent eye’. After having
borrowed its models from linguistics, philosophy, medicine, and mathematics, semiotics is
now well on its way to the elaboration of its proper models.
Semiotics has a long history, mainly as a part of other disciplines; and, of course,
meaning continues to be discussed, even today, inside most of the human and social

4
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

sciences. The creation of a particular discipline, centred around the notion of meaning, and
often, but not always, termed semiotics or semiology, has been announced many times in
history, but its career has been episodic, until the recent period. It is only during the last
thirty years that semiotics has gained a large following and, more importantly, entered the
domain of hard institutional facts. In recent years, research institutes, national and
international associations, revues, congresses, and so on, seem to be springing up
everywhere. Eco (1977) has rightly observed that the emergence, in our time, of semiotics
as a particular discipline must be at least partially due to the present profusion of mass-
media and other means of communication. It should be added, however, that as a result of
these secondary or tertiary layers of mediation which have recently accrued to our
everyday experience, we have been forced to realise how deeply mediated is also our
ordinary, unreflected life in the unquestioned, sociocultural, Lifeworld.
To many exponents of contemporary semiotics, as, for instance, those assembled
around A.J. Greimas in France, semiotics is a pure, or autonomous, science, such as was
once the ideal of structural linguistics. Other researchers, notably in the United States,
tend to look upon semiotics as being merely a meeting-place of many different sciences, a
kind of interdisciplinary framework common to the humanities and the social sciences,
including, on some accounts, biology and neurology. The point of view taken here, and
applied in my book, is different from both these approaches: I will take the results of all
disciplines involved with the same subject matter (that is, in the present case, with
pictures) to be relevant to semiotics, but only once they have been reviewed, redefined
and complemented from a specifically semiotic viewpoint.

The domain of pictorial semiotics

As a peculiar domain of semiotics concerned with pictures as signs, pictorial semiotics
may be said to take its origin from a small article by Roland Barthes, written in 1964
(1964b), in which a analysis of a publicity picture boosting the delights of Panzani
spaghetti is attempted, using a few ill-understood linguistic terms taken over from
Saussure and Hjelmslev (cf. Sonesson 1989a,II.1). Since then, the field has been
flourishing, with the most important contributions having been made so far, to my mind,
by Floch and Thürlemann of the Greimas school, by the Belgian Groupe µ, and by
Fernande Saint-Martin and her followers in Canada. In 1989, a review specialised in
pictorial semiotics started to be published, and the International Association of Visual
Semiotics (of which I happen to be one of the initiators) was founded in Blois, France.
At is present stage, however, pictorial semiotics may well have less in common with
Barthes’ Panzani analysis than with .that ‘linguistics of the visual image’ invoked by the
art historian E.H. Gombrich, or that ‘science of depiction’ called for by the psychologist
James Gibson; as well as with the studies of pictorial meaning initiated in philosophy by,
for instance, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, and Richard

5
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Wollheim. The most relevant reference, however, as will be seen shortly, may well be that
to Gibson, who, together with such disciples and colleagues as Julian Hochberg, John
Kennedy, and Margaret Hagen, has started to elaborate a psychology of picture
perception. — but psycholinguistics cannot do without linguistics, and, by the same
token, we need to establish a more general, theoretical, framework for the study of the
picture sign (cf. Sonesson 1989a).
Pictorial semiotics, we will submit, is that part of the science of signification which
is particularly concerned to understand the nature and specificity of such meanings (or
vehicles of meaning) which are colloquially identified by the term ‘picture’. In other
words, pictorial semiotics is the science of depiction, as a peculiar mode of information
and communication. Thus, the purview of such a speciality must involve, at the very
least, a demonstration of the semiotic character of pictures, as well as a study of the
peculiarities which differentiate pictorial meanings from other kinds of signification, and a
assessment of the ways (from some or other point of view) in which pictorial meanings
are apt to differ from each other while still remaining pictorial in kind. In differentiating
pictorial meaning form other meanings, we should in fact be particularly interested in
knowing how they are distinguished from other kinds of visual signification, such as
sculpture, architecture, gesture, and even writing; or how they differ from other iconic
signs, that its, from other signs motivated by similarity or identity.
The domain of semiotics, we have seen, not only includes signs, but all kinds of
meanings (or ’mediation’), in some wider, yet to be specified sense. Given a suitable
definition of the sign (to which we will turn below), we may ask if the picture, which
certainly conveys meaning, is also, more in particular, a sign. If so, we may continue
inquiring into the possibility that the picture is made up of units which are meanings
themselves, but not signs (which is not simply the old issue of double articulation; cf.
Sonesson 1989a,III.4.2. and 1989c, 1990f). Furthermore, we may want to ask the same
questions about perception per se, which is undoubtedly endowed with meaning, but
which does perhaps not, as we will maintain, take on the character of a sign. Since
semiotics is not merely concerned with signs, but more generally with meanings, pictorial
semiotics, as a subdivision of the former, will be involved with pictorial signs, but also
with all other kinds of pictorial meanings, to the extent that there are any such things.
Therefore, a primary requirement which should be imposed on pictorial semiotics is
to determine the categories of which pictorial signs are subcategories, and to show that the
latter are in fact so related to the former. In the second place, we need to specify the
differences between pictorial signs and other members of the same superior categories.
Thus, although it may be evident that pictures are indeed visual signs, we need to show
that they are intrinsically visual, that is, that visuality is part and parcel of their ‘form’ (in
the sense of Saussure and Hjelmslev), that which could not be exchanged without the sign
becoming another sign having a different meaning. And we have to determine in which way

6
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

pictures differ from all other, intrinsically visual signs.

Even though pictures may form part of the division of visual signs, they are no
doubt also members of the category of iconic signs — and yet they are not the only kind
of iconic signs there is. Iconicity is often wrongly taken to be that which is peculiar to
pictures. Indeed, Eco’s (1968; 1976) plaidoyer against the existence of iconical signs most
of the time reads like an argument against the specificity of pictures. To Peirce, an icon is a
sign which is based on similarity; or, more strictly, a sign consisting of an expression
which stands for a content because of properties which each of them possesses
intrinsically.3 ; This means that, not only do iconic signs abound in sense modalities other
than vision, but there may also be visual, iconic signs which are not pictures. Thus,
pictorial semiotics must show (against Eco, Goodman, and others), that pictures are, in
one or another sense, iconical signs, and that pictorality is a peculiar modification of
iconicity (see, in particular, Sonesson 1989a,III.3.).
As these terms are used by many researchers in archaeology, petroglyphs and
pictograms are certainly visual displays, and often iconic ones; but they are not always
pictorial signs. However, like logograms and logotypes, Blissymbolics, and elementary
children’s drawings, to which they are superficially (and not only superficially, in some
respects) similar, prehistoric petroglyphs often appears to be limiting-cases of pictures
and non-pictorial signs, and therefore are particularly challenging object of study for
pictorial semiotics. This is what we hope to show in the following.
Not only should pictorial semiotics investigate all kinds of pictorial meaning, but, in
its capacity of being the study of ’the life of signs in society’, as advocated by Saussure,
it should also be concerned to determine which are, so to speak, the pictorial kinds
existing in a particular society. Thus, the further analysis of the picture category, as
conceived in our present-day society, may lead on to the tasks of characterising
photography and drawing, the advertisement picture and the art picture, the picture post
card and the poster, and so on. In the case of prehistoric visual displays, semiotics might
come to recognise the difference between mural art and ‘art mobilier’, not because of the
possible convenience of the distinction to the researcher (as suggested by Sieveking
1979:7f), but to the extent that it can be presumed to have a real, though perhaps tacit,
existence for the one-time producers and users of this art.
But before any interesting discussion of these issues may be entered upon, we will
need to clarify, not only the notion of iconicity, but those, more general, of sign, display,
and artifact, as well as a few parallel notions, such as indexicality, which will turn out to
be equally relevant. Furthermore, we will have to elucidate the notion of a prehistoric
Lifeworld; and, in so doing, we will make contacts again with our fellow travellers on this
intellectual journey, the archaeologists.

7
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

On the concept of sign

Even though semiotics is not exclusively concerned with signs, but is also required to
attend to meanings of another kind, the concept of sign remains crucial, and semiotic
inquiry still have to start out from a distinction between signs and other meanings. Indeed,
many semiotic studies (those of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, the Greimas school, etc.), will
recover part of their validity, once it is realised that they are concerned with meanings, in a
much wider sense than that of the sign, better paraphrased perhaps in terms of wholes and
connections. Building their models of the sign, both Peirce and Saussure made a set of
fundamental conceptual distinctions, which are in part complementary, yet both of them
took if for granted that we would all understand the import of such terms as ’signifier’ and
’signified’, or the equivalent. A basic understanding of the sign function may however be
gained from an interpretation of Piaget's important attempt to define the semiotic function
(which, in the early writings, was less adequately termed the symbolic function), and from
Husserl’s definition of the notion of appresentation.
The semiotic function is a capacity acquired by the child at an age of around 18 to
24 months, which enables him to imitate something or somebody outside the direct
presence of the model, to use language, make drawings, play ’symbolically’, and have
access to mental imagery and memory. The common factor underlying all these
phenomena, according to Piaget, is the ability to represent reality by means of a signifier
which is distinct from the signified. Indeed, Piaget argues that the child’s experience of
meaning antedates the semiotic function, but that is does not then suppose a
differentiation of signifier and signified in the sign (see Piaget 1945; 1967; 1970).4
In several of the passages in which he makes use of this notion of semiotic function,
Piaget goes on to point out that ’indices’ and ’signals’ are possible long before the age of
18 months, but only because they do not suppose any differentiation between expression
and content. The signifier of the index is, Piaget says, ’an objective aspect of the signified’;
thus, for instance, the visible extremity of an object which is almost entirely hidden from
view is the signifier of the entire object for the baby, just as the tracks in the snow stand
for the prey to the hunter. But when the child uses a pebble to signify candy, he is well
aware of the difference between them, which implies, as Piaget tells us, ’a differentiation,
from the subject’s own point of view, between the signifier and the signified’.
Piaget is quite right in distinguishing the manifestation of the semiotic function from
other ways of ’connecting significations’, to employ his own terms. Nevertheless, it is
important to note that, while the signifier of the index is said to be an objective aspect of
the signifier, we are told that in the sign and the symbol (i.e. in Piaget’s terminology, the
conventional and the motivated variant of the semiotic function, respectively) expression
and content are differentiated form the point of view of the subject. We can, however,
imagine this same child that in Piaget’s example uses a pebble to stand for a piece of candy
having recourse instead to a feather in order to represent a bird, or employ a pebble to

8
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

stand for a rock, without therefore confusing the part and the whole: then the child would
be employing a feature, which is objectively a part of the bird, or the rock, while
differentiating the former form the latter from his point of view. Only then would he be
using an index, in the sense in which this term is employed (our should be employed) in
semiotics (that is, in Peirce's sense). In fact, the child may even try to objectify his
subjective point of view in the sign, by reworking the pebble to resemble a rock, or by

transforming (perhaps less plausibly) the feather into the likeness of a bird. This is the
kind of discovery made by the prehistoric artist, although the rock itself may not really
have been a possible subject matter for him.

Just as obviously the hunter, who identifies the animal by means of the tracks, and
then employs them to find out which direction the animal has taken, and who does this in

9
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

order to catch the animal, does not, in his construal of the sign, confuse the tracks with the
animal itself, in which case he would be satisfied with the former. Both the child in our
example and the hunter are using indices, or indexical signs. On the other hand, the child
and the adult will fail to differentiate the perceptual adumbration in which he has access
to the object from the object itself; indeed, they will identify them, as least until they
change their perspective by approaching the object from another vantage point. And at
least the adult will consider a branch jutting out behind a wall as something which is non-
differentiated from the tree, to use Piaget’s example, in the rather different sense of being a
proper part of it.5 In the Peircean sense an index is a sign, the relata of which are
connected, independently of the sign function, by contiguity or by that kind of relation
which obtains between a part and the whole (henceforth termed factorality). But of course
contiguity and factorality are present everywhere in the perceptual world without as yet
forming signs: we will say, in that case, that they are mere indexicalities. Perception is
profused with indexicality.
Each time two objects are perceived together in space, there is contiguity; and each
time something is seen to be a part of something else, or to be a whole made up of many
parts, there is factorality. According to Edmund Husserl, two or more items may enter into
different kinds of ’pairings’, from the ’paired association’ of two co-present items (which
we will call perceptual context), over the ’appresentative pairing’ in which one item is
present and the other indirectly given through the first, to the real sign relation, where
again one item is directly present and the other only indirectly so, but where the indirectly
presented member of the pair is the theme, i.e. the centre of attention for consciousness.
This property serves to distinguish the sign from the abductive context, which is the way
in which the unseen side of the dice at which we are looking at this moment is present to
consciousness, because in the latter attention is focused on the directly presented part or
spans the whole context. However, there seems to be many intermediate cases between a
perfect sign and an abductive context (the poetic function, ostensive definitions, proto-
indices, etc.; cf. Figure 1 and Sonesson 1989a,I.2.).
Whereas the items forming the sign are conceived to be clearly differentiated entities,
and indeed as pertaining to different ’realms’ of reality, the ’mental’ and the ’physical’ in
terms of naive consciousness, the items of the perceptual context continuously flow into
each other, and are not felt to be different in nature. In fact, both content and expression of
the sign are actually ’mental’ or, perhaps better, ’intersubjective’, as most linguists would
insist; but we are interested in the respect in which the sign user conceive them to be
different. Piaget’s notion of differentiation is vague, and in fact multiply ambiguous, but,
on the basis of his examples, two interpretations can be introduced: first, the sign user's
idea of the items pertaining to different basic categories of the common sense Lifeworld;
and, in the second place, the impossibility of one of them going over into the other,
following the flow of time or an extension in space.

10
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Suppose that, turning around a corner of the forest path, we suddenly catch a
glimpse of the wood-cutter lifting his axe other his shoulder and head. This experience
perfectly illustrates the flow of indexicalities which do not stop to become signs: it is
sufficient to observe the wood-cutter in one phase of his action to know what has gone
before and what is to come: that he has just raised his tool from some base level, and that
at the next moment, he is going to hit the trunk of the tree. If we take a snap-shot of one of
the phases of the wood-cutter's work, we could use it, like the well-known traffic sign
meaning ’roadworks ahead’, as a part for the whole or, more oddly perhaps, as a phase
signifying contiguous phases. There has been a radical change from the flow of
indexicalities occurring in reality, for not only is there now a separation of expression and
content ’from the point of view of the subject’, but this separation has been objectified in
the picture. The perceptual continuum may be reconstituted in a film, but not in a series of
pictures. However, when we ask the wood-cutter to stand still for a moment (like in a
’tableau vivant’), his position as such, before it is transformed into the motif of a picture,
is already a sign for the whole of the action, although the directly presented position does
not seem to be non-thematized, continuity is only provisionally interrupted, and
expression and content are felt to be of the same nature. If, at this very moment, Vesuvius
erupts, and our wood-cutter is buried in many meters of volcanic ash, he will have been
transformed, when he is rediscovered many centuries later, into a sign of the person he
was, and of the particular phase of his earlier action, as well as of many other things, and
as such he will be doubly differentiated, non-thematic and directly given, while the person
he was and the act he accomplished is now thematic and indirectly given.6 His packed
lunch, however, bread become carbonised, is less clearly differentiated.
The picture is a sign, in the sense of it having a signifier which is doubly differentiated
from its signified, and which is non-thematic and directly given, while the signified is
thematic and only indirectly present. This also applies to rock paintings and rock carvings:
the rock itself is made of quite another material than the arms, the elks, the boats, and the
human beings depicted; indeed, even those stone implements which are represented are not
rendered in the same material, since the expressions of these contents are not really the
rock itself, but the carved hollows, and the pigment lines, made in, or on, the rock. Nor is
there any continuity in space and time between the motifs and their rendering. The rock
and its carvings, as well as the pigments deposited upon it, are directly given to our
perception; that which is thematic, however, are the animals, men, arms, and tools
suggested by these means.

Signs and other things

Not all uses of the term ’sign’ and similar expressions are congruent with the semiotic
function, but may yet correspond to some meaning of meaning. In cognitive science, terms
like ’sign’, ’symbol’, and ’representation’ are used in a vastly more comprehensive sense

11
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

than the one favoured here. The contents of consciousness are said to be ’symbols’, and so
on, of things in the ’real’ world (see Johnson-Laird 1988). Interestingly, that is an
employment of the term found also in John Locke, one of the first explicit semioticians, at
the beginning of the 18th century. Even before that, however, Pedro Fonseca, in his
treatise on signs from 1564, distinguished two types of signs: formal signs, by means of
which we know the outside world, and instrumental signs, which lead to the cognition of
something else, like the track of an animal, smoke, a statue, and the like (cf. Deely 1982).
However, as recognised in philosophical phenomenology, and more recently in the
ecological psychology of James Gibson, we do not ordinarily perceive signs of the world,
but the world itself; and thus, if indeed meaning is involved, its relata cannot be
differentiated, and there can be no semiotic function.
There is certainly a wider sense of meaning, which may be related, as Lévi-Strauss
once put it, to order, that is, organisation, relatedness, indexicality. What is involved is the
idea of connecting of things together, and of selecting elements to connect from a wider
field of possibilities. It is interesting to observe that it is not the sign function but the
paradigm, the feature, and the phoneme, as metaphors for selection, and the syntagm and
the index, as metaphors for connection, which have had an important role to play in the
adoption of the linguistic model in semiotics, notably in the work of Barthes, Greimas,
Lévi-Strauss, and many Peirceans (and in the work of a “structuralist archaeologist” such
as Tilley 1991). When Lévi-Strauss presents the myth as a sign function, this
interpretation is contradicted by his own detailed description, which really manifests a
second-order texture. And when Greimas claims that even the phoneme carries meaning,
this can only be understood in the sense of its forming a whole, a category having its own
limits.
As we have already observed, the picture is undoubtedly a sign, in the sense of it
having a signifier which is doubly differentiated from its signified, and which is non-
thematic and directly given, while the signified is thematic and only indirectly present. On
the other hand, the picture is made up of, and presupposes, an array of meanings which
are more elementary than signs. In the present context, however, we are less intent on
discussing these elementary meanings, than to establish a distinction between displays,
which are specifically made to function as signs, and objects, which may secondarily come
to function as signs, but have other, primary uses. In their material embodiment, both
objects and displays are artifacts, and may thus be discovered together, in the same layer,
by the archaeologist. Whereas a thing is what it is in itself, the sign, and thus the display,
is something only in relation to that of which it is the expression, that is, in relation to its
content. In fact, there is a category of things which is similar to signs in that they are allo-
functionally defined, that is, they are what they are in relation to something else, and that
is the category of tools, or, more broadly, instruments. Something is the expression of a
sign to the extent that it corresponds to a content; and something is a tool to the extent

12
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

that it serves to realise a particular purpose. Many thinkers, therefore, have tried to reduce
signs to tools (for instance, Prieto 1975a,b), or tools to signs (most notably Eco 1968),
although in actual fact they are different in other respects (as suggested by our definition
of the sign above; cf. Sonesson 1989a,II.2.1.).

Many objects, which are made to be used, such as most patently tools and
instruments, may, as Barthes (1964a) submitted, become so closely associated with their
function in a particular society, as to be become signs of this very use. This is not that use
of things that must interest us here. The use made meaning discussed by Barthes is
socially evolved and tacit; but a thing may also be explicitly employed to stand for itself,
for the class of things to which it belongs, or for some or other of its properties. Thus, a
painting may stand for itself at an art exhibition; the wares on display in a show-window,
or the car at the car exhibition, stand for objects of the same general class; the tailor’s
swatch may stand for more extended stretches of the same cloth having the same colour
and pattern; the cupcake shown in the bakery may signify another cupcake, which is
otherwise similar, except for being baked on the day of delivery; and the Stone Age axes in

13
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

the museum may be signs of all Stone Age things, of all Stone Age axes, or of those from a
particular site (Cf. Fig.2 and Goodman 1968, Sonesson 1989a,II.2.2. and 1992a).
When used in this way, to stand for themselves, objects are clearly iconical: they are
signs consisting of an expression which stands for a content because of properties which
each of them possess intrinsically. It could be said, and has often been claimed, that each
object it is own best icon. Paradoxically, however, no object can ever become an iconical
sign of itself, in the absence of a convention for defining its use as a sign. Without having
access to a set of conventions and/or an array of stock situations, we have no possibility
of knowing, neither that something is a sign, nor of what it as sign: of itself as an individual
object, of a particular category (among several possible ones) of which it is a member, or
of one or other of its properties. We have to know the show-case convention to
understand that the tin can in the shop-window stands for many other objects of the same
category; we need to be familiar with the art exhibition convention to realise that each
object stands for itself; and only if we have learnt the convention associated with the
tailor’s swatch can we know that the swatch is a sign of its pattern and colour, but not of
its shape. We shall name secondary iconicity a relation between an expression and a
content of the kind described by Peirce, which can however be perceived only once the
sign function, and a particular variety of it, is known to obtain (Cf. Sonesson 1992a).
This is of course to suppose that there is such a thing as a primary iconicity: a
relation of similarity which is seen to obtain before taking cognisance of the sign relation,
and which helps to establish it. Indeed, there is an archaeological correlate of this
distinction: a secondary iconicity is an iconic relation which can only be perceived to
obtain, to the extent that the archaeologist has been able to reconstruct the contexts of use
and the conventions pertaining to the objects involved; a primary iconicity, on the other
hand, is there for everyone to see, once all layers of earth and other deposits have been
cleared away, or the entrance to the cave has been unsealed. The picture, it would appear,
is such a primary iconicity.

Shadows on the wall — In defence of iconicity

The figures appearing in many prehistoric rock carvings curiously resemble our present-
day traffic signs, or the tadpole men of contemporary children’s drawings, or the
logograms found on the doors of men’s and women’s washing rooms, Blissymbolics used
to communicate with those suffering from different kinds of speech-impairment, the
Alchemic symbols of the Middle Ages, the Hobo signs still employed by tramps and
vagabonds until the Second World War, or signs stemming form many other, mutually
divergent, repertories. Thus, different varieties of the anthropomorphic figure, which
Anati (1976) describes as a ‘prayer’ (see Figure 3), may be compared to a sign denoting
the golden number 18 in the clog almanacs of the Middle Ages, or one of the letters of an
Rumanian alphabet used around the year 1000, the alchemical signs for test, for essence,

14
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

or for mix, or the astrology signs for Pisces or the fixed star Spica, Neptune’s or Jupiter’s
staff, and so on (cf. Liungman 1991: 117; 118, 155, 156, 434). In none of these cases the
figure represents a person: indeed, in most of them, it is not even a pictorial sign. Yet it is
easy to imagine that the same figure may stand for a human being also in the drawing made
by a contemporary child.

Anati’s ‘prayer’ and the native eye

The very same material lines, what is, on the face of it, the same configuration, may thus
serve as the expression of quite different contents, that is, may form part of very different
signs. What is materially identical, is not semiotically so. To describe a sign, or a sign
system, we have to recover the point of view of its user. This is what was meant when it
was said above that semiotics should describe meaning as it appears to those who employ
the signification system. In verbal language, this is illustrated most clearly by the case of
the ‘same’ sound which forms more or fewer different phonemes, or only a variant of a
phoneme, according to the language; thus, for instance, the same physical sound which is
English forms the phoneme /r/, and is opposed, among other things, to the phoneme /l/, is
only a variant of the latter in Japanese; while, on the other hand, free variants of the
phoneme /r/, with one or more slaps of the tongue, form two different phonemes in
Spanish.

Fig. 3. One variety of Anati’s ‘prayer’ (from Anati 1976:46, passim)

Renfrew (1982:11) implicitly recurs to the same analogy, when he quotes the
linguist Kenneth Pike to observe, that the archaeologist’s observations relate to the ‘etic’
(as in ‘phonetics’) rather than the ‘emic’ (as in ‘phonemics’). Phonetics is concerned with
the sounds as such, but phonemics (or ‘phonology’) describes the sounds as they are
conceived by the speaker of a particular language (that is, in relation to other sounds
appearing in that language). In the terms of other linguistics more well-known to
semioticians, Saussure and Hjelmslev, phonetics is concerned with substance, whereas
phonology investigates form. A single substance underlies the Japanese /l/, the English /l/
and /r/, and the Spanish /l/, /r/, and /rr/. Anati’s ‘prayer’ would share its substance with,

15
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

but have a differing form from, those other signs culled from Liungman’s book.
Interestingly, even Tilley (1991), who often rhetorically insists on the materiality of
material culture (which, to him, includes rock carvings and rock paintings), is enough of a
structuralist to realise that meaning (that of the rock pictures, for instance) is only there to
be seen for those who have the capacity, that is, the members of some particular culture
(which may, of course, be as wide as humankind itself). As Renfrew (1982:11) notes,
there can be no direct access for us to the meanings which were once projected by
prehistoric man onto the artifacts which for us make up the remains of his society and of
his world of thinking, and for this reason, the creation of a social archaeology, let alone a
cognitive one, constitutes a difficult, if not an impossible, task. On the face of it, it also
heavily constrains the prospects for prehistoric semiotics.
In the most common, or most commonly reproduced, variety, Anati’s ‘prayer’
could probably be described, in Liungman’s (1991) terms, as a sign which is single-axis
symmetric, both soft and straight-lined, open and with crossing lines (with allowance
made for the little, scooped circle, that appears on the top, which should make the figure
into a sign which is both open and closed). Anati certainly does not think in these terms:
even the groups in which he puts the different figures (1976:46) show that he conceives of
them immediately in terms of what they ‘represent’, not as spatial configurations. In
semiotic terms, in would appear that Anati passes to rapidly from the plane of expression
to the possible corresponding plane of content (Indeed, Bednarik 1991:1 seems to accuse
archaeologists in general of doing just that). As we shall see below, this charge will be
particularly serious, if Bierman, Eco, Goodman, Lindekens, and others, are justified in
their critique of iconicity. Even if they are mistaken, however, we are still, as Jarl
Nordbladh (1973; 1977) observes, faced with the task of recovering the vanished context
of prehistoric pictures, not only their decayed tactile, auditory and olfactory structures,
but the particular socio-cultural Lifeworld in which they occurred generally.
It is, however, not only the variety of the contexts in which what is, in a way, the
‘same’ drawing, may appear, which should surprise us here. What is perhaps more
remarkable is that, in spite of all the diverging contexts, there appears to be a common
background, a human environment which we unavoidably take for granted, which may in
part account for the fact that Anati can hope to perceive the same thing as prehistoric
man. This world of background experience is known in Husserlean phenomenology as the
Lifeworld, in James Gibson’s ecological psychology as the world of ecological physics,
and in Greimas’ semiotic theory as the natural world (in the sense in which we talk about
‘natural language’, the language which seems natural to its users). Indeed, if there can be
such a thing as a semiotics of Culture (as propounded by the Tartu school, by Koch,
Posner, etc.), it must be elevated on the foundations laid by a semiotics of Nature —
which is of course, in a very general sense, a culturized Nature. But, before we go in to
discuss the eventuality of Anati’s ‘prayer’ being interpretable on the basis of common,

16
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

anthropological universals, let us ponder the possibility of it being simply perceived, that
is, of its being, on one, probably too simplistic an interpretation of the term, an iconical
sign.

The three Peircean sign-types

Before we can even begin to ask ourselves whether Anati’s ‘prayer’, or rock carvings
generally, are iconical signs, we have to take care to avoid two, fairly trivial, but commonly
made, confusions pertaining to the import of iconicity. To begin with, iconic signs are
often erroneously taken to be the same thing as visual signs (for instance in cognitive
psychology, when discussing ‘iconic codes’; but this may perhaps be more properly seen
as another, conflicting, usage of the same term; e.g. Kolers 1977). And, in the second place,
iconicity mostly tends to be identified with picturehood (which may happen, in a more
surreptitious way, as we shall see, even inside semiotics), when in actual fact, if we rely
on Peirce’s definition, pictures only constitute one variety of iconicity. When considering
the first appearance of ‘iconic structures (engravings, sculptures and ultimately cave art)’,
Foley (1991:114) appears to be guilty of at least one, or perhaps some compound form, of
these confusions. As for Bednarik (1991:1), he clearly associates ‘iconic intent’ with the
belief, which he censures, that the researcher has the ability to identify the objects
depicted in prehistoric pictures. And even Chesney (1991), when claiming that much more
early production than is commonly believed is non-representational and non-iconic,
appears to take the latter term to mean simply non-pictorial.7
As the term is used in semiotics, however, iconicity is unavoidably connected, in
some way of other, to Peirce’s conception of the icon, even when, as in the Greimas
school approach, is has been redefined to mean something like ‘the illusion of reality’, a
kind of ‘verisimilitude’, which may also be present in literature. In order to understand
the notion of iconicity, we must therefore attend to the threefold division of the sign into
icons, indices, and symbols. We will, however, avoid the term symbol, which Peirce uses
to stand for conventional signs, since it has an entirely opposed meaning in the European
tradition: indeed, in the latter context, the same term is mostly used for a particular variety
of the iconical, or similarity motivated, sign.
We shall not, in the following, make use of Peirce’s intricate terminology; the
essential points, I believe, may be stated without it. Peirce’s insists that the sign has three
parts; however, if I am not mistaken, the third element, the interpretant, is simply that
which determines the relation between the other two. More precisely, it is the function
which picks out the relevant elements (‘grounds’) of expression and content. As for the
difference between content and referent, it is actually taken care of by a subdivision of the
second unit, Peirce’s object, which shall be termed content in the following.8
An icon, then, is a sign in which the ‘thing’ which serves as its expression in one or
other respect is similar to, or shares properties with, another ‘thing’, which serves as its

17
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

content. Yet two objets being iconic with respect to the some properties are transformed
into a sign only by participating, in addition, in a sign relation. However, according to
Peirce, the similarity between two ‘things’ entering into such a sign relation must exist
independently of the latter.
An index, on the other hand, is a sign in which the ‘thing’ which serves as its
expression is, in one or other way, connected with another ‘thing’, which serves as its
content. Again, the two objects partaking of a relation of indexicality are transformed into a
sign only by participating, in addition, in a sign relation. Even in this case, according to
Peirce, the connection between the two ‘things’ entering into the sign relation must exist
independently of the latter (but not necessarily precede it, as is shown in Sonesson
1989a,I.2.5.). Indexicality may conceivably be reduced to either contiguity or factorality.
In a conventional sign, on the other hand, there is no relationship joining the two
‘things’ which serve as expression and content of the sign relation, apart from the sign
relation itself. It is thus a kind of residue category.
We may get closer to Peirce’s intentions, and understand better why the three sign-
types are said to derive from the general categories of Firstness, Secondness, and
Thirdness, if we rephrase these definitions in terms of what Peirce calls their grounds:
those properties of the two things by means of which they get connected (something like
Hjelmslev’s ‘form’, discussed above; cf. Fig.4.). The ground is the potential of things for
serving in a particular type of sign relation.

expression content/
expression ground referent
content ground

Interpretant
Fig. 4. The Peircean interpretant as the function picking out the relevant elements
(‘grounds’) of expression and content.

Two items sharing an iconic ground are apt to enter, in the capacity of being its
expression and content, into a semiotic relation forming an iconic sign, to the extent that
there is some or other set of properties which they possess independently of each other,
which are identical or similar when considered from a particular point of view, or which
may be perceived or, more broadly, experienced as being identical or similar, where
similarity is taken to be an identity perceived on the background of fundamental
difference. Since both Franklin and Rumford are Americans, Peirce claims, one of them

18
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

may serve as a sign of the other; but the fact that Franklin is an American is quite
unrelated to Rumford’s being one. It will be noted immediately, that in the case of the
picture, for instance Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, there it at least on sense in which the fact that
the painting resembles the wife of Francesco del Giocondo cannot be said to be due to
properties the painting possesses quite independently of the woman in question. In the
same way, there may be same doubt, at least on one interpretation of these terms, that the
rock engraving discussed by Anati possesses the properties which makes it iconic of a
‘prayer’, or even a human being, independently of the real man’s, or the real prayer’s
possessing them. But then again, Peirce, contrary to his critics, does not appear to
consider the picture the most characteristic case of an icon.
An indexical ground is involved if two ‘things’ are apt to enter, in the capacity of
being its expression and content, into a semiotic relation forming an indexical sign, due to a
set of properties which are intrinsic to the relationship between them, such as it is
independently of the sign relation. Since indexicality is basic to perception, it is natural
that it should be important to pictures, in which mere indexicalities are often transformed
into indexical signs; and indeed, a number of varieties of indexical signs occurring in
pictures may be distinguished (see Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5. and below).

Actually, there can be no conventional ground: for the conventional sign is literally
ungrounded, and may be constructed on the basis of any two ‘things’, without any
particular requirement being imposed on their properties.
There are a number of different varieties of iconic grounds. Peirce only mentions the
diagram, the image, and the metaphor, but, as soon as we give up Peirce’s propensity for
seeing everything in terms of threes, there really seems to be no reason for stopping at that
number, or even for including that series. According to Peirce, the iconic ground of images
is made up of simple qualities; diagrams render relations of the parts of the content by
analogous relations of the parts of the expression (which would include, but not be
restricted to, diagrams in the ordinary language sense); whereas metaphors ‘represent the
representative character of a representation by representing a parallelism in something

19
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

else’. Surprisingly, when discussing evidence from perceptual psychology, we shall see
that pictures, in the ordinary language sense of the term, cannot be images in this sense,
but should rather be counted as diagrams.
If a particular iconic sign produces the illusion of literally seeing in the two-
dimensional surface of the expression plane the projection of a scene extracted from real
world three-dimensional existence (with or without a suggestion of lineal perspective),
then it is more particularly a pictorial sign, or a picture, as this term is ordinarily used.
Thus a photograph, Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’, a lot of modernist art, including the creations
of ‘pop art’ and ‘postmodernism’, are pictures in this sense, and so are at lot of rock
carvings, to the extent that they can be identified as showing men, boats, arms, elks, fish,
other animals, and so on. The symbol, in the sense in which this term is ordinarily used,
not by Peirce, but in the European tradition (including Saussure), is also a kind of iconic
sign, having certain indexical traits: it reposes on the isolation of an abstract, not
necessarily perceivable, property, connected with a generalisation from the object serving
as an expression, and a particularisation from the object serving as a content (a dove
standing for peace, scales signifying justice, etc.). There is every reason to believe that at
least some rock engravings may have had the function of symbols in this sense. However,
many other types of iconical signs may be distinguished as well (cf. further discussion in
Sonesson 1989a,III.6. ;1990e;1991b).

Some strictures on pictorial iconicity

Although the picture is thus recognised inside the semiotics tradition, starting with Peirce,
as being a kind of iconic sign, must semioticians, during the renewal of semiotic theory in
the sixties and seventies, employed themselves to abolish the notion of iconicity, taking
pictures as their favoured example, while claiming that pictures were, in some curious
way, as conventional as linguistic signs. Bierman, Goodman, Lindekens, and Eco, have all
argued against using similarity as a criterion in the definition of iconical signs and/or
pictures; and even Burks and Greenlee have introduced some qualifications on Peirce’s
view which serve to emphasise conventionality. Some of these thinkers, such as Bierman
and Goodman, were mainly inspired by a set of proto-ethnological anecdotes, according to
which so-called primitive tribes were incapable of interpreting pictures; Eco and
Lindekens, in addition, wanted to show that pictures, conforming to the ideal of the
perfect sign, as announced by Saussure, were as arbitrary or conventional as the sign
studied by the most advanced of the semiotic sciences, general linguistics. Saussure himself
never went to such extremes: in his unpublished notes he recognises the motivated
character of both pictures and miming, but at least in the latter case, he argues that the
rudiment of convention found in it is sufficient to make it an issue for semiotics.
The motive behind the arguments is one thing; the arguments, however, lead a life of
their own. If Eco, Goodman, and the others are right, not only are non-occidental peoples

20
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

incapable of interpreting pictures (which, already in being pictures, are peculiarly

occidental signs), but contemporary occidental man would stand no chance of
understanding prehistoric pictures (if there are such things). When closely considered,
nevertheless, these arguments for the most part turn out to be erroneous, among other
things because they are based on an identification of the common sense notion of
similarity with the equivalence relation of logic. Differently put, they are inadequate
because they suppose man to live in the world of the natural sciences when in fact he
always inhabits a particular sociocultural Lifeworld. Since we have discussed pictorial
iconicity extensively in other contexts (in particular in Sonesson 1989a,III; 1990e,f,
1992a), we will only summarise relevant aspects of our counter-argument here.
No doubt, the equivalence relation, as defined in logic, is symmetric and reflexive,
and thus cannot define any type of sign, since the sign, by definition, must be asymmetric
and irreflexive. Pigments on paper, or carvings in a rock, could stand for a man, but not the
reverse; nor will they, in their picture function, stand for themselves. Similarity, however,
is actually asymmetric and irreflexive. Indeed, this fact is not only intuitively obvious, but
has now been experimentally demonstrated (notably by Rosch 1973; 1978; and Tversky
1977; cf. also Sonesson 1989a,III.2.1. and III.6.2.). It should not be confused with
identity: indeed, between two pictures (two canvases, two rock carvings, etc.) there is
identity, according to a principle of pertinence, and on the basis of this property a picture,
just as any other object, may be used as a self-identification or an exemplification (as, for
instance, in an art exhibition, or in front of the artist’s workshop; see ibid.,III.2.3. and
above). There is similarity, on the other hand, only on the basis of a fundamental
dissimilarity. It is certainly not in their ’important’ properties, if that means the attributes
defining them as ’selves’, that the picture and its referent (or content) are similar. In fact,
the hierarchically dominant categories of the picture and its referent must be different; for
a picture which is just a picture of the picture-of-X, is indistinguishable from a picture of
X.
Although the sign relation is thus not needed in order to render similarity asymmetric
and irreflexive, it is required in order to distinguish similarities which are signs from those
which are not. At this stage, then, it would seem that the picture could be defined by the
sign relation, together with similarity; but Eco rightly observes that, on closer inspection,
there is really no similarity between the painted nose, and the nose of a real person. The
same observation is even more obviously valid in the case of the stick-man, whether it is
drawn on paper, or carved in the rock.
Yet we must account in some way for the impression of similarity, which is
immediately given, and which persists as long as we do no choose to scrutinise the details
of the composition. If similarity is a perceptual effect, then the impression of similarity
simply is similarity. But similarity then appears to be a result of the sign relation, instead
of its motivation (cf. ibid.,III.1.4.). This is possible only if there is some other property

21
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

held in common by all pictures, and by no other objects, which somehow precedes the
sign relation. Gibson (1971:33), who also rejects the similarity theory of pictures,
apparently thinks there is some kind of identity between the picture and the real-world
scene, rightly insisting that identity is not the maximum of similarity. To Gibson, this
identity relies on higher-order properties, which tend to recur in different fashions in the
picture and in the world. Higher-order properties are obviously not “simple qualities”, in
Peirce’s sense; they are relations, relations between relations, and so on. Therefore,
pictures in the ordinary language sense are certainly not Peircean images; they are highly
diagrammatic.
Similar conceptions are present in the work of other psychologists, such as Kennedy
and Hochberg (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.3.2.). Such a conception must suppose our
perceptual systems to be capable of picking up isolated features of the environment (not
necessarily identical in kind to linguistic features; cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.4.1.). Contrary to
Eco’s contention, therefore, the pictorial sign (as well as the real-world scene) must be, not
conventional and unanalysable into features, but essentially feature-based and
motivated.

From ecological psychology to semiotics

On the face of it, there are interesting analogies between the picture and the depicted
world, and between that which is perceived and the cause of the perception, or, more
precisely, between the relations which might be taken to exist between the items of each
pair. In present-day psychology, the latter relationship has basically been conceived in
three ways, each defining a corresponding approach to visual perception, known as
constructivism, Gestalt psychology, and direct registration theory, or Gibsonianism
(Hagen 1980:4ff; 1979; Winner 1982:84ff; Sonesson 1989a,III.3.3.; and, in particular,
Sonesson 1991b, 1992b,c). It is the contention of the latter theory, that all information
needed to build up the percept is available directly in the light coming from the
environment, and is determined by this light, although only if we take into account all the
higher-order variables of the environment and their invariants over time. Constructivists
consider reality to lack all intrinsic organisation, which must therefore be introduced by a
hypothesis on the part of the perceiving subject; which is why the resulting arrangement is
only given with some degree of probability, and may have to be further revised.
Gestaltists would agree with the constructivists in affirming that reality is fundamentally
ambiguous, and so must be supplemented by the beholder's share, but, in their view, the
perceived organisation results deterministically from the Gestalt laws, built into the human
mind. Also, while the Gestalt laws, or at least the simplicity principle on which they are
based, are supposedly innate, constructivists rather tend to suppose that the hypotheses
employed in perception are either explicitly posited as conventions, or derive in a more
tacit fashion from earlier experience of the world (cf. Winner 1982:108).

22
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Hagen maintains that all three theories are descriptively inadequate: constructivism
because no criteria have been proposed for when a hypothesis is confirmed; Gestalt
psychology, because its laws are mysterious; and Gibsonianism, because no list of the
invariants picked up from the environment can at present be given (p.21ff). In spite of
these observations, however, Hagen herself clearly remains within the bounds of direct
registration theory. This is precisely the theory which Winner (1982:98ff) declares to be
descriptively inadequate. On the other hand, she argues that there are cases in pictorial
perception, in which simplicity may be shown to override familiarity, thus favouring
Gestalt psychology, as well as other cases in which familiarity gains the upper hand,
which is a result favouring constructionism. Contrary to Hagen, Winner thus concludes
that reality is ambiguous, but may be supplemented in various ways.
In fact, there seems to be no real Gestalt psychologists left, except for those who are
more properly to be counted among the students of pictorial art, as, for instance, Arnheim.
There is undoubtedly an array of phenomena, discovered by the Gestalt psychologists,
which are still with us, but which now are in need of new explanations. In perceptual
psychology, the really interesting discussion nowadays takes place between
constructionism and direct registration theory. But why should constructionist such as
Gregory, Hochberg, and others think that ’inferences’ are necessary to explain what is
actually perceived, when Gibson, Kennedy, and Hagen feel they can dispense with them
altogether? Among the facts to be explained by perceptual psychology, figure
prominently, in Gregory's view (1966:1974), such things as the pick-up of non-optical
properties, gaps in the stimuli, visual illusions, ambiguities, illusory contours, and the
perception of logically impossible objects. To Gibson, on the other hand, most of these
phenomena are simply curiosities, of very little weight to everyday perception, and
therefore to perceptual psychology. Thus, one of the differences between the theories lies
in the choice of facts which they consider worth-while explaining. Yet, it is perhaps not
beside the point to argue about which facts we should care to explain.
Yet pictures are not among those things which Gibson does not dare to explain.
Contrary to the Gestaltists and the constructivists, who tend to treat pictures and reality
as being of a kind, and to rely on pictorial examples, although their conclusions concern the
perception of the real, three-dimensional world, Gibson things that pictures require an
explanation of their own. And he goes on to claim that pictures are not at all based on
similarity. Yet he certainly does not want to maintain that they are conventional, in the
way semioticians would use that term: instead, because of being so different from the
perceptual environment, they must render the invariants of perception, and convey them
to us, in a very different way from that in which they become manifest in the real world.
Pictures have played an important part in the development of Gibson’s theory. Its
later revisions, making increasingly abstract the invariants responsible for the perception
of the world and pictures alike, were prompted by the observation that caricatures and

23
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

simple outline drawings are more easily perceived, and the objects depicted in them more
rapidly recognised, than is the case with more elaborate pictorial representations. Yet one
wonders if pictorial examples should not have suggested even more far-going revisions to
Gibson. Although Anati’s ‘prayer’, as well as many other petroglyphs, may indeed
incorporate some abstract, visual invariants present also in the perception of real human
beings, the abstraction in this case would appear to have gone so far, that many other
things and beings probably will share the same properties. Thus, if Anati’s ‘prayer’ is so
obviously a picture of a man, and perhaps of a ‘prayer’, something more than the
invariants must have been given at the outset.
There seems to be a fourth alternative in perceptual psychology, not recognised by
Hagen nor by Winner, which amounts to a blend of direct registration theory with some
facets of constructionism Both Julian Hochberg and Ulric Neisser realises the necessity of
accounting for the fact that ordinary perception usually proves right. Just like Gibson
claims, information is picked up from light, Neisser (1976: 16, 20ff) grants, but this pick-
up only serves to start a perceptual cycle taking place in time: anticipatory schemes
generate generic, rather than specific, hypothesis which are modified by the information
available, engendering subsequently more detailed schemes, which guide the further
exploration of the optic array. We will go even a little further in the sense of
constructionism: we will argue that there must be an element of construction preceding
perception, a matrix of expectancies involving familiar objects, which makes up the
groundwork of the taken-for-granted, socio-cultural Lifeworld (cf Sonesson 1991b,
1992b,c).

Semiotic ecology at the foundation of iconicity

The impression of similarity found in pictures is not in doubt, as long as we do no choose
to scrutinise the details. Similarity appears to be, not the motivation for the sign relation,
but a result of it, or perhaps rather of some other property equally preceding the sign-
relation. We have therefore yet to discover a property which is common to all pictures,
and which characterises no other objects. For not only is there a coherent Lifeworld notion
of pictures, but there is no other way of explaining that pictures have meaning.
Goodman’s and Greenlee’s contention that the referent of each picture is appointed
individually (if that is indeed what they want to suggest), and Eco’s proposal that the
relations of the picture are so correlated with those of the referent, are utterly
unconvincing, and besides, incompatible with what psychology tells us about the child’s
capacity for interpreting pictures when first confronted with them at 19 months of age (as
demonstrated in a famous experiment by Hochberg). But it does not follow that this
common property must be similarity.
Goodman may be taken to suggest that this property is ’analogy’ or perhaps
’syntactic and semantic density’. Density here means roughly that, no matter how close a

24
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

division we have made of a picture into units, it is always possible to proceed, introducing
a third unit between each of the earlier pairs, and so on indefinitely. Unfortunately, there
are many problems with this proposal. To begin with, it is strange that the difference
between verbal language and pictures is supposed to reside in the ways in which types
relate to tokens, and not in the relations between expression, content, and referent.
Another problem is that ’analogy’, in the common and required sense, does not seem to
follow from double density, as Goodman supposes. In any case, there are reasons to
doubt that pictures are dense, in the strict sense, for while Goodman’s definition excludes
‘pictograms’ (or ‘logograms’; and thus probably all rock carvings and rock paintings), any
partition of actual pictures and pictograms is bound to be arbitrary. On the other hand, the
definition includes, among the objects which it qualifies as pictures, diagrams (in the
ordinary language sense) and thermometers, and no doubt many other signs which are not
ordinary thought to be such. Repleteness, which is Goodman’s term for density resulting
from divisions made from many different points of view, cannot, contrary to Goodman’s
opinion, make the difference between pictures and diagrams, for it can actually be shown
to exist in some instances of the latter (for details, see Sonesson 1989a,III.2.3-5.).
Goodman is right in claiming that the sign function and similarity are not jointly
sufficient to define the pictorial sign; but substituting analogy for similarity, or adding
them together is not enough either. However, we can make sense of Goodman’s counter-
example if we require similarity, or the impression of similarity, to be at least a partial
reason for the sign function. This is only possible if we suppose there to be a kind of
taken-for-granted hierarchy of prominence between the things in the Lifeworld. Some
’things’ are more apt to serve as expressions of a sign relation than others, in fact, those
which are relatively less prominent. Interestingly, the only verified case in which a so-
called primitive tribe failed to recognise pictures as such, concerned a group which had
never seen paper, and was therefore led to emphasise the material per se. When pictures
where instead printed on cloth, they immediately recognised their function (se Sonesson
1989a,III.3.1.).

a b
Fig.6. Droodles: a) Olive dropping into Martini glass or Close-up of girl in scanty
bathing suit (from Arnheim 1969:92f). b) Carraci’s key (Mason behind wall)

25
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

There is, however, a kind of limiting-case of a picture, which is mostly used in

making jokes, the droodle (Cf. Fig. 6a,b). In this case, similarity is only discovered once
we have been informed about the precise sign function, or when we have guessed at it; but
in an ordinary picture the impression of similarity precedes the sign function. Even in the
latter case, on the other hand, the probability of there being a sign function, would seem to
be a prerequisite for our being able to discover the similarity. For something to be a sign of
something else, it must, as we just observed, be relatively low-ranked on the scale of
prototypicality applying to the ’things’ of the Lifeworld. No doubt signs can also be made
out of high-ranked Lifeworld ’things’ (as in the case of secondary iconicity, discussed
above), but then the sign function must be introduced explicitly as a convention or be
expected in the situation. In fact, the painting at the art exhibition, the tin can in the shop
window, and the objects exposed in the museum are all signs of themselves, some of their
properties, or the class of which they are members; but the sign function only emerges in
given situations.
In a recent collection of essays, Neisser (1987) considerably broadens the notion of
ecological psychology, incorporating Rosch's theory of prototypicality, as well as
Gibson's work on perception, in order to account for the conceptual negotiations going on
in the everyday environment. The prototype, introduced by Eleanor Rosch (1975; 1978),
could be described as the use, for the determination of category membership, of
approximations to the best instances, taking the place of sufficient and necessary criteria
(cf. also Sonesson 1989a,I.3.1.). In his contribution to Neisser's anthology, George Lakoff
(1987) argues for the reconstruction of Roschian prototypicality using different kinds of
cognitive models. Elsewhere, in their study of the basic metaphors which underlie both
poetry and ordinary language, Lakoff & Turner (1989:160ff) describe a ’cultural model’
which they call ’The great chain of being’. This model, which ’places beings and their
properties on a vertical scale with 'higher' beings and properties above 'lower' beings and
properties’ (p.167), has been studied by historians of ideas since the time of Lovejoy, but
Lakoff & Turner shows it to be still current and active in a lot of everyday thinking, as for
instance in ordinary adages. This ’commonplace theory about the nature of things’ (p.170)
would only stand in need of being slightly amended in order to account for the naturalness
with which surfaces stand for scenes, rather than the reverse.
Such regularities of the Lifeworld, together with the laws of environmental physics,
and other commonplace theories of the world, stand at the origin of an even broader
domain of study, which we could call the ecology of semiosis. This discipline should,
among other things, lay the groundwork for all future conceptions of cultural semiotics.
But it will also be needed to explain the varieties of iconicity. However, the Lifeworld
hierarchy underlying iconicity, such as it was formulated in earlier works of ours, must
inevitably be challenged by the existence of rock paintings and engravings; for, while it
may be easy to consider paper and even cloth as being relatively low-ranked on the scale

26
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

of prototypicality applying to the ’things’ of the Lifeworld, rocks and cave walls are not
so easily treated in that way. Indeed, rocks are solid objects, the third dimension of which
is highly salient, unlike that of paper and cloth; yet early man one day discovered it was
possible to low-grade them, in order to have them stand for other objects.
No doubt, rocks differ from many early motifs engraved on them, like men and
animals, in not being animate (or at least, if early man was an animist, in not being animate
in the same way), and from other favoured motifs, like boats, tools and arms, in that they
are not susceptible of being moved (at least not easily) and are not involved, in any active
part, in human activities. Yet, this does not seem to be a sufficient justification for rocks
serving as the expression plane of all early pictures known to us (although earlier pictures,
made of perishable material, may have disappeared). Our perplexity, at this point,
however, only goes to show that semiotic ecology, if that is a possible discipline, only is
at its beginnings.

On the new science of the Lifeworld

Semiotic ecology must take on the heritage left by Husserl’s science of the Lifeworld,
Gibson’s ‘ecological physics’, and Greimas’ semiotics of the ‘natural world’ (cf Sonesson
1991b, 1992b,c). Like the former two, it will suppose the Lifeworld to be a privileged
version of the world, ‘the world taken fro granted’, in Schutz’s phrase, from the
standpoint of which other worlds, such as those of the natural sciences, may be invented
and observed.9 For semiotics, as for all other human and social sciences, the Lifeworld is
important in two respects; first, because, like the natural scientists, semioticians live,
work, formulate their theories, and make their analyses, in the Lifeworld. And secondly,
because the Lifeworld is the very theme of semiotics, its general principles of organisation
forming the background against which all the objects of particular semiotic interest detach
themselves.
Husserl is not interested in the peculiarities of different sociocultural Lifeworld, but
in the principles obtaining in any conceivable Lifeworld. The basic property of the
Lifeworld seems to be that everything there is given in a subjective-relative manner. This
means, for example, that a thing of any kind will always be perceived from a certain point
of view, in a perspective that lets a part of the object form the centre of attention. What is
perceived is the object, though it is always given through one or more of its perspectives
or noemata, which themselves are unattended. Looking at a dice, or any cube, we can
perhaps see one of its sides rather directly and two others in perspectival distortion, while
the remaining sides are actually out of view. For Lifeworld consciousness, however, this
constitutes the seeing of the entire dice. When Gibson (1978:228), much later, observes
that, when we are confronted with the-cat-from-one-side, the-cat-from-above, the-cat-
from-the-front, etc., what we see is all the time the same invariant cat, he actually recovers
the central theme of Husserlean phenomenology, according to which the object is entirely,

27
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

and directly, given in each one of its noemata (see Husserl 1939, etc.). To Husserl, this
seeing of the whole in one of its parts is related to our knowledge of being able, at any one
point, to turn the dice over, or go round it, to look at the others sides. This awareness of
always being able to go on has also been termed the etc principle. Gibson describes its
conditions of possibility more strictly in his ‘ecological optics’.10
Everything in the Lifeworld is given in ‘open horizons’, that is, reality is not framed
off like a picture, but goes on indefinitely, however vaguely indicated. Beginning with the
theme, or centre of attention, the experienced world gradually fades away, without there
being any definite limits, and it is sufficient to change the centre of attention to extend the
field of distinct experience. Every object has an outer horizon, i.e. the background field of
other, nearby objects, and an inner horizon, the parts and attributes that are presently out
of view or just unattended. To both the horizons, the etc principle applies. The temporal
organisation of the Lifeworld is similar to the spatial one. In the consciousness of each
moment lies embedded the consciousness of the immediately following moment and the
consciousness of the immediately preceding moment, called the protention and the
retention, respectively. Each protention, in turn, contains its protentions and retentions,
as so does each retention. They may be general and vague, like the expectancy that life will
go on, or that something will change, or more definite, like the expectancy that the dice will
turn out to have a certain number of eyes on the hidden sides (This model of time
consciousness was used in theatre semiotics, and in literary semiotics, by members of the
Prague school, for instance by Mukar& ovsky! ).
Every particular thing encountered in the Lifeworld is referred to a general type.
Typification applies to all kinds of objects, even to human beings: according to Schütz,
other people, apart form family members and close friends, are almost exclusively defined
by the type to which they are ascribed, and we expect them to behave accordingly,
However, types are not really like scientific concepts, though the former may initiate the
latter. Husserl’s description of geometry as idealisation supposes that geometrical shapes
do not exist as such in the Lifeworld. ‘In perceptual experience, the spatial shapes of
things are determined only as to type — a margin of latitude is left for variations,
deviations, and fluctuations’ (Gurwitsch 1974:26). Thus, there are no circles in the
Lifeworld, only things with ‘roundish´ shapes, with ‘circular physiognomy’. Indeed, the
‘good forms’ of Gestalt psychology, and the prototypes of Rosch’s theory, are clearly
typifications (see Sonesson 1989a,I.2.1.).
Closely related to the typifications are the regularities which obtain in the
Lifeworld, or, as Husserl’s says, ‘the typical which in which things tend to behave’. In
fact, once an object has been assigned to a particular type, we know more or less vaguely
what may be expected, or rather protained, from it in the future, and we can then learn to
manipulate desirable changes ourselves. Many of the ‘laws of ecological physics’,
formulated by Gibson (1982:217ff), and which are defied by magic, are also such

28
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

‘regularities /that/ are implicitly known’: that substantial objects tend to persist, that
major surfaces are nearly permanent with respect to layout, but that animate objects
change as they grow or move; that some objects, like the bud and the pupa transform, but
that no objects is converted into an object that we would call entirely different, as a frog
into a prince; that no substantial object can come into existence expect from another
substance; that a substantial detached object must come to rest on a horizontal surface of
support; that a solid object cannot penetrate another solid surface without breaking it, etc.
Some of the presuppositions of these ‘laws’, such as the distinction between ‘objects that
we would call entirely different’, are also at the basis of what we have called the Lifeworld
hierarchy, and the definition of the sign function.
The Husserlean description of regularities fit in with the notion of abduction, which
Peirce wanted to put beside the more familiar procedures of deduction and induction, and
which reasons from one particular instance to another, not, however, as has been suggested
(by Ginzburg 1983), exclusively on the level of individual facts, for the facts, Peirce tells
us, are mediated by certain ‘regularities’, principles that are tentatively set up or taken for
granted. Peirce wondered how it was possible for so many abductions to prove right,
postulating a natural instinct as an explanation. Actually, there is an infinite number of
ways to relate and facts, but most of them would seem to be humanly inconceivable. The
limited number of alternative abductions being really proposed may be due, not to a
natural instinct, but to the commonalty of the most general organisational framework of
the Lifeworld.

Fig.7. Pictures and droodles: a) Quadrangular face (from Scruton 1974: 204); b) chair
(from Stern 1914:159); c) face or jar (from Hermerén 1983:101); d) wrist-watch or
something else (suggested by von Däniken 1973).

Contrary to what is often believed, Gibson (1982:218) suggests, children

spontaneously believe in non-magic, not the reverse; indeed, it is on this background that
magic gains an interest. In the world of ecological physics, like in Husserl’s Lifeworld, the
sun continues to rise, and the earth does not move. In an earlier book, Gibson (1966: 8ff)
observed that ‘the terrestrial environment’ of any animal has continued to possess certain
simple invariants, during the millions of years of evolutionary history, such as the earth
being ‘below’, the air ‘above, and the ‘waters under the earth’. The ground is level and

29
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

rigid, a surface of support, whereas the air is unresistant, a space for locomotion, and also
a medium for breathing, an occasional bearer of odours and sounds, and transparent to the
visual shapes of things by day. As a whole, the solid terrestrial environment is wrinkled,
structured, at different levels, by mounts and hills, trees and other vegetation, stones and
sticks, and textured by such things as crystals and plant cells. The observer himself
underlies the consequences of the rigidity of the environment, and of his own relationship
to gravity.
Also linguists trying to explain the existence, in all languages, of a set of small words
designating the spatial and temporal dimensions of the environment, has found it
necessary to postulate a basic framework of the experimental world, determined, in part,
by gravity (cf. Miller & Johnson-Laird 1976; also cf. Greimas 1970:46ff). It is, I will
suggest, on this background that we should return to Anati’s ‘prayer’ at the point of
stretching his arms upwards.

Picturehood and other varieties of iconicity

A photograph, or a painting from the 18th or 19th centuries, may be considered a typical
picture, indeed, a prototypical picture, in Rosch’s sense: Petroglyphs, like traffic signs, the
tadpole men of children’s drawings, toilet logograms, Blissymbolics, the Alchemic
symbols, and so on, are less obvious cases of picture signs, but, unlike droodles, they
often function in ways which are typical of pictures, as we shall see in the following.
Indeed, petroglyphs possess a certain degree of exhibitive import; they are susceptible or
resemanticisation, and often they do not need any key to be interpreted, the key being
furnished by the ecology of the Lifeworld.

Droodles , pictures and petroglyphs

It has been noted by philosophers, from Husserl to Wittgenstein and Wollheim, that we
seem to “see” the content of the pictorial sign directly “into” its expression. This is true is
a quite concrete sense. For instance, although no real faces are quadrangular, we have no
trouble identifying Figure 7a as a face; and, more to the point, we can even indicate the
precise place of the expression plane where the ears are lacking. This certainly has
something to do with that peculiar property of iconic signs, observed by Peirce, and called
exhibitive import by Greenlee, which makes it possible for icons to convey more
information than goes into their construction (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.3.6. and III.5.1.)
A further property of pictures can be illustrated by Magritte’s familiar drawing, ‘Le
viol’ (Fig.8.) which may be seen either as a face or as a woman’s trunk; it is precisely
because of this double, contradictory appresentation that it is instructive. Beginning with
the smallest elements, no particular meaning is suggested. But at least when putting the
two half-circles containing two smaller circles side-by-side, we seem to be seeing two
breasts. This interpretation is as its most determinate at the penultimate configurational

30
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

level; but, at the highest one, when the hair is added, another interpretation, that of a face,
gains the upper hand. Once we reach this level, some details which were present
beforehand lend their support to it: the holes in the small circles, and their relative
dimension, makes them more look much more like pupils of the eyes than nipples; indeed,
the proportional location of the inner details are more nearly those of a face than of a
trunk.
Now this points to the second property which is peculiar to pictorial meaning: the
parts which are meaningless in isolation become carrier of particular portions of the overall
meaning, once they are integrated into the whole. Like the phonemes /m/, /æ/, and /n/,
forming the word /mæn/, the strokes and dots making up the picture of a man are in
themselves meaningless even when considered in their particular spatial location; however
after having been put together, the phonemes continue to be deprived of meaning as such,
whereas the strokes and the dots begin to take on the aspects of different proper parts and
attributes of the man they contribute to form. Put simply, the different parts and
properties of the man are not distributed among the phonemes /m/, /æ/, and /n/, as they are
among the strokes and dots forming the corresponding picture. This process, by which
meanings accrues to pictorial features, may be termed resemanticisation.. It will be noted,
then, that pictures do not have double articulation, as was once argued by Eco and
Lindekens, nor do they lack elements without their own signification, as has been widely
argued since; their case is different again.11

31
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Fig.8. Magritte’s trunk/face

In the case of a proper picture, we are immediately able to ‘see into’ the expression
plane, and project as its content, some part of the perceptual world, without receiving any
further indication on how it should be taken. However, that which is “seen into” the
picture, and thus the content projected, will be different, in an ambiguous picture as ‘Le
viol’, to the extent that the percept becomes integrated at higher or lower levels of
configuration. That which defines a droodle, on the other hand, is not the presence of
multiple interpretations, but the fact that the appresentation in sparked off, and meanings
distributed to the parts, only once a verbal label has been attributed to the figure. Clearly,
in this sense, Anati’s ‘prayer’ is a picture, not a droodle, as are many other rock paintings
and engravings, discussed in books by Anati, Burenhult, Tilley, and others; yet it may be
suggested that, while being indeed a picture of a man, Anati’s ‘prayer’ is only a droodle of
a person making his prayers! Or, put into Panofsky’s terms, it is a pre-iconographic
picture, but an iconographic droodle.
Consider the different limiting-cases of pictures and droodles reproduced here as
Figure 7. As we have suggested (relying on Scruton 1974:204), although its expression
plane is quadrangular, and no actual faces are, Fig. 7.a is naturally seen as a face; yet Fig.
7c should be even more inevitably be identified as representing a face, although Hermerén
(1983:101) claims that this is so, only because of ‘the limitations of human imagination’,
since the same pattern may equally well be perceived as ‘a jar from above, with some
pebbles and broken matches on the bottom, and a stick placed across the opening’. Even
such an elementary stick figure as Fig. 7b, was immediately declared to be a chair by a
child one year and eleven months of age (Stern 1914:159); and we could easily agree with
von Däniken (1973) that Fig.7d represents a wrist-watch, until we learn that it is found on
prehistoric rock paintings.
There is nothing accidental, we submit, to those “limitations of human imagination”
invoked by Hermerén: they are imposed by the Lifeworld hierarchy of prototypical
things. Indeed, there must be an infinity of objets whose light pattern, in a static view, fit
much better to the square pattern on Fig.7a. than a face, and yet we cannot help seeing it.
And although it is possible to impose the jar reading suggested by Hermerén on Fig. 7c, it
is only there in the droodle fashion, once a key has been given, and it is all the time being
disturbed, and in fact overridden, by the more ‘natural’ face interpretation. It seems, then,
that we come the task of picture interpretation equipped with certain expectancies to
encounter those objects which are normally close at hand in our everyday Lifeworld, such
as faces and human bodies and, in our culture, chairs and wrist-watches. No doubt most or
all objects and scenes may be depicted, but if they rank below the apex of the hierarchy
built of our Lifeworld expectancies, many more details are necessary, for the object or
scene to be recognisable. At some point in human history, chairs became such familiar

32
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

objects in the ordinary Lifeworld, that just three lines were required to make them
recognisable; very much later, the same destiny befell wrist-watches, astronaut’s helmets,
space-crafts, etc. — which is why von Däniken’s observations are off the mark.
Many of the figures identified by Anati (1976:223ff) are really droodles: indeed, the
difference between von Däniken recognising wrist-watches, and Anati identifying daggers
and other arms, is that the latter, but not the former, is justified in his labelling the figures
from an indexical abduction, i.e. the presence, in the same or similar archaeological sites, of
objects having a form which may be fitted to the pattern. Garrick Mallery, who may have
been the first to conduct what he already termed a semiotic study of iconical signs,
notably of American Indian rock paintings and manual gestures, observed, in the case of
the latter that many of the manual gestures were ‘reasonable’, because the similarity
between the sign relata could be observed by a person acquainted with the culture, or once
the sign had been explained to him (Cf. Mallery 1881:94f and Kroeber’s introduction, p
xxiv). Thus, Mallery’s manual gestures, like Anati’s dagger, are iconical in a way, but only
secondarily, once a key has been furnished. Then the shape, or the outline, may even be
resemanticised.
The case of the ‘prayer’, however, is different. No key is needed to see the man.
And, the evidence for the man on the rock being so scant, I think we must conclude that
the willingness of human beings to perceive other human beings, wherever possible, is
great indeed. It is not clear, form reading Anati’s (1976) book, however, why we should
take the man to be in a position of praying. Perhaps Anati has some evidence for this,
comparable to that for the dagger, though remains of decayed action sequences are
certainly more difficult to come by; or perhaps there is really a kind of anthropological
universal of praying which may be profitably invoked here (which would indeed be
universal, then, for figures of the same general kind are found also in China, cf. the
illustrations to Li Fushun 1992). It seems to us, however, that a much less risky
hypothesis, with more general validity, may be proposed to explain the position of the
arms of the ‘prayer’ figure: it may be suggested, that in the context of a fairly limited set
of other motifs, including many animals, the outstretched arms are there to signify
‘humanity’ in an emphatic sense, that is to say, prototypically: to single out the peculiar
feature which marks off human beings form other animals, and the discovery of which was
a decisive step in the process of hominisation: the erect posture; and thus to indicate the
horizontal directiveness which remains a determining characteristic of the human
Lifeworld, the terrestrial environment of ecological physics.
And this, by the same token, brings us beyond picturehood, to its conventional
residue, and, as it turns out, to its symbolic overlay.

On the conventional residue of pictorial representation

Although the general argument for the conventional character of pictures was no doubt

33
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

mistaken, it remains true (as Peirce was the first to recognise), that all real pictures are
largely conventional. Some of the conventional traits of pictures depends, as we have seen,
on the general character of the human Lifeworld. Many of the other conventionalities
attributed to pictures are really inherent in the particular socio-cultural Lifeworld. This
means that, whenever some peculiarities of an individual or a thing, some traits of the
woman or the zebra, are locally given importance, they also make up the features given
primary importance in a picture.
Pictures, being a kind of visual thinking, are required to follow the phenomenological
rule of all thinking, according to which an object can only be seized each time from a
particular point of view, and not in its entirety, which means that a choice has to be made
among the proper parts, the perceptual parts, and the attributes of the object. Moreover,
much thinking, also that which goes on in pictures, is made in terms of prototypes, that is
to say, construing an object as an approximation to a more typical instance of the same
class; and even abductions and simple structures often intervene in the constitution of
pictorial signs.
In fact, even a sign grounded in resemblance must pick up some of the infinite
number of properties of the object which it takes as its signified, and reject all the others,
in order to constitute its own signifier. Only some of the properties of the content are
pertinent, or relevant, within the domain defined by the sign function. This appears to be
true, not only of pictures, but of all iconical signs, which is why there can be no pure
iconicity. In his early study of manual gestures, Garrick Mallery concluded, as we noted
above, that many of these signs seems ‘reasonable’, because the similarity between the
sign relata could be observed by a person acquainted with the culture, or once the sign had
been explained to him (Cf. Mallery 1881:94f and Kroeber’s introduction, p xxiv). Thus,
for instance, in Mallery’s (1880-81) dictionary of manual gestures we discover a great
number of different signs bearing the meaning ‘woman’ or ‘female’: imitations of the
breasts; of the female sex organ; of the undulating contours of the female body; of small
size; of long hair; and of the peculiar hairdo of the Indian woman, with braids to the sides.
This is really the story of the blind men and the elephant all over again: the elements are all
similar, but the way they are selected and divided up into segments must be separately
justified (cf. Sonesson 1989a: 43ff, 223ff). This story may be recounted using rock
engravings.
We may use this example taken from Mallery to illustrate all the secondary
conventional traits which were elsewhere shown to occur in pictorial signs although these
are basically iconical (cf. Sonesson 1990b,III.1.5.). As we hinted above, the iconical sign,
like any perception, is unable to grasp its object in more than one or a small number of its
aspects at the same time. Thus, for instance, a thing must be perceived from a particular
point of view, and must likewise by so rendered in a picture, or by means of an iconic
gesture; even Cubism is unable to integrated more than a few perspectives at a time. This

34
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

is true not only of the perceptual parts of a thing, but also of its proper parts, and of its
attributes: an object appears as a division block of a more extended perceptual world (the
face as part of the body, the body of the room, the room of the apartment, the apartment
of the city, and so on); and one or other of its properties is highlighted by the way it is
presented (as a human being, a horseman, a general, a husband, and so on). The manual
sign for woman obviously represents a woman from a particular perceptual perspective
(the braids or the curves are seen from the front), selecting some proper part to the
exclusion of others (hairdo, sex, or more global properties like size and nature of border
lines), and insisting on particular attributes (secondary or even culturally defined sexual
characteristics). Also petroglyphs will insist on some particular perceptual angle (a human
being from the front, a ship or an animal in side view, a plough and a chariot from above),
some proper parts (arms, legs and trunk of a person, sometimes no head, but often sexual
organs), and some attributes (sometimes man versus woman, but never child versus adult,
etc.). Anati’s ‘prayer’ only conveys some very general traits of bodily shape, arms, legs,
trunk, sometimes a head; and it picks out one conceivable position, that of raised arms.
This choice is often not made in an entirely arbitrary fashion, but some proper parts
rather than others, some attributes, and in particular some perceptual parts will be
favoured over the others, at least if there is no particular reason for picking out some
specific part. This choice is determined in multiple fashions. First, manual gestures, like
pictures, carry with them the conventional traits of the Lifeworld in which they are first
used. Even when referring the white man’s woman, the user of the American Indian
manual signs will make the sign depicting the two braids typical of the Indian woman’s
hairdo. In the context of the prehistoric Lifeworld, it would seem, the inclusion of a penis,
or of some kind of weapon, both serve equally well to designate the male sex of a human
figure (see Burenhult 1981; Janson et al. 1989), even though one is a body part, and other
a cultural trait; moreover, they may appear even when no sexual act is involved, in one
case, and no war scene or hunting party, in the other. In the same way, the raised arms of
the ‘prayer’, do not necessarily stand for praying at this particular moment, even
suppsoing that was a possible interpretation of the arm position in question at the time.
Second, like all thinking, pictures and manual signs designate categories of things by
describing their prototypes, that is, the best instances of the category. Thus, although not
all women have a markedly curvaceous body, the manual sign involving undulating
movements may be employed to designate them. Similarly, the petroglyph showing a man
urging a mule, or driving a plough, with his over-sized penis in erection (reproduced in
Anati 1976:128 and Janson et al. 1989:20, respectively), may not be making love, either to
his plough, or to his mule, but is simply shown as a prototypical man, first because his
sexual organ is emphasised, and secondly, because it is shown in its prototypical state
(which is not to say its most common state). Indeed, as we have suggested elsewhere
(Sonesson 1988; 1989a; 1990a) many visual signs standing for large categories are better

35
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

seen as idealtypes, that is, signs the expression of which exaggerates certain features to a
point not found in real instances of the category. The penis, in many petroglyphs, is not
only of a disproportionate size, but it in erection outside of natural contexts for such as
state. Also Anati’s ‘prayer’ may well be a idealtype in this sense: it exaggerates the erect
posture which differentiates man from other animal, by adding the vertical extension of the
arms to the customary stature, and by introducing the raised arms outside a natural context
for such an act.
Most beings and objects clearly possess a point of view from which they are most
characteristically shown, and more easily identified: it has been demonstrated that the
side-view is prototypical to animals and vehicles, but furniture, shirts, and trousers, as
well as human beings, from the front (see Rosch et al. 1976: 400f). What is prototypical to
one culture may not be so to another, however, for old Chinese pictures, and the early
stages of their writing, show that they preferred to consider a nose from the front, not in
profile, as we do (cf. Lindqvist 1989:33). In petroglyphs the plough or the chariot is often
shown form above, the animals attached to it from the side (and sometimes one of them
upside-down), and the man driving them from the front (see Janson et al. 1989:20).

c) man d) w oman e) man f) woman

Fig. 9. Conventional selection of iconic traits: a-b) Bakairi drawings (from Vierkant
1912:352); c-d) Blissymbolics; e-f) prehistoric petroglyphs.

In order to economise their expressive resources, the users of pictures and gestures,
like all other signs may, thirdly, be content to use only those traits in which the designated
object differs from other, similar objects. In the case of manual gestures, for instance,
women’s small size is relevant, in opposition to the (relative) tallness of men. According
to a well-known example given by Eco (1968:191), the zebra, which in our culture may be
contrasted to the horse by means of its stripes, would have to be differentiated in another
way in a culture being familiar with a single other animal species, the hyena, which also
has stripes. A more extreme example are the petroglyphs of the Bakairi tribe contrasting
man with a bird (Figure 9a-b; reproduced in Vierkant 1912:352): only the upper part of
the figures differ, so that it might be said, paraphrasing Aristotle, that to this tribe man is a
beakless biped. Anati’s ‘prayer’ appears to pick out a more basic trait distinguishing man

36
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

from other animals, which is more firmly grounded in the general structure of the
Lifeworld: the erect posture, exaggerated by being extended to the arms.
The signs used for man and woman in Blissymbolics (and also sometimes as
logogrames to indicate men’s and women’s washing rooms; Figure 9c-d) may be read
pictorially, but the traits included are not chosen for the sake of a correct and complete
rendering, but to establish the distinction: the trousers’ legs of the male versus the
woman’s skirt (Note that, on this interpretation, the pictorial equivalents of the woman’s
legs emerging below the skirt are not included; the rendering of the woman’s body is less
complete than that of the man). In some respects this is similar to the opposition, often
found in petroglyphs, between the stick figure with a the straight line appended, which is
easily interpreted as the man’s penis, and an identical stick figure with a dot (or, as we
shall see, a cup mark), which could be the woman’s vagina (cf. Anati 1976; Broby-
Johansen 1967; Burenhult 1981; Gudnitz 1972; Janson et al. 1989). In a general way, the
sexual organs are more natural distinctive features between the male and the female than
trousers and skirts; but, pictorially, the selection of these traits, rather than any of the
other bodily differences between men and a women, is quite arbitrary.
Taken together, all this means that, although a part of the expression of a sign can be
iconical for a part of the content, it may very well be included in the sign for conventional,
and even, in a stronger sense, arbitrary reasons. Of course, in some cases this inclusion is
far from being arbitrary, but is then motivated by considerations quite foreign to the
pictorial rendering, perhaps by the necessities of symbolism.
If the inclusion in a picture of certain, in themselves iconic, traits, is not necessarily
iconically, or at least not pictorially, motivated, the exclusion of such traits does not have
to be pictorially, or otherwise iconically, justified. Thus, for instance, Anati (1976)
repeatedly mentions the presence of ‘asexual figures’, but in fact, the failure to depict any
sexual organ, just as the absence of heads, in other cases, may well lack all pictorial
significance; the proper parts in question may have been neutralised, simply because their
inclusion was not important in that context. Similarly, Tilley (1991: 68ff, 102ff, 136, 142,
146) makes too much of what might well be the same kind of neutralisations, when he
argues that the elks, lacking antlers, must be females, and thus embody a female principles,
whereas the stick-figures, which have phalluses or no sexual indication, must represent
males. Sexuality may simply not be relevant here.
If Anati (1976:60) is right in suggesting that a couple consisting of one headless
figure and one normal one indicates the separation between body and soul in the same
individual, then the headless figure is really iconical, but not in the sense of pictorial, as we
have describe the latter function above, but rather in a symbolical sense: no real headless
person is depicted. 12
Finally, it should be mentioned here that pictures and gestures are necessarily
conventional because they are themselves objects of different categories from most of the

37
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

object which they represent. For instance, since the expressive resources of manual signs
are essentially the hands and their movement, the (limited) vertical extension of the female
body can only be described as far as one of its properties is concerned, its highest point;
and the curvaceousness of the female body cannot be rendered in its totality, but only
transposed in time, as an undulating movement. Rock carvings, as all other pictures
executed on a surface, lack the third dimension of the real world: actually, because of being
carved in the rock, the petroglyphs, unlike most pictures, have a prominent third
dimension, but this cannot be used for rendering the third dimension of the perceptual
world.

Plastic and pictorial layers of the picture

There is presently a kind of consensus for distinguishing the plastic and iconic layers of
the picture. Earlier made in other terms by Lindekens, the distinction is now incorporated
into two of the leading models of pictorial semiotics, that of the Greimas school and of
Groupe µ. According to this conception, roughly, the picture stands, on the iconic level,
for some object recognisable from the ordinary perceptual Lifeworld; whereas, on the
plastic level, the expression is conveyed by simple qualities of the picture thing itself,
which tend to correspond to increasingly abstract concepts (Cf. Fig.10 and Groupe µ
1978; 1979; 1985; 1992; Floch 1985: 15; 1986a, passim; 1986b. 126ff, and passim; and
critique in Sonesson 1988; 1989a; 1991b; 1992a). As used in semiotics, on the other hand,
iconicity is unavoidably connected, as we have seen, with Peirce’s concept of icon, and in
this sense, iconicity is something considerably broader. Indeed, as we shall see, the
iconicity of the iconic layer is not the same at that of the general sign theory formulated by
Peirce: most notably, plastic features, in the sense of Groupe µ and the Greimasians, may
well be iconic in Peirce’s sense!

Fig.10. Plastic and iconic (that is, pictorial) layers of the picture sign.

In the sense derived from Peirce, two items share an iconic ground, and are thus apt
to enter, in the capacity of being its expression and content, into a semiotic function

38
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

forming an iconic sign, to the extent that there are some or other set of properties which
they possess independently of each other, which are identical or similar when considered
from a particular point of view, or which may be perceived or, more broadly, experienced
as being identical or similar, where similarity is taken to be an identity perceived on the
background of fundamental difference (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.1-3. and above). The
pictorial function is realised, and the iconic ground is more particularly a pictorial one,
when, in addition, there in something in the ‘thing’ serving as the expression of the sign
which is instrumental in producing an illusion of literally seeing in the two-dimensional
surface of the expression plane the projection of a scene extracted from real world of three-
dimensional existence (with, or without, a suggestion of lineal perspective), giving rise to
the phenomenon of resemanticisation. The symbolic function, in the sense in which this
term is ordinarily used, not by Peirce, but in the European tradition, is also a kind of iconic
sign function, having in addition certain indexical traits: it reposes on the isolation of an
abstract, not necessarily perceivable, property, connected with a generalisation from the
object serving as an expression, and a particularisation from the object serving as a content
(a dove standing for peace, scales signifying justice, etc.; cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.6.).
A pictorial sign is a sign the primary allofunctional relation of which is pictorial, in
the sense defined above. Pictures also tend to manifest a secondary function, which,
following Floch and Groupe µ, we will call plastic, in the case of which meanings are
derived from the properties which the expression plane of the picture really possesses,
when considered as made up of mere twodimensional shapes on a surface. In this sense,
however, the plastic layer may well function iconically. Thus, for instance, if the circle is
seen to convey softness, and the rectangle signifies hardness, to pick up some of the
results obtained by Lindekens (1971) in one of his experiments, then there must be some
properties mediating synaesthetically between the visual and tactile sense modalities, that
is, an iconic ground based on invariants obtaining across the different senses. When the
circle is declared to be feminine, on the other hand, and when the triangle is said to be
calculating, and the rectangle mathematical, increasingly more conventional elements would
seem to enter the semiotic function., Therefore, it would be more convenient to
distinguish, not the plastic and the iconic layers, but perhaps the plastic and pictorial ones,
both of which may have an iconic function (for the full argument, cf. Sonesson 1990e).
It might perhaps be said that, in this sense, the difference between outline elks and
fish and scooped elks and fish, and even between double-line boats and single-line boats,
and between triangular humans and stick humans, found by Tilley (1991: 109 and passim)
at Nämforsen, are plastic differences, and are thus not at the same level, and not
comparable to the distinctions between elks and boats, fishes and humans, shoe soles and
birds, etc., which are rendered on the pictorial level. This, however, does not necessarily
mean that the plastic distinctions must lack significance, or that they can only point to the
difference between different époques, or difference craftsmen. The plastic layer can

39
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

convey a symbolic meaning; but symbolism may also, as we shall see, occur on its own.

Symbolism and iconicity

A symbolic ground must put into correspondence an expression plane, the substance of
which is concrete and material, but which contains one or a set of fairly abstract
properties, and a content plane consisting in an identical abstract property, or of a
property generalised from those intrinsic to the expression plane.13 Indeed, is has often
been demonstrated (in experiments by Köhler, Arnheim, Sander & Volkelt, and others),
that circles, and rounded shapes generally, are associated with softness, the elementary,
the natural, the dynamic, and the feminine, while the rectangle, and angular forms in
general, are taken to signify properties such as rudeness, coarseness, elaborateness, the
static and the masculine.
In a particularly illuminating experiment, Jessen (1983) found that children, aged 7-
17, in both Germany and East Africa, took the circle and the triangle pointing upwards to
signify femininity, but considered the square, as well as the triangle pointing downwards,
to stand for the male. Since, in East Africa, the traditional garments of men and women are
not trousers and skirts, respectively, figures like those in 9c-d, and other versions of toilet
indicators, like a triangle pointing downwards for men’s washing room, and a triangle
pointing upwards, for that of women, are not primarily pictorial, but symbolic, for what
the signify. According to this line of thinking, the lower straight line of the stick figure
taken to signify a male person in rock engravings (Fig. 9e), may less represent a phallus
than contribute to the general angularity of the figure which conveys masculinity; and,
more probably, the round mark between the legs of the other variant figure (Fig. 9f), may
not really stand for the female sex organ, but its maximal form of roundness should
perhaps signify the abstract property of femininity. If so, it becomes understandable that
a cup mark, which is hollowed out, and of a disproportionate size, often appears instead
of a dot, and it becomes reasonable to think, as many archaeologists (cf. Burenhult 1981;
Janson et al. 1989; Tilley 1991), have suggested, that all cup marks are signs of femininity.
On the analogy with these observations, it might be suggested that the raising lines of
Anati’s ‘prayer’, are less to be read, pictorially, as out-stretched arms, than as indicators
of horizontality, and thus, of humanity.
Jessen’s results were obtained with children no younger than 7 years, which might
be taken to suggest that the association is learned, though universally so. This is perhaps
not as surprising as it may seem at first. The prototypical bodies of male and female,
considered as divergences from a common body scheme, are characterised by the global
properties of angularity and roundness, respectively. From these prototypes, culture tends
to make idealtypes, exaggerating, not least by means of clothes, the original roundness of
women and the angularity of men (cf. Lurie 1981:215f; Laurent 1980). In other cases, the
idealtype of femininity may also be found to combine roundnesses which are hardly found

40
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

together in nature, producing such strange figures as Venus von Willensdorf. The feel of
angularity is rough, and that of rounded forms is smooth, and this is redundantly
translated in the use of soft material for women, rough ones for men. If there are
panhuman tendencies to correlate the physical and the mental, as is perhaps suggested by
the use of metaphor (cf. Winner 1982), soft feelings will also be seen as redundantly
characterising the female. This at least accounts for part of the notional complex opposing
the male and the female, not only in our culture.
It should not be surprising that the global traits of man and woman tend to express
themselves as ‘best forms’, i.e. as configurations of maximal prototypicality, which is, in
the case of femininity, the circle, and for males, any angular shape. From this point of
view, the cup mark certainly appears to be a very probable embodiment of the feminine
principle.14

Fig.11. Different limits between prototype categories in children’s drawings.

The picture function, as conceived in semiotics, would correspond to the pictogram

of Anati’s (1991:5ff) taxonomy, while the psychograms of the latter (‘violent outbursts of
energy that perhaps express sensations, or even more subtle perceptions’) could be
symbols in our sense, in spite of the description, according to which they are ‘signs which
are not recognisable as, and do not seem to represent either objects or symbols’. As for
Anati’s ideograms, they could either be pictures, the contents of which serves as symbols
(Fra Angelico’s or Picasso’s dove), or they might be symbols which have been
conventionalised (the dove as a stock symbol in Occidental culture). In will be noted, in
any case, that unlike pictograms, psychograms, and ideograms, the different signs
functions distinguished here may share their expression substance, and may be manifested
entirely, or more plausible, partly, by the same traits of the expression form: they are
aspects of signs, not different signs. Thus, in the case of Anati’s prayer, only part of the
design becomes relevant to serve as the symbolic ground of ‘humanity’.

The elementary graphic hierarchy

One way of approaching the intrinsic meanings of visual elements could be to establish a

41
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

feature hierarchy, similar to the one found by Jakobson (1942), according to which there is
a parallelism between the stages of phonetic development in child language, the stages of
phonetic reduction in the aphasic, and the relative complexity of the world’s languages, as
far as the phoneme repertory is concerned. Indeed, Lotte Hoffmann (1943) asked children
between 2,2 and 9,7 years of age to imitate a set of simple geometrical configurations using
ready-made material, like sticks, plates, and rings. All the configurations lacked a
straightforward pictorial content. By combining the ready-made implements, it was
possible to reproduce all the geometrical configurations faithfully. Instead, however,
children between 3-4 years would use any object whatsoever to stand for all of the
different configurations; but more often than not, a perfectly round, compact object would
be preferred. Older children would pick up only one, global, property present in the
configuration and imitate it with a single implement, for instance, such properties as being
closed, angular, pointed, having holes, and so on. Later several pieces would be used,
rendering more often the number of parts of the imitated object than its shape (more
details in Sonesson 1989a,II.3.6.).
It becomes clear from these examples that a prototypical shape is used by the child
to represent a whole class of geometrical configurations. A round, compact object seems to
function like a prototype, a ‘best form’, to which more deviant cases are assimilated. This
is seen most clearly is cases in which different children impose differently placed limits
between the classes subsumed by the prototypes (Fig.11). Given these facts, we are able
to set up the rudiments of a tentative hierarchy: it will start out from the circle; and it will
continue with an elementary division into circles and straight lines, only later to be
followed by a distinction between compact and contoured shapes (Fig.12).

Fig.12. A hierarchy of shapes, derived form children’s drawings

The equivalent of the compact and contoured shapes in rock carvings must be the

42
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

scooped out and the outline figures, respectively. Tilley (1991:81ff) quotes Malmer as
claiming that the outline elks must be earlier than the scooped elks at Nämforsen, simply
because the former are more frequent. If the analogy from the development of children’s
drawing ability is valid, however, we should expect the scooped figures to be the original
ones. But this analogy ignores a fact on which we have insisted above: that the iconicity of
the iconical ground is modified by the fact that its expression is an object of a different
category from most of the object which it represents. The rock offers another kind of
surface for the sign than the paper or the canvas.
If the analogy is worth anything, however, it might be suggested that, on this level of
elementary meanings, Anati’s ‘prayer’ is a relatively cultured, that is, ‘elaborate’, symbol
of ‘humanity´.

The part of indexicality: The petroglyph as inscription

To the outsider, the archaeologist seems to be, first and foremost, one who trades in
indexicality. The artifacts that he recovers are parts of the totality of the culture which he
interprets. They are dated by means of contiguities to other objects (at least if the context
can be supposed to be a primary one; see Renfrew & Bahn 1991:43f). By means of varves
and tree-rings, decayed contiguities may be retrieved and interpreted, according to a
procedure which, as Peirce anticipated, requires the indices to be built on icons (cf.
Renfrew & Bahn 1991:117ff). If part of a cave wall containing paintings falls down, and if
further layers accumulate above it, the contiguity may help establish a date ante quem for
the cave painting (Sieveking 1979:30). There is even something indexical to the method of
dating petroglyphs by means of wheathering phenomena, or by an analyses of features
that are contemporaneous with the picture, e.g. pigment; predate it, e.g. the particular
surface on which it is executed; or postdate it, e.g. later cracks dissecting a motif or
precipitates deposited on it (cf. Bednarik 1991:2). Moreover, the method of making
tracings in order serve to record the petroglyphs relies on an indexical relationship (see
Anati 1977).
In the present context, however, we are interesting in the rock carvings in their
capacity of being traces of something else. Indeed, we shall suggest that all pictures, and
therefore also all petroglyphs, are based on indexical properties, as well as iconical ones.

On the theory of indexicality

Numerous definitions of the index, which seem difficult to reconcile, are to be found in
Peirce’s work; and yet other interpretations are suggested by the examples given by Peirce
himself, and even more so, if we also attend to those proposed by latter-day semioticians.
According to the paraphrase formulated above, which seems sufficiently broad to account
for most of the examples and a fair amount of the definitions, an index, is a sign in which
the ‘thing’ which serves as the expression is, in one or other way, connected with another

43
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

‘thing’, which serves as its content. Although the two objects partaking of this relation of
indexicality become a sign only by participating in a sign relation, the index relation must
exist independently of the former. As shown by some examples, however, this cannot
mean that the index relation must necessarily precede the sign relation in real time (see
Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5.).
In the second place, since there are many conceivable types of connection between
two things and, in particular, many ways in which they may be contracted, it is
convenient to distinguish various kinds of indices (indexical signs) and indexicalities. This
is not the place the enter into any details on the subject of indexicality, but a few varieties
must be noted in the following (cf. also Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5; 1989d; 1992a). All indexical
relations may involve either contiguity or factorality. Those indexicalities which are not as
yet signs, being based on items which are not situated on different levels or directness or
thematisation, or not clearly differentiated, may be described as contexts (or ‘pairings’, in
Husserl’s sense). Any experience of two elements being related by proximity, conceived
as a primordial perceptual fact, may be considered an actual perceptual context involving
contiguity. A actual perceptual context involving factorality is any experience of
something as being a part of a whole, or as being a whole having parts.
When only one of the items is directly given, and the other precedes it in time, or
follows it, we may speak of an abductive context (protention and retention, respectively).
The term abduction is employed here in Peirce's sense, to signify a general rule or
regularity which is taken for granted and which links one singular fact with another. All
experience taking place in time is of this kind, for instance our expectancy, when seeing the
wood-cutter with the axe raised over his head, that on the following moment, he is going to
hit the piece of wood (contiguity protention), and on the moment just preceding, he lifted
the axe to its present position (contiguity retention). A case in point would also be the
linguistic syntagm before it is completed, the foaming beer and feelings of refreshment, etc.
Abductive contexts involving factorality would be, using some Peircean examples, the gait
of the sailor, the symptom as part of the disease (possibly a proto-index), part and whole
in a picture, the partly destroyed Minoan fresco, a jig-saw puzzle, a piece of torn paper
(the last three examples combine factorality and contiguity). We may use the term proto-
index for an indexicalities which is only momentarily a sign, as would be the “tableau
vivant” of the wood-cutter, the photographic pose (which is a limitation in time), that
what is seen in the view-finder (with spatial limits), and indeed many of the examples
given above, to the extent that the flow of indexicalities is momentarily halted. The
archaeologist’s art, from this point of view, would consist in transforming indexicalities of
decayed cultures into proto-indices accessible to us.
When an indexicality has been stabilised, and objectified, into a real sign, it may
become an abductive index, which can involve contiguity, as in the case of footprints,
fingerprints, the cross as a sign of the crucified, the weather-cock (contiguity to the

44
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

direction of the wind); or factorality, when an anchor is used to stand for navigation, the
clock to designate the watch-maker's (as part of the sum total of clocks), or a painting to
indicate the painter’s workshop. Some of Peirce’s examples, and many of those suggested
later, are however of another kind, for, instead of presupposing a regularity known to
obtain between the ‘thing’ which serves as expression of the sign, and another ‘thing’
which is taken to be its content, they transform something which is contiguous, or in a
relation of factorality, to the expression, into its content. These signs may therefore be
termed performative indices. With contiguity, they give rise to such phenomena as the
pronoun “you”, the finger pointing to an object, the weathercock (as marking the here-and-
now of the wind), the clock of the watch-maker's (as marking the emplacement of the
shop); and with factorality, they may produce the pronouns “I”, “here”, “now”, the
finger pointing out a direction, etc.
Secondary indexical signs are signs, the dominant sign relation of which is pictorial
or otherwise iconical, conventional, or whatever, but which involve a secondary sign
function, which is a relation between several signs, or parts of several signs, and which is
indexical. Rather trivial are such examples in which the primary sign content is related to a
secondary content outside the sign (implication, “connotation” in Eco's sense, metonymy
and synecdoche in a loose sense, etc.), some examples of which are dead rhetorical figures
such as the sword for the army, a picture of a cross for the crucified, the traditional
“symbols” of iconography (all with contiguity); dead rhetorical figures such as the sail for
the ship, a picture of a clock for the watch-maker's, iconography generally (all with
factorality). Also of relatively limited theoretical interest are depicted proto-indices, in
which the sign content stands in relation to an only provisionally differentiated content:
the picture taken of the “tableau vivant” containing the wood-cutter, the photographic
pose when caught in the photograph, etc.
When the entire primary sign is related to another sign via the respective contents
we obtain the equivalent of metonymy and synecdoche in the strict sense. These are
difficult to obtain in pictorial signs, since they are not sufficiently codified to evoke other
signs from the same “system”, if we except the toilet logograms, the traffic signs, and
some much-too- famous works of art like Mona Lisa, etc. Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q” is not
really a metonymy or synecdoche for Leonardo’s picture, since the entire artwork in
question in contained in Duchamp’s paraphrase. But the moustache and the pointed beard
of Duchamp's work are synecdoches for a droodle of a man. However, the moustache and
hair configuration familiar to everybody as being that of Hitler, which is often scrawled on
advertisement figures in the street, is semantically much more dense.
In another variety, it is the entire primary sign which is related to another sign via
the respective expressions, that is, the two expressions form an actual perceptual context.
This type is often found in publicity and in surrealist painting. Some examples, with
contiguity, would be two figures seen against a common ground, for instance an

45
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

advertisement for a brand of whisky with glass and bottle; a bottle of gin and a crown; a
jetty and a tyre; or pictures placed side by side (Tardy’s “troisiéme signifiant”), as in
collages, montages, etc. With factorality, examples would be a pile of fruits forming a
crown; Magritte’s drawing of a face which is also a female trunk; slices of orange forming a
jam bottle; Arcimboldo’s portraits, etc. The primary sign may also be related to an
element which is abduced from another sign via the respective expressions, that is, when
the two expressions form an abductive context. The index type is found in publicity and in
caricature. In most cases. however, it seems doubtful that another sign is really evoked;
rather a secondary content, as in the first case above, would appear to be involved. Some
examples, with contiguity, are a bottle of liquor and ice cubes placed in the Coliseum
when an ice-pail is anticipated; and, with factorality, an orange with a bottle opener; hens
with the heads of court ladies, Roosevelt as a bull, the cat as a coffee pot, Beckett as a
vulture, etc.

The indexicality of surfaces

In general, pictorial indexicality has been much less discussed than the part of iconicity,
and yet, all pictures are certainly profused with indices. Those semioticians who have
studied publicity, like Nöth, Williamson, and many others, have not failed to note the
importance of contiguity in such pictures, when positive values are to be transferred to the
product, from a nude girl, a crown, or an exuberant landscape. More importantly, all
pictures are in a sense indexical, since they isolate a portion of a scene which is present
more fully in the actual world of perception.
But there is yet another kind of indexicality, found in all pictures, which is of
interest here. Like all pictures, the rock engravings consist of markings made on a surface,
and as such are indexicalities (which, in some cases may becomes indices) of all forces
contributing to produce them. It has been suggested that, to the toddler, the marks left on
the paper are accidental traces of a motor activity which at first is rewarding in itself; only
at about 18 months, that is, with the emergence of the semiotic function, will the child
react with disappointment when no strokes and dots result form the contact of the marker
with the paper, and only at 3 years will he refuse to draw in the air (Cf. Gardner
1973:215ff; 1980ff). What was at first accidental substance now becomes the very form
of the act, defined by the principle or relevance known as the making of a drawing.
According to Gibson (1978:228f; 1980) a picture is ‘a surface so treated that it
makes available a limited optic array /---/ of persisting invariants of structure’ at some
point of observation. But he also speculates that to prehistoric man, just as to the child,
the picture is ‘a progressive record of movement’, a layout receptive to traces, long before
it is discovered that it may also serve to ‘delineate something’. If the record is of a stylus,
brush, pen, pencil, crayon, maker or another hand-held tool, the result will be a
chirographic picture; and if the traces are made with a camera, including its accessory

46
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

equipment, we will have a photographic picture.

To consider the picture as a record of the implements employed to produce it, is
probably a view-point more familiar to archaeologists than to art historians (with the
exception of those whose occupation is to discover fakes). Thus, for instance, the
regularity of pecking marks may yield indexical information about the chipping efficiency
of the tool, different for various kinds of stone, bone, metal, horn, etc; and of the method
of hammering employed, whether it was direct pecking, done with the engraving
instrument itself, or indirect, done with the aid of a mallet or percuter. Similarly, the
concentration of peck marks is indexical for the number of blows per square centimetre
(Cf. Anati 1977:28f). Interestingly, at least part of these indexicalities are not established
on the bases of any abduction familiar from our own Lifeworld, but are derived from
experience in some class of Lifeworlds thought to be sufficiently similar to that of
prehistoric man, that is, that of contemporary ‘primitive’ people (Anati 1977, ibid.; this
would seem to be the whole point of ethnoarchaeology; cf. Renfrew & Bahn 1991: 9ff,
154ff15). Moreover, it may well be, that the difference between scooped and outline
figures should be interpreted at this level of analysis, that is, indexically.

elements standardized free variation

productive link
contiguity typographics photographics
similarity — chirographics
Fig. 13. An interpretation of Espe’s taxonomy

In an earlier publication (Sonesson 1989a,I.2.6.), we followed Gibson in admitting a

primary distinction, among those signs which are markings on surfaces, between
photographic and chirographic pictures, that is, literally, pictures produced by the
workings of luminosity on the surface, and pictures the markings of which are made by
hand. According to Espe 1983, however, graphics, which comprises all kinds of
manipulations of two-dimensional surfaces, is really of three kinds: photographics,
chirographics, and typographics. Like the term photographics, that of typographics here
retains is ordinary sense, but it could perhaps also be conceived to mean, more broadly,
the production of markings on surfaces by the use of standardised implements. In the
latter case, we could transform Espe’s little taxonomy into a cross-classification of the
type suggested in Figure 13.
According to another classification, proposed by Roman Gubern (1987b:46f), we
should distinguish between chirographic pictures, such as drawings, and technographic
pictures, which is a group comprising photography as well as pictures produced by the
cinematographic camera and the video, and which could also be taken to include what

47
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Gubern (1987a:73ff) elsewhere terms synthetic pictures, that is, pictures produced by
means of a computer (cf. Fig.14). Although they are not hand-produced, neither
photographic nor cinematographic pictures, nor some synthetic pictures, are created using
standardised elements, contrary to the case of typography; indeed, it is one of the
remarkable feats of desktop publishing that it de-standardises typefonts, permitting them
to the varied along a number of dimensions (size, obliqueness, etc.), thus bringing them
closer to being pictures.

productive tools: hands machines

productive link chirographics technographics
contiguity — photographics,
cinematographics,
videographics
typographics
similarity chirographics computerographics
Fig. 14. A taxonomy of graphics.

This breaking up of the association between that which is machine-made and that
which is standardised is a characteristic feature of information society, which then must be
supposed to have begun already with the development of photography and the cinema.
Traditionally all hand-produced pictures also regulate themselves on similarity (they
depend on what Gibson calls the hand-eye-system, which includes hand-held tools),
whereas all machine-made pictures are indexically derived — until this simple organisation
is destroyed by computerographics. Actually, this neat categorisation may turn out to be
illusory: already the hand-prints found on many cave walls are standardised, contiguity
based, and yet not machine-produced. In this respect, they are very different from
similarly looking hand shapes, carved on many rocks together with other petroglyphs.

From photography to petroglyphs

In the church of Le Sante, at Capo di Ponte, a crypt has been built upon a boulder on
which six hand-prints are to be seen. According to tradition, these are traces left by the
hands of the three saints who miraculously stopped a landslide which was about to
destroy the village. In the opinion of Anati (1976:159f), however, the marks have really
been carved in the rock, perhaps originally in prehistoric times, but have then been
smoothed and deepened many times, so that it is impossible to establish their actual age.
Tradition thus favours a purely indexical conception, whereas archaeology would claim the
prevalence of the iconicity principle. Of course, there are excellent reasons, based on
concomitant indexical traits of the markings, for taking the archaeological explanation more

48
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

seriously.
In semiotics, the indexicality of icons has mostly been studied in the peculiar case of
photography, which, already on Peirce’s view, embodies both indexical and iconical traits.
This is true, even though Maldonado (1974) has mentioned a number of other ‘hard icons’,
that is, iconical signs whose cognitive value is guaranteed by the indexical relation between
the expression and the referent: X-ray pictures, hand impressions on cave walls, ‘acoustic
pictures’ made with the aid of ultrasound, silhouettes, the configuration left on the ground
by a man out walking in Hiroshima at the moment of the explosion of the nuclear bomb,
thermograms, pictures made with ‘invisible light’ to discover persons hiding in the woods,
and so on. An obvious, though three-dimensional addition to this list, would be the
cavities left in the ash of Pompeii by human bodies, and, less directly, the plaster cast
made from them (cf. Renfrew & Bahn 1991:20f).
In the following, however, we will summarise the discussion of photographic
indexicality for comparison. According to Dubois (1983:20ff), the first semiotical theories
of photography tended to look upon the photograph as a mirror of reality, or, in Peircean
terms, an icon; then came that most celebrated generation of iconoclasts who tried to
demonstrate the conventionality of all signs, supposing even the photograph to present a
coded version of reality, or, as Peirce would have said, a symbol; and finally the
photograph was seen for what is really is, according to Dubois, an index, a trace left
behind be the referent itself.
Unlike the earlier writers, Vanlier (1983), Dubois (1983), and Schaeffer (1987) are
really concerned to demonstrate the specificity of the photographic sign. Vanlier´s notion
of indexicality (split into the untranslatable opposition between ‘indice’ and ‘index’) is not
really derived from Peirce; indeed, his ‘indice’ is actually, in the most literal sense, a mere
trace, of which he offers some very usefully descriptions. Contrary to Vanlier, Dubois has
recourse to the Peircean tradition, though he may not be all that immersed in its ambience.
Schaeffer takes a less extreme stand than Vanlier and Dubois, arguing that the photograph
is an indexical icon, or, in other cases, an iconical index. His Peirce reception is much more
faithful than that of Vanlier and Dubois, but some doubts on its correctness subsists (for a
closer discussion, see Sonesson 1989d).
We shall have no quarrel with what, on the face of it, appears to be the essential
issue: there is actually an indexical relation, in this case a contiguity, between the
photographic expression plane, and one or more objects present in the real-world situation
in which the photograph was produced. In terms of our earlier investigations, however, an
indexicality is not yet a sign (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2. and above). Thus we still have to
inquire into the nature of that kind of indexicality which is present in photography, to see
if it is susceptible of being the carrier of a sign relation; an then we have to investigate if in
actual fact it does carry one, and if it always does.
When photographs are said to be indexical, contiguity is always meant, and a

49
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

particular kind of contiguity at that: a contiguity close enough for the referent to rub off on
the expression plane of the sign, albeit not contemporaneous with the semiotical
functioning of the sign, but more or less anterior to it. Inspired by the parallel between
Peirce’s conception of indexicality and abduction, and Sherlock Holmes’ famous ‘method,’
which has been explored by Sebeok, Eco, and others (cf. Eco & Sebeok, eds. 1983), we
have suggested elsewhere (in Sonesson 1989a,I.2.) to term abrasion the particular indexical
relationship resulting from the fact that the object which it to become the referent have
entered into contact with, on some prior moment of time, and then detached itself from,
what later is to become the expression plane of the sign, leaving on the surface of the latter
some visible trace, however inconspicuous, of the event.
At this point, it will be useful to attempt a more systematic description of abrasion,
so as to locate it among other kinds of indices. In the case of abrasion, it is contiguity, not
factorality which is involved in the constitution of the indexical relation; in particular, it is
direct contact, not mere contiguity which is so involved. Furthermore, the event producing
this contact took place at a moment prior to the use of the sign as a sign, not at the same
time, or before it; and it left some traces of its occurrence on the object presently
functioning as the expression plane of the sign, so that the interpretation of the sign is not
entirely given over to abductions based on historical knowledge.
In the case photography, as we noted about pictures generally above, certain
limitations are imposed on the trace, not by the object, but by the support on which the
trace is inscribed. Some of these are mentioned by Vanlier: the quadrangular shape of the
photograph, its digital nature, the information it leaves out, its inability to record the
temporal aspects of the process giving rise to the trace, etc. But this may be restated by
saying that the photograph is not only the trace of the objects, or even the photons, but also
of the properties of the film, of the lenses, of the photographic device generally, of the space
travelled through by the photons, and so on. As Ennion & Tinbergen (1967) points out in
their excellent study of animal traces, the same animal will leave different traces on differ-
ent ground -- and so will the same photographic motif (see Sonesson 1989a,I.2.6. and
1989d)
It could yet be objected, that now that, with the help of Vanlier, we have isolated
some peculiar properties of that kind of index or "indice", which is not only an effect of a
cause, but a trace in a literal sense, we can claim that the motif is different from the other
causes involved in producing the photographic effect, precisely in being a trace. Yet, there
is really no intrinsic reasons for considering the cause producing a trace (and even so, we
have seen than many more causes than the motif may be held responsible for the trace) to
be a more important type of cause than the others. Indeed, we can only explain the
importance of the motif, when we realise that a trace, in the most central sense of the term,
contains not only indexical but also iconical aspects, and if we begin by admitting that a
photograph is a kind of pictorial sign, and that all such signs a first and foremost grounded

50
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

in the illusion of similarity.

Contrary to Vanlier and Dubois, Schaeffer, as we have noted, argues that the
photograph may be an indexical icon, or, in other cases, an iconical index. But even
Schaeffer’s conception is too absolute. Consider the difference between a typical index
such as a hoof-print, and a photograph: while both the photograph and the trace stand for
a referent which has vanished from the scene, the signifier of the former sign continues to
occupy the place that was that of the referent, and it stills remains temporally dated,
whereas the photographic signifier, like that of the verbal sign, is omni-temporal and omni-
spatial, tokens of its type being able to be instantiated at any time and place (although
only after the referential event and the time needed for development). Thus, if, for the
sake of simplicity, we attend merely to the temporal aspects, Figure 15 can be
constructed.
That is to say, in the case of a footstep, a hoof-print, and so on, both the expression
and the content are located at a particular time and place; in verbal language, none of them
are; and in the case of photography, it is only the content (or, strictly speaking, the
referent) which is bound up with spatio-temporality. Thus, the hoof-prints, present
where before the horse was present, tells us something like ‘horse here before’; but the
photograph of a horse, which most likely does not occupy the scene where the horse was
before, only tells us ‘horse’, and then we may start reconstructing the time and the place.

Expression
time-dependant omnitemporal

Content time-dependant footsteps photograph

omnitemporal ? verbal sign

Fig.15. Comparison of the indexicality of some different signs.

At this point, it may seem that we could say that, whereas the hoof-print is first
and foremost an index, the photograph must originally be seen as an icon, before its
indexical properties can be discovered. In fact, however, things may be still more
complicated. Schaeffer is of course right in pointing out, against Peirce, that not all indices
involve some iconic aspect, but it so happens that the hoof-prints, just like all other
imprints and traces, in the narrow sense of these terms, also convey a partial similarity
with the objects for which they stand. We have to recognise the hoof-print as such, that is,
differentiate if from the traces of a man’s feet, or of a donkey’s, a well as from fake hoof-

51
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

prints, and from accidental formations worked by the wind in the sand. Only then can we
interpret the hoof-prints indexically. It remains true, however, that the essential meanings
of the hoof-prints are embodied in indexicality: they tell us the whereabouts of the animal.
The same observations applies to the trace of a sandal which a Roman soldier left in the
sand banks of the underground stream in the Niaux cave: the imprint must first be
iconically identified as a Roman sandal, before it can be indexically employed to ascertain
that the cave was visited already in Roman times (Sieveking 1979:13).
In the case of a photograph, on the other hand, we do not need to conceive of it in-
dexically to be able to grasp its meaning. It will continue to convey significations to us,
whether we are certain that it is a photograph or not. Indexicality, in photographs, really is
a question of second thoughts and peculiar circumstances. Therefore, we may conclude
that indexicality cannot be the primary sign relation of photographs, although it is an open
potentiality present in their constitution, and exploited in certain cases. First and
foremost, the photograph is an iconical sign.
Whatever the difference between Anati and a follower of local tradition at Capo di
Ponti, they agree in the iconicity of hand-shaped signs on the boulder of the Le Sante
church; their disagreement concerns the possibility of the signs being ‘hard icons’ in
Maldonado’s sense. Thus, the iconicity is not in doubt, but the indexicality is. This is
even more obviously true in the case of chirographic pictures, in which the thing which
serves as the expression does not stand in the relation of indexicality to the same object
that relates to it iconically. Even more than the photograph, the petroglyph is an iconical
signs having only subsidiary indexical aspects. And yet, perhaps because of professional
deformation, the archaeologist so far seems almost exclusively preoccupied with its
indexical aspects: the problem of dating it.

Conclusions
In spite of its length, the present contribution really is nothing more than the prolegomena,
in the guise of a few provisional reflections, to what may turn out to be a rewarding study,
the investigation of prehistoric petroglyphs as pictorial signs. To the semioticians, what
our reflections would tend to suggest, is that a close scrutiny of prehistoric rock paintings
and rock engravings, and a comparison of these pictorial signs to others, more familiar to
us at present, will pose an array of challenging problems, the resolution of which may help
to bring us further on the way to the creation of a really general semiotical study of
pictures. If our investigation has any message to convey to archaeologists, then it could
perhaps be that, by taking the iconical nature of these signs for granted, and failing to
analyse the varieties of its iconical status, they may by-pass some important issues, the
study of which could just possibly help to elucidate, not only the nature of pictorial signs,
and the peculiarities of early picture production, but also some of the distinguishing traits
of early humanity.

52
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

In order to go further, however, it will not be sufficient to read archaeological studies

from the semiotician’s point of view, or semiotical treatises adopting the archaeologist’s
vantage point. We need a transitional language, an inter-semiotic translation, to break the
barriers of semiotics and archaeology alike.

Notes
1
Research into the issues covered in the present work was made possible, and was partially
financed, by a grant from the Erik Philip Sörensen Foundation for Research in the Humanities.
2
This is not to say that semiotic results must be formulated in terms of Hempel’s
covering law (as has been claimed by some exponents of “New Archaeology”): we are
referring to the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic descriptions in the more
general sense of Rickert and Windelbrant.
3
We must dispense here with Peirce’s idiosyncratic terminology. For reasons explained in
Sonesson 1989a,III.1., we will take “representamen” to be roughly equivalent to
“expression”, whereas “object” corresponds to both “content” and “referent”. The
Peircean “interpretant”, on the other hand, appears to be a determination of the relation
between the former two.
4
Not all of Piaget's examples of the semiotic function may really be of that kind, even
applying his own criteria For some critical observations, see Bentele 1984, Trevarthen &
Logotheti 1989; and Sonesson 1990f. Just as it remains doubtful that there is an unitary
semiotic function from the point of view of ontogeny, one may doubts its phylogenetic
justification; cf. Foley 1991.
5
About proper parts, perceptual perspectives, and attributes as different ways of
dividing an object and thus different indexicalities, cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.
6
The case is of course more complicated yet, for that which serves as an expression of
this sign, is actually the imprint, made of plaster or glass fibre, of the imprint left in the ash
by the organic remains. Imprints are a special type of indexicalities. However, if glass fibre is
used, bones will be visible, and may thus serve as another indexical sign of the person of
which they were parts. About this technique, see Renfrew & Bahn 1991: 20f.
7
Similar confusions are found in the psychological literature concerned with
Blissymbolics and other alternative communication system for the speech-impaired, e.g.
Muter 1986.
8
For this claim, cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.1. and literature referred to in that place.
9
Greimas (1970: 49ff) takes another view of this question, which we have criticised
elsewhere (in Sonesson 1989a,I.1.4, I.2.1, and passim).

53
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

10
One peculiar thing about the so-called ecological psychology devised by Gibson is
that it is, on so many counts, remarkably similar to Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy.
Gibson, is has been reported, was very interested in philosophy; he was even censured for
trying to resolve philosophical puzzles empirically (cf. Lombardo 1987; Reed 1988:45).
Apparently, Gibson had some knowledge of Husserl's work. Yet, from reading Lombardo
and Reed, one gets the impression that neither they, nor Gibson have any idea of the degree
to which their conceptions coincide. No doubt, apart form being a good psychologist,
Gibson was also an excellent phenomenologist.
11
This argument is given more fully in Sonesson 1989a,III.4. For the Magritte
example, see Sonesson 1989b.
12
Also Tilley’s interpretation amounts to a kind of symbolism, a notion to which we
will turn below!
13
Elsewhere (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.6.5.), we have suggested that symbolism normally
inheres in things, not in signs particularly created for the purpose, because , the symbol, like
the identity sign, is based on an independently existing object, which has its primary
justification elsewhere, and which is valued, first of all, as a ‘self’. This may be true of the
plastic layer of a pictorial signs, whose ‘self’ it is to convey the pictorial function. However,
symbolism will be used here in an extended sense, to cover also the cases in which the
symbolic function is realised alone.
14
It will be noted that, on this account, many of the signs found in cave paintings
which Leroi-Gourhan qualifies as female, are not only arbitrarily so considered, as Sieveking
(1979:60ff) would maintain, but should in fact be qualified as male!
15
As an example of the use of enthoarchaeology to retrieve lost abductions of the
prehistoric world, and its employment to establish correlations between traces and the
corresponding abduced actions, consider Lewis Binford’s renewed analysis of the Pincenent
site, excavated by Leroi-Gourhan. The regularities which Binford observed while living with
the Nunamiut Eskimos allowed him to show that certain assemblages of bone fragments
found at the prehistoric site were the ‘drop zones’, and others the ‘toss zones’, around the place at
which the craftsman sat processing bone for marrow, and that no complex skin tent around
him had to be supposed, as Leroi-Gourhan had abduced. See Renfrew & Bahn 1991:166ff).

References
Anati, Emmanuel (1976). Evolution and style in Camunian rock art. Capo di Ponte,
Edizioni del Centro.
– (1977). Methods of recording and analysing rock engravings. Capo di Ponte, Edizioni
del Centro.
– (1991). Archetypes, constants and universal paradigms in prehistoric art.

54
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Mimeographed text circulated at the Yinchuan conference, October 1991.

Arnheim, Rudolf (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of
California Press.
Barthes, Roland (1964a). Éléments de sémiologie, Communications, 4, 91-135. Also in
Barthes, Roland, Le degré zéro de l’écriture/Éléments de sémiologie, Paris: Gonthier.
– (1964b). Rhétorique de l'image, Communications, 4, 40-51. Also in Barthes, Roland,
L'obvie et l'obtus., 25-42. Paris: Seuil 1982.
Bednarik, Robert G. (1991): The direct dating of rock art. Mimeographed text reproduced
from the program of the Yinchuan conference, October 1991.
Bentele, Günter (1984) Zeichen und Entwicklung. Vorüberlegungen zu einer genetischen
Semiotik. Tübingen: Narr.
Bierman, Arthur K. (1963). That there are no iconic signs, Philosophy and
phenomenological research, XXIII:2: 243-249.
Bouissac, Paul (1991): Describing and interpreting prehistoric pictographs and
petroglyphs: Steps toward a global visual database of rock art. Mimeographed text
circulated at the Yinchuan conference, October 1991.
Broby-Johansen, R. (1967). Oldnordiske stenbilleder. København: Gyldendals.
Burenhult, Göran (1981). Stenåldersbilder. Stockholm: Stureförlaget.
Chesney, Shirley (1991): Max Raphael’s contribution to the study of prehistoric symbol
systems, in Rock art and prehistory, P. Bahn, & A. Rosenfeld, (eds.), 14-22. Oxford:
Oxbow Monographs.
Deely, John (1982). Introducing semiotic. Its history and doctrine. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Dubois, Philippe (1983). L'acte photographique. Paris & Bruxelles: Nathan/Labor.
Eco, Umberto (1968). La struttura assente. Milan: Bompiani. Swedish translation: Den
frånvarande strukturen. Lund: Cavefors 1971.
– (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
– (1977). The influence of Roman Jakobson on the development of semiotics. In Roman
Jakobson. Echoes of his scholarship. Amstrong, D., & van Schooneveld, C.H., (eds.),
39-58. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press.
Eco, Umberto, & Sebeok, Thomas, eds. (1983).The sign of three. Dupin — Holmes —
Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana Univesity Press.
Ennion, E.A.R., & Tinbergen, N. (1967). Tracks. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Espe, Hartmut (1983). Realism and some semiotic functions of photographs. In Semiotics
unfolding. Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for
Semiotic Studies, Vienna, July 1979. Borbé, Tasso, (ed.), Volume III, 1435-1442.
Berlin, New York, & Amsterdam, Mouton.
Floch, Jean-Marie (1978). Quelques positions pour une sémiotique visuelle/Roland
Barthes: Sémiotique de l'image, Bulletin du Groupe de recherches sémio-linguistiques,

55
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

4/5, 1-16, 27-32.

– (1985). Petites mythologies de l'œil et l'esprit. Paris: Hadès.
– (1986a). /entries in/ Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Tome II.
A.J. Greimas, & J. Courtès, J., (eds.). Paris: Hachette.
– (1986b). Les formes de l'empreinte. Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac.
– (1990). Sémiotique, marketing et communication. Sous les signes, les stratégies. Paris:
PUF.
Foley, Robert A. (1991). The silence of the past, in Nature, vol 353. September 12, 114-
115.
Gardner, Howard (1973) The arts and human development. New York: Wiley & Sons.
– (1980). Artful scribbles. New York: Basic books.
– (1984). Frames of mind. The theory of multiple intelligences. London: Heinemann.
Gardner, Howard & Wolf, Dennie (1983). Waves and streams of symbolization: Notes on
the development of symbolic capacities in young children. In The Acquisition of
Symbolic Skills, John Sloboda, & Don Rogers, (eds.), 19-42.
Gibson, James (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Bonston: Houghton
Mifflin Co.
– (1971). The information available in pictures, Leonardo, 4:1, 27-35.
– (1978). The ecological approach to visual perception of pictures, Leonardo, 4:2: 227-
235.
– (1980). A prefatory essay on the perception of surfaces versus the perception of
markings on a surface. In The perception of pictures, Volume I: Alberti's window.,
Margaret Hagen, (ed.), xi-xvii. New York: Academic Press.
– (1982). Reasons for realism. Selected essays of James J. Gibson, Edward Reed, &
Rebecca Jones, (eds.). Hillsdale, New Jersey, & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1983). Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes. In The sign of three.
Dupin — Holmes — Peirce, Eco, U., & Sebeok, Thomas, (eds.), 81-118. Bloomington:
Indiana Univesity Press.
Gombrich, E.H. (1960). Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon Press. Second edition 1962.
Goodman, Nelson (1968). Languages of art. London: Oxford University Press.
Greenlee, Douglas (1973). Peirce's concept of sign. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.
Gregory, R.L. (1966). Visual illusions. In New Horizons in pychology, 1, Brian Foss, (ed.),
68-96. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Second edition 1973.
Greimas, A.J. (1970). Du sens. Paris: Seuil.
Groupe µ (Dubois, J., Dubois, Ph., Edeline, Fr., Klinkenberg, J.M., Minguet, Ph, Pire,
Fr., & Trinon, H.) (1970). Rhétorique générale. Paris: Larousse.
– (1976). La chafetière est sur la table, Communications et langages, 29, 36-49.
– (1977). Rhétorique de la poésie. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe.
– (1978). Douce bribes pour décoller en 40 000 signes, Revue d'ésthétique, 3-4, 11-41.

56
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

– (1979) Iconique et plastique: sur un fondement de la rhétorique visuelle, Revue

d'ésthétique, 1-2, 173-192.
– (1980). Plan d'un rhétorique de l'image, Kodikas/Code, 3, 249-268
– (1985). Structure et rhétorique du signe iconique. In Exigences et perspective de la
sémiotique. Recueil d'hommages pour A.J. Greimas, H. Parret, & H.G. Ruprecht,
(eds.), Volume I, 449-462. Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing Co.
– (1992). Traité du signe visueal, Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris: Seuil.
Gubern, Roman (1987a). El simio informatizado. Madrid: Fundesco.
– (1987b). La mirada opulenta. Exploración de la iconosfera contemporaánea. Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili.
Gudnitz, Fred (1962). Broncealderens Monumentalkunst. København: Martins Forlag.
– (1972). Bronzealderens billedkunst. Holbæk: Historiskt Samfund for Holbæk Amt.
Gurwitsch, Aron (1957). Théorie du champs de la conscience. Bruges: Desclée de
Brouver.
– (1974). Phenomenology and the theory of science. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Hagen, Margaret (1979). A new theory of the psychology of representational art. In
Perception and pictorial representation, C. Nodine, & D. Fisher, (eds.), 196-212. New
York: Praeger Publishers.
– (1980). Generative theory: a perceptual theory of pictorial representation. In The
perception of pictures, Volume II: Dürer's devices, Margaret Hagen, (ed.), 3-46. New
York: Academic Press.
Hermerén, Göran (1983). Aspects of aesthetics. Lund: Gleerups.
Hjelmslev, Louis (1959). Essais linguistiques. Copenhagen. Second edition: Paris, Minuit
1971.
Hochberg, Julian (1972). The representation of things and people. In Art, perception, and
reality, E.H. Gombrich et al., (eds.), 47-94. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins
University Press.
– (1978). Perception. Second, revised edition. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, Inc.
– (1980). Pictorial functions and perceptual structures. In The perception of pictures,
Volume II: Dürer's devices, Margaret Hagen, (ed.), 47-93. New York: Academic
Press.
Hoffmann, Lotte (1943). Vom schöpferischen Primitivganzen zur Gestalt. München: C.H.
Beck. New edition 1961.
Husserl, Edmund (1939). Erfahrung und Urteil. Prag: Academia Verlagsbuchhandlung.
Jakobson, Roman (1942). Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze, Uppsala:
Uppsala University. New edition: Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1968.
Janson, Sverker, Lundberg, Erik B., & Bertilsson, Ulf, eds. (1989). Hällristningar och
hällmålningar i Sverige. Third, revised edition. Helsingborg: Forum.

57
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Jessen, Edelgard (1983). Die Zuordnung von Mann und Frau zu einfachen geometrischen
Formen im interkulturellen Vergleich. In Semiotics unfolding. Proceedings of the
Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Vienna, July
1979. Borbé, Tasso, (ed.), Volume III, 1443-1452. Berlin, New York, & Amsterdam,
Mouton.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1988). The computer and the mind. An introduction to cognitive
science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Kennedy, John M. (1974). A psychology of picture perception. San Francisco: Jossey-Bas,
Inc.
Kolers, Paul (1977). Reading pictures and reading text, in In The arts and cognition, D.
Perkins, & B. Leondar, (eds.), 136-164.. Baltimore & London: John Hopkins
University Press.
Krampen, Martin (ed.) (1983). Visuelle Kommunikation und/oder verbale
Kommunikation. Hildesheim & Berlin: Olms Verlag/Hochschule der Künste.
Lakoff, George (1987). Cognitive models and prototype theory. In Concepts and
conceptual development: ecological and intellectual factors in categorization, Ulric
Neisser, (ed.), 63-100. Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press;
Lakoff, George & Turner, Mark (1989). More than cool reason. A field guide to poetic
metaphor. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
Laurant, Jacques (1980). Le nu vêtu et devêtu. Paris: Gallimard.
Li Fushun (1992): A survey of the methods of dating rick art in China. In International
Newsletter on Rock Art, no 2; 15-19.
Lindekens, René (1971). Eléments pour une sémiotique de la photographie. Paris &
Bruxelles: Didier/Aimav.
– (1976). Eléments de sémiotique visuelle. Paris: Klincksieck.
Lindqvist, Cecilia (1989). Tecknens rike. En berättelse om kineserna och deras
skrivtecken. Stockholm: Bonniers.
Liungman, Carl. G., Dictionary of symbols. Santa Barbara, California: ABC Clio
Lombardo, Thomas (1987). The reciprocity of perceiver and environment. Hilldale, New
Jersy, & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.
Luckman, Thomas (1980). Lebenswelt und Geschichte. Paderborn: Schöning.
Lurie, Alison (1981). The language of clothes. London: Heinemann.
Maldonado, Tomás (1974). Avanguardia e razionalità. Turin: Einadui Editori. Spanish
translation: Vanguardia y racionalidad. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili 1977.
Mallery, Garrick, (1880-81): Introduction to the study of sign language among the North
American Indians and A collection of gesture signs. In Aboriginal sign languages of
the Americas and Australia I., Umiker-Sebeok, J., & Sebeok, Th., (eds.), 1-76; 77-406.
New York & London: Plenum Press 1978.
– (1881). Sign language among North American Indians. Reprinted: The Hague & Paris:

58
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Mouton 1972.
Miller, G.A. & Johnson-Laird, Philip (1976). Language and perception. Cambridge,
Mass.: The Belnap Press.
Mukar& ovsky!Jan
, (1974). Studien zur strukturalistishcne Ästhetik und Poetik. München:
Hanser Verlag.
Muter, Paul (1986). Blissymbolics, cognition and the handicapped. In Communication
and Handicap, E. Hjelmquist, & L.G. Nilsson, (eds.), 233-252. Amsterdam, North
Holland.
Neisser, Ulric (1976). Cognition and reality. San Fransisco, Freeman & Co.
– (1987). From direct perception to conceptual structure. In Concepts and conceptual
development: ecological and intellectual factors in categorization, Ulric Neisser, (ed.),
11-24. Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press.
Nordbladh, Jarl (1973) Om bilderna som meddelanden i samhället, in Bild & miljö.
Konstvetenskapliga studier, 71-85. Gothenburg.
– (1977). Images as messages in society. Prolegomena to the study of Scandinavian
Petroglyphs and Semiotics, in New Directions in Scandinavian Archaeology,
Kristainsen, Kristian, & Paludan-Müller, Carsten, (eds.), 63-78. Copenhagen: The
National Museum of Denmark.
– (1978). Some problems concerning the relation between rock art, religion and society, in
Acts of the International Symposium on Rock art, Hankø 6-12 August 1972., 185-210.
Oslo: Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning.
– (1980). Glyfer och rum. Gothenburg: Institute of Archeology.
Parmentier, Richard J. (1985). Signs' place in Medias Res: Peirce's concept of semiotic
mediation. In Semiotic mediation. Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, R.
Mertz, & R. Parmentier, (eds.), 23-48. New York & London: Academic Press, Inc.
Piaget, Jean (1945). La formation du symbole chez l'enfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux &
Niestlé. Third edition 1967.
– (1967). La psychologie de l’intelligence. Paris: Armand Colin.
– (1970). Epistémologie des sciences de l'homme. Paris: Gallimard.
– (1972a). Problèmes de psychologie génétique. Paris: Gallimard.
– (1972b). The concept of structure, Scientific thought. 35-56. The Hague & Paris:
Mouton/Unesco;
Preziosi, Donald (1983). Advantages and limitations of visual communication. In Visuelle
Kommunikation und/oder verbale Kommunikation, Martin Krampen, (ed.), 1-34.
Berlin: Olms Verlag, Hildesheim/Hochschule der Künste.
Prieto, Luis (1966). Messages et signaux. Paris: PUF.
– (1975a). Pertinence et pratique. Essai de sémiologie. Paris: Minuit.
– (1975b). Essai de linguistique et sémiologie générale. Genève: Droz.
Reed, Edward S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the psychology of perception. New Haven &

59
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

London, Yale University Press.

Renfrew, Colin (1982). Toward an archaeology of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Renfrew, Colin, & Bahn, Paul, (1991). Archaeology. Theories, methods, and practice.
London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Rosch, Eleanor (1973). On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In
Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, Thomas E. Moore, (ed.), 111-
144. New York & London: Academic Press.
– (1975). Cognitive reference points, Cognitive psychology, 7,4: 532-547.
– (1978). Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization., E. Rosch, & B.
Lloyd, B., (eds.)., 27-48. Hillsdale: Lawrende Erlbaum Ass.
– (1987). Wittgenstein and categorization research in cognitive psychology. In Meaning
and the growth of understanding., M. Chapman, & R. Dixon, (eds.), 151-166. Berlin,
Heidelberg, & New York, Springer Verlag.
Rosch, Eleanor, Mervis, C.B., Gray, W., Johnson, D., & Boyes-Braem, P., (1976). Basic
objects in natural categories. In Cognitive psychology, 8:3, 382-439.
Saint-Martin, Fernande (1987). Sémiologie du langage visuel. Québec: Presse de
l'Université du Québec.
– (1988). De la fonction perceptive dans la constitution du champ textuel, Protée 16, no
1-2, 202-213.
– (1990). La théorie de la Gestalt et l'art visual. Québec: Presse de l'Université du
Québec.
Sander, Friedrich & Volkelt, Hans (1962). Granzheitspsychologie. München: Verlag C.H.
Beck.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (1987). L'image précaire, Paris: Seuil.
Sieveking, Ann (1979). The cave artists. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Scruton, Roger (1974). Art and imagination. London: Meuthen & Co.
Sonesson, Göran (1987). Notes sur la macchia de Kandinsky; le problème du langage
plastique, Actes Sémiotiques: le Bulletin , X, 44, décembre, 23-28.
– (1988). Methods and models in pictorial semiotics. Report 3 from the Semiotics project.
Lund: Institute of Art History (mimeographed).
– (1989a). Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the
analysis of the visual world. Lund: ARIS/Lund University Press.
– (1989b). Bildanalysens plats i semiotiken,. Konstvetenskaplig bulletin, 35, Autumn
1989.
– (1989c). Le mythe de la triple articulation. Modèles linguistiques et perceptifs dans la
sémiotique des images. Contributions to the Fourth congress of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies, Barcelona/Perpignan, Mars-April 1989, to be
published in the acts of that congress.

60
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

– (1989d). Semiotics of photography. On tracing the index. Report 4 from the Semiotics
project. Lund: Institute of Art History (mimeographed).
– (1989e). A bibliography of pictorial and other kinds of visual semiotics. Report 1# from
the Semiotics project. Lund: Institute of Art History (mimeographed). Also in EIDOS.
Bulletin international de sémiotique de l'image, 2, 1989, 3-29; and 2, 1990, 5-42.
– (1989g). Tjugofem års soppa på Panzanis pasta. Postbarthesianska betraktelser över
bildsemiotiken. Conference given at the invitation of the Norwegian Association for
Semiotic Studies, November 1989, to be published in the review of that organization,
Livstegn, 1, 1990.
– (1990a). Rudimentos de una retórica de la caricatura. In Investigaciones semióticas III.
Actas del III simposio internacional de la Asociación española de semiótica, Madrid 5-
7 de diciembre de 1988; Volumen II, 389-400. Madrid: UNED.
– (1990b). Vägen bortom bilden. Datorbilden inför bildsemiotiken, Konstvetenskaplig
bulletin, 36: 14-29.
– (1990c). The challenge of visual semiotics. Review of Saint-Martin, Fernande,
Sémiologie du langage visuel, The semiotic review of books, 2 , 6-8.
– (1990d). Cuadraturas del círculo hermenéutico. El caso de la imagen. To be published in
the acts from Jornadas de semiótica visual, Bilbao, octubre de 1990.
– (1990e). Iconicité de l’image — Imaginaire de l’iconicité. De la ressemblance à la
vraisemblance. To be published in the acts of Premier Congrès de l’Association
internationale de sémiologie de l’image, Blois, novembre de 1990.
– (1990f). The semiotic function and the genesis of pictorial meaning. In Center/Periphery
in representations and institutions. Proceedings from the Conference of The
International Semiotics Institute, Imatra, Finland, July 16-21, 1990., Tarasti, Eero
(ed.), 211-156. Imatra: Acta Semiotica Fennica 1992.
– (1990g). Bodily semiotics and the extensions of man. In Center/Periphery in
representations and institutions. Proceedings from the Conference of The International
Semiotics Institute, Imatra, Finland, July 16-21, 1990., Tarasti, Eero (ed.), 185-210.
Imatra: Acta Semiotica Fennica 1992.
– (1991a). Kroppens byggnad och bruk. Några semiotiska modeller. In Att tala utan ord.
Människan icke-verbala uttrycksformer, Göran Hermerén, (ed.), 83-100. Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell International.
– (1991b). Comment le sens vient aux images. Un autre discours de la méthode.
Conference given at the Université Laval, Québéc, Spring 1991, to be published in Les
Nouveaux Cahiers du CÉLAT, , Québéc: Les éditions du Septentrion/CÉLAT.
– (1992a) Bildbetydelser. Inledning till bildsemiotiken som vetenskap. Lund:
Studentlitteratur.
– (1992b). The semiotics of picturehood. The state of the art at the beginning of the
nineties. To be published in The semiotic web 1993: Advances in visual semiotics,

61
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

Thomas Sebeok, & Jean Umiker-Sebeok, (eds.). Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana

University Press.
– (1992c). Pictorial semiotics, Gestalt psychology, and the ecology of perception. Review
of Saint-Martin, Fernande, La théorie de la Gestalt et l’art visuel, to be published in
Semiotica.
Stern, William (1914). Psychologie der frühen Kindheit. Tenth, unmodified edition:
Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer 1971.
Strasser, Stephen (1967). Phénoménologie et sciences de l’homme. Paris: Université de
Louvain & Bétarice-Nauvelaerts.
Tardy, Michel (1964). Le trosiéme signifiant, Terre d’images, 3: 313-322.
Thürlemann, Félix (1982). Paul Klee. Analyse sémiotique de trois peintures. Lausanne:
L’Age d'Hommes.
– (1990).Vom Bild sum Raum. Beiträge zu einer semiotischen Kunstwissenschaft. Köln.
DuMont.
Tilley, Christopher, (1991). Material culture and text. The art of ambiguity. London &
New York: Routledge
Trevarthen, Colwyn & Logotheti, Katerina (1989). Child and culture: Genesis of co-
operative knowing. In Cognition and social worlds, Angus Gellatly, Don Rogers, &
John Sloboda, (eds.), 37-56. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tversky, Amos (1977). Features of similarity, Psychological Review, 84,4: 327-352.
Vanlier, Henri (1983). Philosophie de la photographie, Laplume: Les cahiers de la
photographie.
Vierkant, Alfred (1912). Das Zeichnen der Naturvölker. In Zeitschrift für angewandte
Psychologie, 6, 299-373.
von Däniken, Erik (1973). Meine Welt in Bildern. Düsseldorf & Wien: Econ Verlag.
Weinhandl, Ferdinand (ed.) (1960). Gestalhaftes Sehen. Zum hundertjährigen Gebutstag
von Christian von Ehrenfels. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliches Buchgesellschaft.
Winner, Ellen (1982). Invented worlds. The psychology of art. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press.

Göran Sonesson obtained his doctoral degree in linguistics from Lund University,
Sweden, in 1978, and was awarded in the same year an equivalent degree in semiotics by
the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. From 1974 to 1981, he
conducted research in general semiotics and the semiotics of gesture in Paris, and was later
involved with general and Mayan linguistics in Mexico. Since 1983, he has been in charge
of the Semiotics Project at Lund University, some results of which have been published in
his book Pictorial concepts (1989). President of the Swedish Association for Semiotic
Studies, and a Swedish representative in the executive commission of the IASS, as well as
in the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies, he is also one of the founding-members,

62
 Göran Sonesson, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays

and vice-president, of the International Association for Visual Semiotics, created at Tours
in 1989.

Fig.1. The prototypical sign and other meanings

Fig.2. Examples of objects used as signs (exemplification/identities).

Fig. 3. One variety of Anati’s ‘prayer’ (from Anati 1976:46, passim)

Fig. 4. The Peircean interpretant as the function picking out the relevant elements
(‘grounds’) of expression and content.

Fig. 5. Signs and their grounds, according to Peirce

Fig.6. Droodles: a) Olive dropping into Martini glass or Close-up of girl in scanty bathing
suit (from Arnheim 1969:92f). b) Carraci’s key (Mason behind wall)

Fig.7. Pictures and droodles: a) Quadrangular face (from Scruton 1974: 204); b) chair
(from Stern 1914:159); c) face or jar (from Hermerén 1983:101); d) wrist-watch or
something else (suggested by von Däniken 1973).

Fig.8. René Magritte, ‘Le viol’

Fig. 9. Conventional selection of iconic traits: a-b) Bakairi drawings (from Vierkant
1912:352); c-d) Blissymbolics; e-f) prehistoric petroglyphs.

Fig.10. Plastic and iconic (that is, pictorial) layers of the picture sign.

Fig.11. Different limits between prototype categories in children’s drawings.

Fig.12. A hierarchy of shapes, derived form children’s drawings.

Fig. 13. An interpretation of Espe’s taxonomy

Fig. 14. A taxonomy of graphics.

Fig.15 Comparison of the indexicality of some different signs.

63

View publication stats