Maritime memoria: navigating Bronze Age rock art

• Autores: Cecilia Linde
• Localización: Presenting Counterpoints to the Dominant Terrestrial Narrative of European Prehistory / coord. por John T. Koch, Mikael Fauvelle, Barry Cunliffe, Johan Ling, 2025, ISBN 9798888571859, págs. 129-145
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Scandinavian rock art, generally attributed to the Nordic Bronze Age (1700-500 BC), has a strong connection to the prehistoric coastline with examples often found etched by bays and ffiords close to the water. The imagery, links these sites to maritime practices essential for long-distance trade and naval warfare. This chapter argues that rock art served as a mnemonic device for seafarers, facilitating the memorization and practice of critical skills for navigating treacherous waters. Using ancient rhetorical techniques such as memoria (articial memory), ekphrasis (to tell in full), and ductus (directed movement), the chapter suggests that these rock art sies were designedto guide and instruct through the movement of people across the landscape, creating ab embodied experience of learning. By engaging with the rock art sites and moving through the sites, paticipans likely built a visual memory that informed their actions at sea. By aplying ancient rethoriacal theory to the rock art, it might be possible to develop new approaches to undersatanding the directional function if rock art in the landscape, enabling us to moveaway from a definition of the sites merely as a collection of images and toward a focus on the connection between clusters of images and sites in the landscape.