An audio-visual perspective is argued, where the auditory sense and visual experience of the landscape combine in a vital interplay that is essential to the interpretation of 25 out of about 80 known rock-engraving sites in northern Scandinavia (ca. 4000-500 BC) hunter-gatherer 'mindscape'. Rather than restricting interpretation to the visual, the relationship between rock 'art', rock-art 'site' and the wider landscape is considered as articulated within a socially and historically specific Neolithic (ca. It is argued that there is 'more than meets the eye' when interpreting rock-art. This article attempts to extend the study of rock-art beyond the visual to include the non-visual experiences and perceptions of human beings. But rather than reproduce an unnecessary dualism between seeing and hearing, this endeavor will require us to relearn how to see and hear at the same time through other, complimentary modes of articulation and engagement. In building upon a non-modernist notion of time where entities and events quite distant in a linear temporality are proximate through their simultaneous entanglement and percolation I suggest we might learn what we can understand from tuning into the acoustic properties of the material past. Still, it is argued that sound as a quality of things is fundamental to human sensation - to being. So while the visual is linked with spatial properties that are resistant to change, the aural is connected with the temporal and is considered momentary and fleeting in nature. Moreover, the denial of sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist notions of space-time that reside at the heart of the discipline. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of the material world been over looked? This article considers this question in relation to sound. This chapter suggests that acoustic survey should be reinforced at these sites, to gain an understanding of whether or not sound was a determining factor in their recognition as sacred places appropriate to this cult. Yet most archaeological research in caves of Pan and the Nymphs has focused on the visual characteristics of the sites and makes no reference to their aural qualities. Pan and the Nymphs have special connections to sound and resonance, and there appears to be a reciprocal connection between ritual performances and the sonic qualities of grottos. This chapter considers not only how the visual and aural qualities of these places inspired ancient thought, but how they stimulated or deprived human senses and made individuals believe that they were the abodes of sacred spirits. Their worship, described vividly in the Dyskolos of Menander, required corporeal effort to access the sanctuary, for sacrifice, preparation and the communal consumption of food and drink by the participants, as well as the performance of ritual dances, probably accompanied by chanting and music. This chapter focuses on the rituals performed in sacred caves in worship of Pan and the Nymphs. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.Caves have always inspired human imagination and Ancient Greece was no exception. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece: Heroic Reference and Ritual Gestures in Time and Space. Available for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.Ĭalame, Claude. Online edition of Hellenic Studies 18, originally published in 2009 by the Center for Hellenic Studies. Explicating these examples, Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece shows how the Ancient Greeks’ collective memory was based on a remarkable faculty for the creation of ritual and narrative symbols. Hesiod’s history of humanity was intended to establish justice in the modern city Bacchylides sang the celebration of the Athenian hero Theseus in a present-day cultic and ideological framework the city of Cyrene used the heroic act of its founding to reaffirm its civic identity and the Greeks embossed poetic texts on leaves of gold to ensure the ritual passage of the dead to a blessed afterlife. The Greeks not only spoke of time unfolding in a specific space, but also projected the past upon the future in order to make it active in the social practice of the present. Philosophers have often reflected on the Ancient Greeks’ concepts of time, but an anthropological approach is necessary to understand their practical concept of time as tied to space.
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