Shepherds Who Write: Pastoral graffiti in the uplands of Europe from prehistory to the modern age

Product Description


In a number of significant sites of the vast ancient pasturelands of the Old World, generations of wandering shepherds have left their testimony in the form of graffiti drafted on the rocks, sometimes in their tens of thousands, over a period of hundreds of years from ancient to modern times. The phenomenon is a conspicuous one, and has considerable significance for two reasons. On the one hand, the study of such pastoral graffiti may convey fresh ethnoarchaeological information as to the circumstances of the pastoral activities and the pastoral economy of the past. On the other hand, these signs, which can be often fully alphabetic as well as drawing upon ancient symbolic repertoires, can be of some aid in the interpretation of rock art as a whole genre of human expression, and projected back, in their significance and their modes of appearance, the earliest times of prehistory.


Review


'This volume will be of great interest to researchers in many parts of the world, including rock-art specialists, ethnographers and ethnoarchaeologists.' Michael C.A. Macdonald, University of Oxford'This volume is an important contribution to the study of iterative and dialogical forms of writing and drawing. It is the most comprehensive treatment of these types of graffiti to date.' Professor Karen B. Stern Gabbay, Brooklyn College CUNY


About the Author


Marta Bazzanella and Giovanni Kezich