Measuring entanglement in material traces of ritualized interaction: Preferential attachment in a prehistoric petroglyph distribution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel network science approach to analyze prehistoric petroglyphs, revealing that their distribution follows a power law indicative of preferential attachment, thus highlighting ritualized interaction in material engagement.

Contribution

It applies the concept of preferential attachment from network science to prehistoric rock art, offering a new method to measure ritualized interaction in material traces.

Findings

Petroglyph distribution follows a power law.

Preferential attachment explains motif clustering.

Method links ritual processes to material traces.

Abstract

Prehistoric rock art is often analyzed predominantly as the product of artists intentions to create public representations of their perceptual experiences and mental imagery. However, this representation-centered approach tends to overlook the performative role of much material engagement. Many forms of rock art are better conceived of as traces from artists repeated engagement with a surface, including with previous traces. For these artists, a potentially more relevant intention was ritualized interaction, such as communion and petition, which were realized as materially mediated transactions with the agencies that were believed to animate specific areas of the environment. If so, we can expect the motifs to be strongly clustered on ritually attractive areas, rather than to be evenly distributed on canvas-like surfaces that would maximize their visibility as public representations. Here we propose a novel way of testing the interaction-centered approach in terms of preferential attachment, which is a concept from network science that describe the well-known social phenomenon that popular agents tend to attract more followers. We applied this approach to a case study of an archaic site in Chihuahua, Mexico, and found that its petroglyph distribution has the form of a power law, which is consistent with preferential attachment. We conclude that this approach could be developed into a measure of the entanglement between ritual processes and products in prehistoric material engagement.