Table of Contents

1. Contemporary approaches to rock art in South America: introductory remarks; 2. The materiality of rock art. Image-making technology and economy viewed from Patagonia; 3. Rock art and technology. A spatio-temporal proposal from the upper basin of the Limari river, north central Chile; 4. Rock art in the construction of landscape, Parguaza river basin, Venezuela; 5. Memory in the stone. Rock art landscape at Cerro Colorado as a negotiation space for social memory; 6. Signs in the desert: geoglyphs as cultural system and ideology (northern Chile); 7. Capivara (north-east Brazil) and the Limari Basin (Chile): a semiotic tale of two rock art landscapes; 8. Exploring rock paintings, engravings and geoglyphs of the Atacama Desert through materiality, style, and agency; 9. Hunting scenes in Cueva de las Manos: style, content, and chronology (Rio Pinturas, Santa Cruz, Patagonia); 10. Rock art assemblages in north central Chile: materials and practices through history; 11. Ethnogeology of rock art? Some considerations derived from Amazonianist ethnographies

About the Author

Andrés Troncoso gained his Archaeology degree at the Universidad de Chile, and PhD in Archaeology at Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He also was a Postdoctoral visiting Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universidad de Chile. He has directed several projects in Chile funded by the Chilean National Fund for Science and Technology (FONDECYT), National Geographic, and Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others. His research focuses on the way in which rock art was engaged in the social reproduction of past communities and in the construction of landscape along History, developing comparative studies. Andrés has published books and several articles on Chilean prehistory, rock art, the Inkas, and landscape archaeology.

Felipe Armstrong gained his degree in Archaeology from the Universidad de Chile, and holds a Master in Comparative Art and Archaeology from the UCL Institute of Archaeology, same institution where he is currently completing his PhD in Archaeology. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology of Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile). Felipe has worked on rock art from North-Central Chile, assessing its role in the configuration of social and collective memory, and in the relational and sensorial fields of pre-Hispanic communities. He also works on Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) anthropomorphic objects, assessing their role in the embodied world experiences of late prehistoric and early historic islanders.

George Nash is a Research fellow and former lecture at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, and Associate Professor at the Museum of Prehistoric Art (Quaternary and Prehistory Geosciences Centre, Maçao, Portugal [IPT]). Dr Nash has undertaken extensive fieldwork in Brazil and central Chile and is currently involved in rock art research in Israel and Mongolia.