Making Sense

Making sense of things is something that is hard for humans to avoid. Last week the class was made a great example of this when we watched Dali’s film and then we were asked to respond to it, Rebecca said all of us tried to make some sense from it. Two weeks ago in our blogs we discussed Annette Laming-Emperaire’s two methods of archaeological study. The first is categorizing and organizing all the information in order to make sense out of it, and the second method relies on our imagination and educated guesses to answer questions about the past.

In class on Wednesday we discussed the different ways we currently, and in the past, use symbols to communicate. We do this through metaphor by linking two unconnected things and the viewer has a prior knowledge of what these things represent and the information is filled in in-between. The example we had in class was the bear and the bull which represent different meanings towards Wall Street. When using a metaphor such as this the meanings between the bear and the bull are understood socially. Because the public understands what the animals represent through metaphors, satire, or irony we can indirectly communicate messages

We have no idea if the people from our past were aware of such things as metaphors or not, and if they chose to use them. If this were the case the animals in the cave paintings may mean something very different than what is shown. We will never know what they plainly mean because no one knows what their culture was like or what kind of importance the animals in the paintings had to the people.

There is no clear way to make sense of the meanings behind cave paintings. Since we are not from the time when they were created, and known little about the people living during the time, we cannot decipher the significance behind each piece. Even the outline of the pictures in the caves, and the placement of the art, it is very hard to draw conclusions to why what pictures are placed where. One thing we can be certain of is that art reflects culture and the world around that culture. In that case we know that the forms in the cave paints hold some sort of meaning to the people who created them. There are countless other life forms that the cave painters could’ve placed on the cave walls, that is why we feel the ones that were chosen can serve as a window for us to our past.