PROCEEDINGS of the23rd International Congress on Acoustics
9 to 13 September 2019 in Aachen, Germany

Digitalizing the sounds of the past: the soundscapes of World
Heritage rock art landscapes from Spain and Mexico
Angelo FARINA1; Margarita DÍAZ-ANDREU2; Enrico ARMELLONI3; Mathieu PICAS4; Leslie F.
ZUBIETA5; Tommaso MATTIOLI6;
1
2

University of Parma (Italy)

ICREA and University of Barcelona (Spain)
3
4,5,6AIDA S.R.L. (Italy)

University of Barcelona (Spain)

EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Anthropological studies and ethnohistorical sources show that most hunter-gatherer and early
agricultural societies around the globe believe the world to be ensouled or numinous. This meansthat natural phenomena, including acoustic effects (echoes, for example), were perceived as being
linked to supernatural agents (2) (3). Although the supernatural is everywhere, particular places in
the landscape are identified as being special for transcendental communication. In prehistory, theinformation about these places is lost, except when they have been marked with rock paintings. In
fact, rock art– when it is preserved – is situated precisely still in places where the artist chose to putit. Intriguingly, while experiencing rock art landscapes, one also occupies the same space where theartist was. This placement has particular advantages on the interpretation of rock art landscapes
compared to other types of archaeological features, because the knowledge of its exact location in theenvironment can provide a powerful insight into what lay behind its production.
In our hypothesis, acoustics can be considered as one of the potential key element in the placement,
production and use of rock art. We were not the first to address this issue, but some efforts have been
made in the past to explore, for example, the role of echoes in rock art landscapes or the relationshipof rock art with specific sonotopes (4). In archaeology, there have also been researches about thefunction of musical instruments found in the archaeological deposits associated to rock art panels, orabout the meaning of musical instruments depicted in rock art panels – and, finally, about the use of
the rock art support itself , i.e. lithophones (4), as a musical instrument. Other interesting approaches
briefly addressed in the literature dealt also with the importance of sound and music present in rituals(5:21) (6) (7), including those performed in rock art landscapes (8:650) (9:39) (10) (11:248), see (12)).
It is in this context that since 2014 we have started a series of research projects aimed at exploring
the acoustics of rock art landscapes. The aim of these projects has been to put together a group of
researchers from different disciplines (i.e. archaeology, acoustics, psychoacoustics, anthropologists)
to explore from different perspectives the sensorial experience sought by prehistoric communities andthe potential use of landscape acoustics to produce sounds in the past. Regarding physical acoustics,
measuring the acoustic properties of rock art environments is not a trivial task; it involves handlingand moving equipment over highly demanding terrains (i.e. gorges, cliffs, canyons, etc.), whileproviding sound recordings that are as accurate and authentic as possible. Thus, the foremost problem
that we overcame was designing a compact, small- sized, portable and battery-powered equipment to1

farina@unipr.it
armelloni@aidasrl.it
3m.diaz-andreu@ub.edu
4mathieu.picas@hotmail.fr
5leslie.zubieta@ub.edu
6tmattioli@ub.edu
24214

obtain a full range of detailed acoustic data relevant to our research objectives. Furthermore, thisequipment must meet the requirements of the Impulse Response (IR) analysis (e.g. ISO 3382:2009),
which is the measuring method that we used during our fieldwork data acquisition. This equipment isdescribed in (13) (14). In this paper we discuss the results of our fieldwork in two World Heritage
rock art landscapes, the “Rock Paintings of Sierra de San Francisco” (WHL property 714) in Baja
California (Mexico) and the “Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula” (WHLproperty 874) in Spain.
The Rock Paintings of Sierra de San Francisco encompass an area of almost 1900 km2 in El
Vizcaino natural reserve in the northern part of Baja California Sur (Mexico). It includes more than
400 rock art sites where Outstanding Universal Value has been recognized by UNESCO in 1993(https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/714/). Sites are composed by rock shelters and small caves mainly
located along river canyons. Paintings and engravings are remarkably well-preserved because of thedry climate, the inaccessibility of sites and the low population density of the region. The mostsignificant rock art tradition of this area is the so-called Great Mural style (fig.1), which is known
since the end of the XIX century (15). The Great Mural rock art composition and size, as well as theprecision of the outlines and the variety of colors, make this artistic tradition impressive. The Great
Mural rock art tradition is characterized bylarger-than-life figures of people and animals.
The style is mainly naturalistic although there
are also some abstract motifs. Human motifs
represent mainly adult men but there are also
women and some infants. There are more than30 species of terrestrial and aquatic animals
represented in the rock art such as eagles,
rabbits, turtles, whales, and fish, but themost frequently depicted and in close
association to human motifs are deers, bighorn
sheep (borrego cimarrón) and sand pronghorn(berrendo). There are also a few reptiles
including turtles. The figures are mainly
painted in red and black, and to a lesser extent
white and yellow. The dating of the Great
Figure 1 – M. Díaz-Andreu during IR measurements in Mural paintings has been a matter of debate
Cueva Pintata (photo by C. Villalobos)
ranging from the 6 th millennium BC to the 1 stmillennium BC (16) (17) (18:81-82) (19)(20:94, 337).
The Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basinon the Iberian Peninsula is a large group ofprehistoric rock art sites recognized byUNESCO in 1998 (WHL property 874, see
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/874).
Itincludes 758 sites with paintings in red andblack color distributed across six Autonomous
Communities of Spain from Catalunya toAndalusia. The paintings are mainly found inshallow rock shelters, but sometimes also insmall caves and boulders. Depictions areusually placed on the front walls of rockshelters at different altitude from the ground,but sometimes also in the ceilings of shelters
or in difficult locations to reach. The
UNESCO list aggregates three different
artistic
traditions
possessing
different
Figure 3 – Sample of the rock art traditions inscribed in
iconographies that can be related to different
historical periods, territories and sociothe WHL property 87: (A) Macroschematic, (B)economic realities of the prehistory of theSchematic, and (C) Levantine motifs. (from (1))
Iberian Peninsula (fig. 3). The Levantine rock4215

art tradition is mainly confined along the Mediterranean coast and its immediate inland, theMacroschematic is witnessed exclusively in a limited mountainous area beyond the Cabo de la Nao
promontory in the northern part of Alicante province (Hernández Pérez 2009:68), while the Schematicrock art tradition is widely distributed in different environments of the Iberian Peninsula and evenbeyond in a broader area that includes the central Mediterranean basin (France, Italy, Balkan coast;see (21) (22) (23)). The Schematic rock art is composed of smaller, basic silhouettes filled withpigments, representing anthropomorphs, animals, geometric motifs (such as lines, zigzags, dots), andsymbols (24). In contrast to the two previous styles, Levantine art has a more naturalistic and narrativenature. The size of motifs varies, but they are typically around 10 cm in height. The scenes depictedprovide us with highly relevant information about individual or group hunting activities, trapping andtracking of wounded animals, harvesting (such as honey), military confrontations, combats and dance(including also music) (25). The Macroschematic art is characterized by large, schematic motifs up toa meter high. They represent anthropomorphs with raised arms normally located in the center of theshelter and snake-like figures usually formed by a few parallel lines sometimes surrounded by dots
and short lines and other geometric motifs (26:64-69). The chronology of these artistic manifestations
has been the focus of fierce debate, partly because there are opposing views regarding theNeolithization process on the Iberian Peninsula (27, 28)Macroschematic rock art has been dated tothe early Neolithic because of the similarities between some of its motifs and those impressed on theNeolithic cardial pottery found in caves such as Cova de l’Or and Cova de la Sarsa (29) (30). The
superimposition analysis show that Macroschematic motifs are always beneath either Schematic orLevantine motifs (30:51– 85). It is also thought that the Schematic tradition originated in the earliest
Neolithic but continued into the Chalcolithic and even later (24). Regarding Levantine art many
authors believe it has a Neolithic affiliation (31, 32)although some researchers have claimed that its
origin may be in the final stages of the Upper Paleolithic (33).
The geological setting of both Baja California and the Mediterranean Basin rock art landscapesvery often coincides with deep and narrow canyons where shallow rock shelters’ openings on theirsides offered prehistoric people an adequate vertical support for the execution of paintings. From an
acoustic perspective, this means that sounds produced within these rock art landscapes can propagate
better than in other types of open-air natural environments. Hard vertical surfaces – like canyon walls,
rocky cliffs, outcrops and boulders – can in fact increase multiple sound reflections and refractions,which can make sound travel over a long distance, create prolonged reverberation or strong
envelopment to listeners (34:17). Although it may seem surprising at first sight, this type of rock artlandscapes act like “city canyons”: narrow city streets with large building façades that can heavily
affect the propagation and the perception of sound (35).
What role did the acoustics of these canyons played in the past? Did particular acoustic effects
motivate prehistoric artists to choose specific sites or sectors of canyons to be decorated? Can wecorrelate specific acoustic parameters (such as Reverberation time, Strength, Speech and Music
Clarity) to the placement, production and active use of rock art. In order to investigate this, wearranged a portable equipment for 3D Impulse Response particularly suited for fieldwork in remoteand rough terrain. As sound source, we combined the use of large air balloons of 40 cm of diameterand a portable dodecahedron powered by solar batteries. The research reported in this paper have been
undertaken within the framework of two funding schemes: the People Programme (Marie CurieActions) grant of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ (REA Grant
Agreement No. 627351) and a grant by the Fundación Palarq in 2018. This research has also benefitted
from discussions undertaken in the umbrella of the ERC Artsoundscapes project (Grant agreement
number 787842).

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