The Divide Between ‘European’ and ‘Indigenous’ Rock Arts: Exploring a Eurocentic Bias in the Age of Globalization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Rock art studies are a field of research that includes many different (and diverse) national traditions. While most of these traditions have their own research histories and trajectories, during most of the twentieth century, rock art literature was marked by a certain prominence of European Palaeolithic art. The privileged position of the European record was the result of a combination of factors, including the traditional focus on European archaeology, the abundance of and research support for decorated caves in Southern France and Northern Spain, and, especially, a number of ethnocentric prejudices against Indigenous peoples. However, in a context marked by globalization, a number of developments in the past decades have called into question the divide that favours European cave art at the expense of other rock art corpuses. For instance, new dating techniques have showed that the traditional belief that the temporal ‘origins’ of rock art was in Europe cannot be sustained. Similarly, innovative theoretical approaches mainly based on Indigenous rock art have generated many new avenues of research for the meaning, the making, and the context of rock images. With reference to the history of research, we argue that we need to overcome the divide that privileges the European record in rock art research. However, the favoured position of the European caves is deeply rooted in many conscious and unconscious biases. For this reason, we explore in this paper a number of strategies that can help us to counteract Eurocentrism, including the abandonment of traditional narratives, the focus on the materiality, making, location, and contents of rock images, and the development of new styles of theorizing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".