Tracing Images, Shaping Narratives: Eight Decades of Rock Art Research in Chile, South America (1944–2024)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
80 years of Chilean rock art research, from its early descriptive stages in the 1940s to the present-day integration of relational ontologies, archaeometric techniques, and interdisciplinary perspectives, is reviewed. 562 publications are analysed, covering four major regions: the Arid North, Semi-Arid North, South-Central, and Southernmost Chile. Drawing from a systematically constructed corpus, we trace the evolution of research questions, theoretical orientations, and methodologies over time, with attention to regional trends and institutional dynamics. Results reveal a gradual shift from typological classification toward more complex approaches addressing mobility, landscape, coloniality, visual agency, and human/non-human relationships. The Arid North emerges as the primary centre of innovation, while southern regions remain in exploratory stages despite recent advances. Comparison with global research trajectories shows how Chile’s situated approaches—marked by decentralisation, theoretical pluralism, and critical reflection—contribute to decolonial and southern perspectives in rock art studies. Rather than reproducing hegemonic models, Chilean scholarship offers alternative epistemologies rooted in context-specific materiality and historical processes. The review highlights the potential of Chilean rock art research to expand the theoretical and methodological horizons of the discipline, positioning it as a fertile field for dialogue with contemporary archaeology and global visual studies.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it