Metanarratives and the (re)invention of the

Rock-art reflects cultural narratives and is influential as a medium in the invention of narratives. Images found in South-Central Indian rock-art are particularly useful in considering archaeological tran-sitions. Rock-art here shows a chronology spanning the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Megalithic, Historic, and Modern times. Imagery reflects changing human/animal relationships, from ‘agile ’ hunted animals to cattle and its domestication, with rock-art an active medium in the creation of new metanarratives focused obsessively upon bulls. While bulls in the singular appear early, later compositional elements imply a growing concern with ideas of herds as interconnecting communities. Through time, panels were focal points for the addition of subsequent anthropomorphic imagery, further reinventing the Neolithic. A Historic period efflorescence of densely applied rock-art at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016jsa.sagepub.comDownloaded from 356 Journal of Social Archaeology 8(3) perhaps reflects an appropriation of a locality redolent with the past as new mythologies were invented in the ancestral association with the now millennia-old Neolithic rock-art. KEY WORDS India ● invention ● Mesolithic ● narrative ● Neolithic ● rock-art ● transition One aspect of rock-art is its narrative quality: rock-art can provide visualnarratives fixed in particular places, made in particular times by particular people (Chippindale, 2001; Chippindale and Nash, 2004). These images may express core ideological concepts that sustain, differentiate, or define people in relationship to each other (Hudson and Lee, 1984; Robinson, 2006; Schaafsma, 2000); equally, rock-art may express peoples’ concepts of, and relationships to, the landscape, the environment, and othe