Probing Prehistoric Cultures Probing Prehistoric Cultures: Data, Dates and Narratives

Like all other domains of science, rock art research, which is the main source of data for investigating prehistoric symbolic cultures, aims at acquiring knowledge, that is, at establishing the validity of some new propositions. These propositions can be formulated linguistically in the form of predications, mathematically in the form of equations, visually in the form of diagrams or figuratively in the form of narratives. The propositions produced by scientific research are usually not the result of immediate intuitions such as those pertaining to common sense knowledge, but they are most often counterintuitive. They are obtained through a complex constructive process of which the successive steps can be traced back and scrutinized by the scientific community whose first task is to try to prove them false. They are validated by their resistance to these critical procedures and by their logical consistency. They often have the ability to provide explanations and to generate predictions that yield pragmatic results, and therefore have social, economic and political impacts. The issue of what constitutes scientific knowledge is the focus of ongoing discussions among scientists, sociologists and philosophers (e.g., Psillos 1999). Since the debates between Ernst Mach and Max Planck in the earlier part of the twentieth century (Fuller 2000), and the development of the sociology of science which started in the early 1930s with Ludwig Fleck (Elias 1971) and culminated with Thomas Kuh