Could petroglyphs be graffitti?

Question

As vital as they are to exploring previous cultures and ages, couldn't cave drawings be the result of civil unrest as is the graffitti of today. If so what importance will the graffitti of today play in the exploration of our culture thousands of years from now.

Answer 1

Although grafitti could be interpretted as mere artistic expression and not a form of social rebellion, cave painting and petroglyphs were not created within that social context.

Humans from 25 000 years ago did not have a lot of spare time for trivial pursuits.  The level of artistry displayed often surpasses anything a common person could achieve now!

These activities had significant cultural meaning to the artists along the same importance that a modern person would place in building a local church or temple.  These paintings aided the hunt or fertility and were considered important for the entire groups benefit and survival.

Life was a struggle just to survive back then and the time it took to create lasting works of art was a significant outlay of resources and effort.  (ie it was not just a quick stop for spray paint between visiting the ATM machine and working at Starbucks....not that there is anything wrong with Starbucks.)

In order for there to be civil unrest, there first has to be civilization in the urban sense.  Prehistoric societies by definition are not urban.

Modern grafitti will likely be overlooked by future archeologists and anthropologists as a very minor form of twenty first century expression.

Don't forget that surviving grafitti from pyramids and ancient walls and frescoes only stands out today because early societies were so relatively illiterate.  So little survives that even graffitti is considered important.

Modern society churns out so much content, that no future social scientist will be able to process more than a small fraction of what remains.  just like there are no contemporary people who know everything about everything in every language or idom, I suspect Graffitti will likely be viewed when it is viewed at all, like the unimportant distraction that we see it as!

Advertising or even rap sung by hill billies will be better represented!

Answer 2

graffiti won't last long--it's paint and on buildings that will crumble in a few decades if unmaintained. no one will see it.

cave drawings had an importance that we don't know about (and it's not a magical rite before the hunt, you think?) they spent plenty of time finding the minerals and grinding them to make paints. now petroglyphs are even harder to figure out--just think of the work they took and some of them are in places that are almost inaccessible.

our forebears didn't have time for social unrest--they were lucky to reach 30 years of age. a teenager today would have been middle-aged then, but now there is a teen culture (never had one before world war 2) that thinks it is the most important age group and tell the rest of the world what's cool or not cool.

would you like your house defaced by kids with paint bombs?

why not decorate buildings instead, with scenes of nature and portraits of inspiring people?

Answer 3

not exactly what you asked about, but ancient graffiti is often very important. a few languages are known only from graffitti.  the sinai script, from which our alphabet comes, is only known from graffitti. unfortunatly, most mo0dern graffitti will not last very long. but i believe it will play a very big part in future art history.

Answer 4

yup

Answer 5

Yes I am sure of it. Most of it probably is unless it is decifered to be accounting or marking of goods and ownership. There is evidence of Graffitti in many ancient forms of writting all over the world and it stands to reason that petroglyphs would as well.

Workers in Egypt use to use Graffitti to talk c**p about or praise their work bosses. Romans used Latin to make political statements. For all we know two rival groups could have had a bit of a competition and were doing the petroglyphs to say "We were here" louder than the other "Graffitti" they found there.

To me Petroglyphs are just a another language on the path to the sophisticated ones we use to day and so logically all other "written" languages have examples of graffitti, it seems highy probable that petroglyphs though more primitive would also be used for graffitti.

Answer 6

I doubt they were the result of social unrest. The purpose of graffiti is to offend people, and I just don't understand how drawing a bison on a cave wall would offend anybody.

But I do think that modern graffiti might have an impact on how future societies see us. That's a very interesting concept.