Shape and meaning: engraved weapons as materialisations of the Calcolithic / Early Bronze Age cosmogony in NW Iberia

Abstract

This work aims to study the context of engraved weapons dating back to the Late Chalcolithic/ Early Bronze Age, located in the South-west of Galicia and North-west of Portugal. It is assumed that prehistoric and premodern societies experience the surrounding physical world and its forms as full of meanings, and not as simple sets of random entities. The physical elements forming the landscape, such as rivers, mountains or rocks, were seen and felt as meaningful. Thus, the rock art within that meaningful world materialises some ideas and meanings from the communities, which engraved these motifs or, in some cases, even added new ones. In this sense, engraved panels with similar iconography may occur in similar contexts. Weapon engravings in outcrops were presented in an active or passive position. There are some differences in the contextual location of each group that lead to some interpretations regarding their meaning within an animistic perspective of experiencing the world. The first group, which is most unusual, occurred in high altitude places, that is, in the platforms of higher slopes of certain impressive and rocky hills, close to wetlands. Taking into consideration its physical context and the orientation of the weapons in the rock, these places seem to materialise a cosmogony connected to the solar cycle, the stars and the symbolic importance of some hills, that seem to have served as structuring places of the Bronze Age landscape. The group of places with passive weapon engravings is more heterogeneous in physical contexts but are always within an intimate scenario. They seem to relate to intersection areas and several natural paths connecting the lower lands with the middle or higher lands. The orientation of the weapons in the rock is also heterogeneous, but seems to indicate the importance of votive offering to deities of the outcrops, the water sources and the earth.