Articles by Lioudmila Iakovleva

Paleolithic art is a fundamental tool for the understanding of prehistoric societies. The relationships between paleolithic art and archaeological sites have been investigated and show the existence of nearly all the types of artistic expressions (sculptures, paintings, engravings, drawings, clay modelling, mammoth bone assemblages, etc.) in various sites like rock shelters, open-air sites, burials, deep caves, open caves and rock open-air sites. Unfortunately, old discoveries and tourism have destroyed in most cases the relationship between mobiliar and cave art with archaeological structures, limiting to recent discoveries the capability of a global approach. The different interpretative theories of prehistoric art since XIX century have been remembered both for symbolic explanations (Reinach, Breuil, Bégouen, Raphaêl, Laming-Emperaire, Leroi-Gourhan, Sauvet, Vialou, Clottes) and for social explanations (Efimenko, Abramova, Semenov, Iakovleva, Sieveking, Conkey, Bahn), and their revision due to the recent 14C AMS dates directly obtained on paintings made by charcoal. The critical question of the building of a reliable chronological framework is discussed. A method to study prehistoric art is then proposed, in five main steps: Step 1: Acquisition (recording); Step 2: Acquisition (signs, species and scenes determination); Step 3: Structuring (craftsmen workflow: space selection, physical-chemical studies, stylistic analysis, panel organization); Step 4: Structuring (chronological and spatial organization of the decorated space, relationships between the decorated space and the territory of hunters-gatherers); Step 5: Modelling (the craft system, the social system and the symbolic system of the hunter-gatherer society).

Preliminary results of a project for the reconstruction of a mammoth bone paleolithic dwelling are discussed. The graphical object management software package ArcInfo was used to create two different databases: the first one, for the bone icone database, the second one for the identification and localisation of bone architectural artifacts, extracted from the excavation books and graphical plan drawings. The potential of the system for understanding the dwelling architecture through 2D visualization and 3D reconstruction is discussed.