Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression

Oxford Handbooks Online

Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression Douglas W. Bird and Rebecca Bliege Bird The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art Edited by Bruno David and Ian J. McNiven

Subject: Archaeology, Art and Architecture Online Publication Date: Jul 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190607357.013.39

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter develops links between theoretical frameworks in social and biological sciences about the origins and maintenance of durable stylistic traditions of graphic representation, exploring the role that symbolic performance plays in facilitating cooperation and collective action. The foundations of human propensities for coordinating complex social interactions lie in our ability for shared intentionality: we can represent to ourselves the interior lives and intentional states of others. This empathic capacity likely emerged in novel rearing environments of cooperative breeding, where infant survival required discerning and trusting the intent of many different possible caretakers. Trust in many arenas of interaction is ensured primarily through symbolic signalling, whereby communication of underlying qualities and motivations is made honest through costly performance. The authors draw on traditions in street art and rock art to illustrate how graphic representations serve as an important type of signalling system whose design serves to coordinate complex social interaction.

Keywords: behavioural ecology, signalling systems, shared intentionality, semiotics, rock art, street art

Introduction

Symbolic behaviour, including a fluorescence of graphic representation, is often seen as a fundamentally defining feature of the transition to behavioural modernity in humans (Henshilwood 2014; Henshilwood & Marean 2003). There is no doubt that, compared with other apes, humans invest considerable effort in symbolic production. Activities that appear to function principally as complex forms of representational communication designed to coordinate social interaction are an inherent part of modern human daily life:

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression elaborate display, intricate ornamentation, social ritual, mortuary practice, costly sacrifice, artistic expression, and, of course, language are ubiquitous, even universal, features of human life.

However, there are two important caveats to the claim that the use of symbolism to organize behaviour is what distinguishes ‘us’ as modern humans from our hominin ancestors. First, members of our genus likely began to use some, albeit limited, types of durable substances (especially pigments and beads, but also possibly lithics) for symbolic communication long before the first graphic traditions appear in the archaeological record around 60,000 years ago (Texier et al. 2010) and long before anatomical or behavioural modernity (Hiscock 2014; Kuhn 2014; Stiner 2014). Second, emphasizing the question of whether or not humans are more symbolic than any other species glosses over the importance of semiotic processes in other organisms (Sharov, Maran, & Tønnessen 2015). Symbolic-like representations of self, where materially produced signs send representational information to other organisms, are fundamentally involved in the ‘strategies’ that many, maybe all, organisms use to pursue their agendas across generations (Sharov 1992).

Presumably modern humans are distinguished by the degree to which we can pursue our strategies in a mutually understood manner, whereby we can be aware of our own and each others’ mental lives and intentions and can standardize symbolic representations of that shared intentionality to organize collective action (sensu Tomasello & Carpenter 2007). However, many animals use behaviour to represent something other than the action itself as a means to transmit information, sometimes using symbols in the form of extrasomatic materials to represent and communicate to others something about their quality or qualities of their environment. Many non-human primates exhibit complex behaviour designed around mediating social arrangements, some of which is highly stylized and representational (e.g., Boesch 1991; Call & Tomasello 2008; De Waal 2012; Hare 2011; Pika 2015). But it is among the birds, not the primates, where we see some of the most complex forms of symbolic communication.

Bowerbird males build large, elaborately decorated structures that transmit information about their skills of procurement, construction, performance, and ‘taste’ for the purpose of attracting and coordinating the attention and action of others. Endler and colleagues (Endler, Gaburro, & Kelley 2014) report how male Great Bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus nuchalis) construct a courtyard ‘bower’ with a central avenue (about a metre in length) bounded on the sides by elaborately thatched stick walls that open at both ends into large arenas. During courtship, a female stands in the avenue, which creates a forced perspective illusion wherein the two walls constrict her field of vision to a wedge of an arena, which is lined with size-scaled ornaments collected, sorted, and stored by the bower’s owner. Ornament styles vary according to local traditions and reflect the discriminating taste of a skilled suitor. The bower’s owner begins his display by standing just outside the female’s view on the side of the avenue entrance. He then picks up an ornament and enters the arena, flashing it within her field of vision before tossing it across the court to pick up a new ornament to display. Due to forced perspective created

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression by the bower’s construction, for a female in the avenue, the male and the ornaments he flashes appear larger than they actually are. The quality of the overall illusion is a good predictor of mating success, but the rapid flashing of ornaments is designed primarily to increase signal efficacy in attracting and holding a female’s attention. The bower is thus a material vehicle designed to send multiple signals of symbolic meaning: its components represent different things about the bower’s owner, some of which are not directly related to mating success but are instead designed to coordinate the observation and response of a particular audience. The overall form of bower construction varies by species, but specific aesthetic designs vary as part of a ‘cultural tradition’ among local populations of the same species (Diamond 1986; Madden, Lowe, Fuller, Dasmahapatra, & Coe 2004). This tradition must be learned: males undergo a delayed maturation while they observe and practice locally relevant aspects of bower construction and design from older males (Madden 2008). Bowers are thus socially constructed material symbols designed to coordinate behaviour relative to reproduction and sexual signalling.

Despite the fact that many animals exhibit symbolic behaviour, our high degree of meta- mutual understanding combined with complex layers of elaborate social engagement distinguishes us (quantitatively, but probably not qualitatively) from both birds and our closest primate relatives. Moreover, human societies and social coordination are constructed with symbolic representation in astoundingly rich and multidimensional ways that go well beyond sexual signalling. This must have something to do with our cognitive capacity to share intentionality alongside the complexity and expansiveness of our social interactions (Tomasello & Carpenter 2007).

Archaeologists have long claimed that increased complexity of social organization is linked to a fluorescence of stylistic objects and standardized forms of symbolic expression (see Sterelny & Hiscock 2014). Some have argued that a rapid development of linguistic capabilities coincides with the appearance of regionally and temporally definable artistic traditions beginning around 60,000 years ago (Klein 2009; Texier et al. 2010). Others point to sporadic evidence of durable art in Africa and the southern Levant beginning around 90,000 years ago or earlier (Henshilwood & Marean 2003; Kuhn & Stiner 2007; McBrearty & Brooks 2000). Regardless of the timing, scholars tend to agree that art (vocal, performative, and visual) is fundamentally related to more general phenomena involved in an expanding reliance on symbolic representation to coordinate complex social behaviour (Henshilwood 2014; Stiner 2014). And, increasingly, researchers are drawing on theoretical frameworks in behavioural ecology for conceptual tools to approach questions about symbolic expression and the function of material representation (Sterelny 2014, 2015; Kuhn 2014).

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Behavioural Ecology, Human Life Histories, and Cognition

Archaeologists and anthropologists have used models from behavioural ecology to inform hypotheses about variability in human behaviour for more than forty years (see Codding & Bird 2015). Behavioural ecology is fundamentally a theory of decision-making grounded in principles of natural selection: those variants with behaviour that enhances fitness will differentially contribute traits to future generations (Davies, Krebs, & West 2012). But fitness is never absolute: it is determined in ecological contexts that shape the tradeoffs organisms face over the course of lives lived in particular social and physical environments. Fitness-related tradeoffs—indeed individual organisms themselves—are fundamentally contextual and relational (Maynard Smith 1982). Individual fitness is thus a theoretical construct: it is the propensity to contribute to future generations and is taken more as an axiom for organizing hypotheses than something measured directly. Behavioural ecology thus assumes that patterns of behaviour are fitness-related and gets on with the business of figuring out the dynamic social and ecological contexts that shape the tradeoffs and decisions organisms face in making a living. Patterns in those decisions then feed back in an iterative fashion to shape the social and environmental setting—the niche—of an organism. For humans, that niche is densely and often purposefully constructed with symbolic materials. The nature of our symbolic environment in turn affects the tradeoffs we face and our consciousness about them: we can reflect on what our actions mean for ourselves and others via symbolic representations of our constructed niches. We thus construct moral economies around tradeoffs we face and how our decisions about them affect others. We can represent our own and other’s internal, external, and relational lives, and we are aware of that!

Recently, behavioural ecologists have begun to explore links between the evolution of distinctive features of human life histories and our capacity to be aware of and represent symbolically our own and other’s mental lives (Hawkes 2014). This has come about, remarkably, by linking concepts and results from cognitive psychology with efforts to understand the evolution of prosociality and cooperation. A life history is the developmental schedule of an organism, including variable investments in somatic and behavioural ontogeny, the span of gestation, juvenility, reproduction, aging, and number and size of offspring. Compared with other large-bodied apes, humans have similar reproductive lifespans, but we wean offspring early, exhibit extended juvenile periods, and have long lives that for women average more than two decades beyond menopause (Hawkes 2003; Hawkes & Paine 2006). All human children are thus extraordinarily costly to raise, and, because juvenility is so long, a mother’s investment is often split between dependent offspring at different stages of development. Cooperative breeding, in which mothers and their offspring receive significant investments from alloparents, may be the adaptation allowing us to cope with this costliness and, as such, may be the foundation for the evolution of our distinctive social lives (Hrdy 1999, 2009, 2014). Unlike other apes,

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression a human mother’s reproductive success depends fundamentally on her ability to cooperate with others in caring for her dependents, and she suffers considerably without a significant measure of ambivalence with regard to investing everything in mothering. Likewise, survival for human infants depends on their own ability to elicit and coordinate investment from potential alloparents. Kristen Hawkes and colleagues (Hawkes 2003; Hawkes, O’Connell, Jones, Alvarez, & Charnov 1998; Kim, Coxworth, & Hawkes 2012) argue that of the range of common alloparents—including fathers, siblings, other kin, and non-relatives—grandmothers have the most to gain, suggesting that grandmothering explains our long, slow life histories.

Hrdy (2014) and Hawkes (2014) both draw on Michael Tomasello and his colleagues’ persuasive work showing that our propensities for eliciting cooperation depend on our capacity for mutual understanding (e.g., Tomasello 2009; Tomasello & Carpenter 2007). Our distinctive cognitive abilities are most probably a product of unique skills for sharing intentional states with others. Hawkes, Hrdy, and Tomasello all agree that this ability for shared intentionality evolved not as a result of the group-level benefits of altruism (sensu Bowles & Gintis 2011), but when collaborating with others became necessary for procreation and infant survival. This would set the stage for novel ‘rearing environments’ (Hawkes 2014) in which there was selection on infants to be especially sensitive to social contexts for discriminating cooperative alloparental care: among the apes, only human infants live in social worlds where their survival depends on their ability to discern the intentions and motivations of a range of possible caretakers.

For chimpanzee infants, the intentions of anyone other than mother are generally irrelevant or hostile. Not so for human babies, and they can evaluate the social contexts of opportunity and threat within two months of birth (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom 2010). Astonishingly, babies do this by empathetically representing to themselves the interior world of others (Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann 2012). How do human infants, probably even when they are prelinguistic, trust the recursive mind-reading that allows them to discriminate the intentions of others? More broadly, how do any humans ensure trust for cooperation? How can we trust the mutual understandings we share? If we can’t ensure trust, there is no basis for opportunities of knowing together that each of us shares a common goal: the two—trust and shared intentionality—are inextricably bound. We argue that signalling systems involving symbolic representations are prerequisites for human trust, mutual understanding, and coordination in achieving joint goals. Durable rock art is a salient example of such a signalling system, one with a profound record in human history.

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Signalling Theory

Human behavioural ecologists use signalling theory to approach questions about symbolic communication in coordinated social behaviour, with a focus on providing functional hypotheses for the adaptive value of seemingly costly practices and behaviours (Bliege Bird & Smith 2005; Boone 1998; Neiman 1997). Signalling theory in the social sciences has intellectual roots in semiotic theory (Peirce 1934), economic understandings of conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1899), competitive generosity (Mauss 1954), the problem of honesty and the role of ritual in maintaining it (Rappaport 1971, 1976), and questions about how employers can ensure the honesty of potential employee skills (Spence 1973). Signalling theory in biology was introduced by Zahavi’s ‘handicap principle’ (Zahavi 1975), which was initially proposed to account for seemingly wasteful and ritualized display in animals, and then formalized by game theoreticians (Grafen 1990).

A classic example of ‘costly’ signalling is stotting behaviour by a gazelle. A gazelle in good condition will often, paradoxically, react to a nearby predator not by fleeing, but by stotting (a ritualized jumping display), which serves to attract the predator’s attention. This is less paradoxical when we know that a gazelle in poor condition rarely attempts to stot: stotting sends honest information to a potential predator about the quality of a gazelle, thereby creating a bond of trust between two individuals with competing interests, allowing them to coordinate behaviour. Stotting solves a collective action problem. The cheetah can trust that if a gazelle stots a chase will likely be fruitless, and the gazelle can trust that if it can stot, the cheetah will not chase. Despite conflicting interests, both benefit from not having to expend effort in a useless chase.

More broadly, signalling theory is concerned with how and why organisms exchange otherwise hidden information about each other or the world around them (Maynard Smith & Harper 2003). The central problem in the study of signalling is understanding the honest communication of otherwise cryptic information: how can the recipient of a signal of hidden quality trust that it conveys accurate information about that quality? This does not pose a problem if the signaller and the recipient share a common interest in the context within which the signal is given. Two hunters cooperatively pursuing the same animal send quiet signals to each other when one finds a fresh track—there is little incentive to deceive if you depend on that partner to capture the animal successfully. In this context, conventional (low or no-cost) signals will do. However, those same two individuals might have divergent interests when it comes to choosing whether or not to cooperate in the first place: a poor hunter will benefit from being able to partner with a better hunter, while a better hunter will do worse; thus it is in the poorer hunter’s interest to mislead the better hunter about her skill. The better hunter should only partner with those who have sent honest signals about their hunting skill. In this case, because interests diverge considerably, talk is cheap, and conventional signals will not

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression serve to ensure honesty. Good hunters should look for signs of skill that are difficult or costly to fake by less skilled individuals, signs that serve as a reliable index of hunting ability.

This does not mean that signals must be intrinsically costly, only that the marginal benefits of signalling are lower for those who do not actually have the trait or motivation in question or who have less of it (Higham 2014; Lachmann, Szamado, & Bergstrom 2001; Zollman, Bergstrom, & Huttegger 2013). ‘Costly’ signalling is then a bit of a misnomer because high-quality signallers may actually pay a lower realized cost to send a particular signal than a low quality signaller. The classic case of conspicuous consumption, where the payment of high cost is itself the signal, is only one type of costly signalling. Many apparently low-cost signals can also be maintained by the marginal costs of dishonesty. Commitment signalling is often dependent upon such a cost structure. One of the ways to signal commitment is by sending a hand-tying signal in which a signaller changes his or her future payoffs such that if the future action is not taken, the signaller pays a high cost. For example, if a signaller announces publicly that he and B are allies, he pays a low cost to make such a pronouncement but potentially suffers a high cost to his reputation if he fails to come to B’s aid; the public announcement is a costly signal of commitment because the signaller put his reputation on the line (Fearon 1997; Fuhrmann & Sechser 2014). If however, the signaller had made a private agreement with B, he did not put his reputation on the line and could have reneged on his promise without paying the cost. When signals are easily verifiable in the short term, or where receivers remember individual signallers and their pattern of past signals, and respond accordingly, the cost of giving a deceptive signal is imposed mainly by signal observers. This does not mean that recipients must engage in costly punishment of lying signals, as Searcy and Nowicki (2005) or Maynard Smith and Harper (2003) maintain, only that recipients should fail to respond to deceptive signals in such a way as to generate a benefit to the signaller, thus reducing a false signaller’s marginal benefits.

While costly signalling models deal with the reliability of signal production, semiotics deals with signal form and the way in which meaning is conveyed. Signals are generally composed of three sign modes: iconic, indexical, and symbolic. Signals composed of iconic signs are simplified versions of the information they represent, easily identifiable by anyone: a picture of a hand represents a hand; a dog, a dog; a pointing index finger directs the gaze. Indexical signs represent some degree of quality: sound volume in frog calls indicates body size, or the quality of the stroke in calligraphy indexes the skill of the writer. Symbolic signs have meaning that is only understood through the common experiences of the signaller and receiver: without being part of a system of shared meaning, there is no a priori way to understand that the symbol ‘$’ represents a type of currency.

While classic semiotics treats individual components of communication (signs) as dichotomous (signs are either iconic or indexical, iconic or symbolic), more recent work emphasizes the continuous and hybrid nature of signs. Diachronically, signs evolve over time from more or less iconic to more or less symbolic representations, and,

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression synchronically, signs transmit information on potentially more than one mode. That is, a calligraphic letter can represent symbolic information at the same time it indexes the skill of the calligrapher, or a pictogram may be so stylized that it is as much symbolic as it is iconic. Even art, often assumed to have mainly symbolic meaning that is uninterpretable without knowing the contexts of its production, often consists of iconic, indexical, and symbolic elements. The iconic elements come from its form, the indexical elements come from its performance, and the symbolic ones from the cultural meanings attached to that performance. We may not be able to understand those symbolic meanings, but we can make something of the indexical and iconic meanings. We can recognize the skill-based information represented by a bowerbird bower even if we don’t know the specific meaning of the signal as perceived by the female. Likewise, the symbolic meaning of an expertly executed cave painting may be specific to its long-lost cultural context, but the form of the signal carries indexical meaning in the performance and execution: where it was painted, how much skill or effort it involved. The art may also act as an index of the symbolic: the painting may also index the artist’s knowledge of the natural world or his or her knowledge of the ritual associated with the production of the symbol (e.g., ‘I have had a true vision during my initiation, or I have progressed through the stages of initiation such that I know this story’).

Signalling theory has mostly focused on indexical signals, which are derived from performance-related cues. Performance reveals hidden qualities via the differential quality-linked costs or benefits paid or gained by performers, while discrimination of quality often requires standardized indices of performance (Bourdieu 1984). Performance practices and their material corollaries are thus often standardized in stylistic forms (‘habitus’, sensu Bourdieu 1977), not to signal some shared group quality or group affiliation, but, as Zahavi points out, in attempts to discriminate the accuracy of information about individuals competing for distinction:

In order to classify people exactly according to their quality as runners, it is necessary that they display their ability to run in a standardized way. Such a display is both in the interests of the runner claiming his or her running ability and that of the observer who is interested in determining the ability proclaimed. Unless we are aware that the split second difference at the end of the run is the important variance for which the whole display has evolved, we may be misled by the long synchronized and ritualized run which forms the main part of the display. Although the overall variance in a running competition is smaller than the variance in ordinary movements of people, the meaningful variance which separates clearly the ability of one runner from another is more reliable in a standard competition. The performance of the runner has not come about as a consequence of his or her motivation to display clearly that he or she is a runner, but as a consequence of the drive to display his or her personal claim to be the best runner.

(Zahavi 1980)

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Extended Phenotype Signalling

Purely behavioural performances need to be directly observed by others, but, if performance has a material component, information about the performance and the hidden qualities it reveals can be inferred from the material correlates. The use of durable materials in performance signals is known as extended phenotype signalling (Schaedelin & Taborsky 2009). Extended phenotype signalling ranges from simple iconic information about presence or absence (I am here or I was here) to more complex indexical information about resource-holding potential, cognitive skill, or motivation. There are two advantages of a material signal over a purely behavioural one: first, it can provide information in the absence of the signaller’s presence, and, second, depending on the medium, it can last for a long period of time. However, this trades off with a recipient’s ability to link a signal with a particular individual and with the accuracy of its current information—if old, it may not indicate the current presence, quality, or condition of its maker.

Extended phenotype signals come in two primary forms: one as decorations of an occupied site, the other as markings or decorations at unoccupied sites. Most animal extended phenotype signalling occurs at occupied sites, primarily in the form of nest decorations. Birds construct nests far out of proportion to their utilitarian value for protecting eggs and nestlings (Moreno 2012). Some decorate nests with foreign materials: Blue Tit males and Spotless Starling females decorate the outside of the nest with collected feathers, male Weaver birds implant flower petals into the wet mud of the nest chamber in an attempt to attract females, and male Black Wheatears carry heavy pebbles to form the base of the nest in a nesting cavity, an activity involving energetic costs similar to human weightlifting, possibly to signal foraging, cognitive, and manipulative ability (Schaedelin & Taborsky 2009). Raptors (Black Kites) decorate their nests with white plastic objects; such decoration is a costly signal that conveys complex information on territory quality, individual viability, and dominance in social interactions (Sergio et al. 2011). Perhaps the most elaborate form of occupied-site extended phenotype signalling among birds is that of the bowerbird detailed in our introduction to this chapter.

Unoccupied site signalling among many animals consists mostly of mark and scent signals, which function primarily as message boards and territory indicators. While less common among other animals, a primary form of human extended phenotype signalling is at unoccupied sites: public architecture and art installations, earthworks, signage, arborglyphs, and rock art.

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Street Art and Extended Phenotype Signalling

Human extended phenotype signalling can take the form of any intentional modification of a material good, mark, tool, or structure, but we are concerned here with graphical representation and mark-making. Graphical mark-making is a material-based extrasomatic vehicle through which we send signals to specific audiences, especially to communicate and generate shared thoughts and emotional response. Marks are standardized in style to increase the efficacy of signals—the fidelity and impact of information sent via symbolic expression—but their meanings and responses are specific to different audiences.

The simplest forms of durable graphical markings are iconic representations of presence, usually to mark territory or simply to make one’s presence known in a local area. The earliest of these may be handprints and hand stencils, which represent some of the oldest forms of clearly defined durable rock art, produced about 40,000 years ago in caves as disparate as the northern coast of Iberian Peninsula (Pike et al. 2012) and the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia (Aubert et al. 2014). Likewise, with the emergence of proto-writing ideographic systems, the most common sign is a stamp of identity and a date (Houston 2004). Other simple signs may be commitment signals, public affirmations of alliances or relationships that constitute hand-tying leading to a cost to the artist’s reputation or future benefits if he or she fails to follow through. Conventional signs also tend to be relatively simple: marking trees with blazes or arrows to show the direction of a trail, rock cairns, and ‘hobo’ markings that guide subsequent travelers. More complex graphical traditions tend to evolve under competition among small groups of knowledgeable insiders that then expand to wider audiences (Houston 2004).

One good example of the links among social contexts, signalling, and sign production and how it changes through time is the evolution of street art in New York and Toronto in the mid-twentieth century (Bowen 1999; Brewer 1992; Snyder 2011). The tradition began with simple tagging, usually young men writing their names in visible places, often to make themselves known to potential admirers and competitors. Initially, gang graffiti to define territories was to some degree coextensive with tagging, but gang markers became something distinct from most street art: as Adams and Winter (1997) describe, gang graffiti is highly symbolic, a representational form of linguistic communication between groups that serves primarily to mark territory and communicate with rivals, whereas tagging conveys more indexical information about the individual. While gang symbols tend to change little over time, tagging is a competitive interaction for renown among artists (Lachmann 1988). With time, names or logos become more and more elaborate as taggers compete via the production of panels in more and more astonishing or inaccessible spaces. While some taggers stick with identity tagging and compete with quantity of tags and location, some turn toward competition via the quality of production and time invested, producing more elaborate ‘throwups’ that morph into murals (Lachmann 1988). Because the longer one stays in a locale of difficult production the

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression greater the possibility of capture or harm, more elaborate panels indicate an artist with astounding skill displayed at great personal risk. Sonik, a street artist of wide renown, describes in great detail how such graffiti style conveys information about the artist:

[R]egardless where they choose to work, or even whether they choose to use the name and style base of traditional graffiti, [artists are] still governed by the number one word in real estate: location…. Graffiti is all about risk and reward, and how high a risk one runs by doing a particular spot is often the best measure of the work’s success…. A perfectly executed piece in a wild spot shows not only the artist’s mastery of the medium, but also their mastery of their surroundings.

(Neelon 2003)

Such works have classic costly signalling components which emerge from the performance and production represented in the piece:

Perhaps graffiti’s ‘halo-effect’, the means by which its powerful efficacy is fashioned, is created through the intensity of its very production, due not only to its illegality, but equally to the inherent physical difficulty of producing such artworks, without authorization, without permission, in such prominent urban locations. One cannot overlook this extreme and powerful facet of the graffiti performance; not only must the artists reach perilously inaccessible sites, from train tracks and railway bridges to central city locations, but once there they must spend hours perfecting their work, whilst constantly ready to sprint from the authorities.

(Schacter 2008)

As names became panels, panels became masterpieces, and street artistry became an act with layers of deep meaning for multiple audiences. No longer simply making declarations of identity or ownership, ‘writers’-cum-artists could advertise their styles in two simultaneous directions well beyond their ideographic origins: one exploding outward and driven by signalling to a large public audience, the another diving inward to increasingly constrained audiences and driven by competition for renown among other artists. In the second case, panels began to appear in secret places where only other graffiti artists could recognize the work and its master.

Who will see the work? Booming spots, such as freeways, guarantee a wide audience, which is always nice, yet can sacrifice depth for breadth. Work done in an out-of-the-way space has the potential to be much more intimate and hit harder the few people that it does reach.

(Neelon 2003)

In a way more visceral than graphic art displayed out of its context of production, urban street artists can play on environmental settings and durability of placement to adjust the

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression efficacy of their signals for engaging multiple audiences, multiple senses, and varying emotional responses.

Naturally, writers strive to make their work last as long as possible, but a fifteen- year-old piece is a Methuselah. Does the spot a writer is doing have any chance of lasting more than a few hours? If people see the writer’s work on the street on their way to work, have they seen something that won’t last until their trip home that evening? Obviously, it’s nice when work lasts, but there are times when a piece lives fast, dies young, leaves a beautiful corpse, and it’s a good thing…. [T]here are [also] the sensory intangibles of a spot, the qualities that cannot show up in photos, but frequently dominate the stories of the space. Good street artwork has the power to engage all of the viewer’s senses, even if it is an essentially visual art form.

(Neelon 2003)

To become a tagger or a muralist requires a period of apprenticeship to a mentor who seeks out promising youth as apprentices. The apprentice is usually quite sceptical that his work will be individually identifiable and that there is an audience for it (Lachmann 1988). Once they learn the techniques and audiences, they begin by creating a stylized signature or logo unique to each graffiti writer. The more tags they create, the more fame they receive. As they develop wider social networks of collaborators (solitary writers become crews) and admirers, they begin to transform their work to speak to those networks.

Such elaboration of stylistic tradition—from simple identity marks that began to appear fifty years ago to today’s murals of deeply layered meaning—requires not only symbolic extended phenotype signalling, but also shared intentionality: the ability to recursively share each other’s inner lives and motivations. It requires both a means to test the honesty of the information conveyed (otherwise the audience has no reason to pay attention) and a mutually understood theory of mind (otherwise we have no way to represent to ourselves the interior world of others and share that world across generations). There is good reason to think that even the earliest rock art traditions, like contemporary street art, meet both signalling and shared intentionality criteria.

Rock Art and Street Art

Analogies between contemporary artistic practices and rock art have not been lost on archaeologists. A number of researchers have used the production of contemporary images to inform approaches to prehistoric mark-making (Clegg 1998; David & Wilson 2002; Frederick 2009; Frederick & Clarke 2014; Haviland & de Laguna Haviland 1995; Orengo & Robinson 2008). Conversely, Howard Morphy (2012) demonstrates how prehistoric images inform contemporary artistic expression, where rock art imagery in

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Aboriginal Australia is recursively incorporated in contemporary Indigenous painting and ceremonial work. Such practice provides ‘a fascinating window into how rock art may have served as both repertoire and inspiration in the past—for both creating and adding art to extant rock art bodies and inspiring the form and graphics of parietal and portable art objects’ (McDonald & Veth 2012a: 54). Rock art can thus serve as a reservoir of representational value that is repurposed and recontextualized by temporally or spatially distant artists and audiences.

The point we emphasize here is that the ‘original meaning’ of rock art is always contested, distorted, and often lost. Searching for ‘the’ symbolic meaning is often a fool’s errand. However, the indexical power of durable extended phenotype signalling is often maintained, creating new opportunities to create new symbolic meaning: what matters is that rock art can retain its signalling potency because of its valence—its capacity to attract attention—independent of the motivations of the mark-makers. Aspects of the originator’s motivation can sometimes be revealed in a visual distillation of performance, but durable symbolic expression often retains its power as an index of mutually understood quality even when the original motivation is vague or lost. This is well illustrated in Ursula Frederick and Sue O’Connor’s (2009) study of how contemporary graffiti artists across metropolitan Perth, Western Australia, began to incorporate Wandjina rock art motifs in their street murals.

Wandjina are the ancestor beings for many Indigenous people in the Kimberley, more than 2,000 kilometres to the north of Perth in Western Australia. Their mesmerizing painted forms—anthropomorphs with large dark eyes and ‘halo-like’ bands of solid or dotted colour radiating from the head—are found in rock shelters on the estates owned and maintained in ceremonial traditions bound to the figures. For Aboriginal people in the Kimberley, the epic journeys of the Wandjina gave birth to the land, to all life, and to all social organization. Each clan-owned estate is thus defined by a particular Wandjina whose creative journey is concentrated in particular rock shelters (Utemara & Vinnicombe 1992). Clan owners care for and repaint Wandjina figures but claim they are not the original producers; they are said to be images of self left behind by Wandjina, and sacred components of associated knowledge and ceremony are only accessible to fully initiated clan members.

No doubt, graffiti artists in Perth incorporated Wandjina figures because of their mystique: the enigmatic figures are inherently captivating and had long been a source of fascination for an Australian public who, for the most part, did not understand their religious symbolism or the intent of the Indigenous custodians (Frederick & O’Connor 2009: 19). The Kimberley owners were not entirely opposed to the appearance of Wandjina in street art, and some elders genuinely admired the skill of the graffiti artists. Nevertheless, the adoption of the imagery in Perth was contested and charged; it raised important questions about the authority of traditional owners to shape legitimate use of imagery that had been coopted for other symbolic meanings and purposes. The images in urban settings retained their indexical valence, but symbolic contents of the signals—the motivations of the artists to affect specific meanings for a specific audience—were

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There is no reason to think that such borrowing and repurposing are just recent phenomena (Frederick 2012). We suspect that recursive and standardized themes, in which signals that function as indices that convey information (repurposed or not) across distance and generations, will be sustained especially under three conditions: when signals are durable indices of skill or social coordination, when signals engender trust between performer and audience, and when signals facilitate shared intentionality. Rock art is especially effective in capturing all three criteria; thus its potency as both an indexical and symbolic signal.

Jo McDonald and Peter Veth (McDonald 2005; McDonald & Veth 2008, 2011, 2012b) illustrate these processes in a series of analyses of rock art maintained by Martu, the traditional owners of a large region of Australia’s Western Desert. Rock art continues to play an important role in the lives of remote-living Martu: like the Wandjina figures of the Kimberley, for Martu, rock art is seen as the physical expression of ancestral beings and their creative journeys (yiwarra), curated in sacred locales and associated with epic poetry, songs, and ceremonial performance. Rock art custodianship is tied to one’s ceremonial estate and homeland responsibilities and plays a role in the instruction and initiation of younger generations into Jukurrpa—the law, religion, science, and philosophical orientation often referred to as ‘The Dreaming’. Holding or carrying (kanyininpa) the next generation requires provisioning them with the materials and knowledge of social ecology and geography, both physical and metaphysical (Bird, Bliege Bird, Codding, & Taylor 2016). As McDonald and Veth (2012b) argue, rock art is an especially efficacious tool for transmitting those materials and knowledge, especially in the Western Desert where traditional life requires high residential mobility and expansive open social networks. They suggest that the salience of rock art as an index of skill and social coordination is especially pronounced when small and highly mobile groups can coalesce for periods of time in relatively large aggregations (such as the large Martu ‘meetings’ called tjapal). For Martu, rock art—because it is such a durable index of performance and coordination—fulfills the requirements for a range of information exchange opportunities even beyond its specific symbolic context.

We have had the privilege of working with Martu traditional owners for many years and have been able to travel with them to visit prehistoric rock art in many locations well beyond their Western Desert homelands, including North America. We have always been struck by their reverence and concern for rock art that is ‘not theirs’, clearly attesting to its power as an indexical signal to convey shared understandings of performance well beyond the specific symbolic ‘meaning’ for the original producers and audiences. That highly skilled artists expended such effort in training and presentation, enabling them to paint or peck a panel at a particular site, is an index of the significance of that site and those that represent(ed) it. The more elaborate or precise the panel, the more

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 17 August 2017 Signalling Theory and Durable Symbolic Expression uncomfortable Martu are about being there, especially in the absence of traditional custodians. Without knowing the specific meaning, Martu know that the site is important, and it should be either avoided or given great respect. Martu trust that their response is culturally ‘appropriate’ because the signal sent in the art retains its valance; for Martu, the art is an honest index of a commitment to coordinated communication, even if the specific symbolism of that communication is not known.

Conclusion

Rock art is an especially efficacious signalling system. Well beyond its potential as an iconic representation of the mark-maker, in its durability and style, rock art can signal across great timespans commitments to performance, coordination, competition, and cooperation. In its standardization of styles and themes—some of which are detectable in 40,000-year-old representations left in the initial spread of fully modern humans out of Africa—rock art speaks to us about the ways in which we can communicate mental representations of our own and each other’s worlds. The graphic patterns of symbols have power to engage our attention even when we don’t know what the symbols ‘mean’ because their production is an index of performance and social coordination. We know that because we can imagine, represent, and share social intentions with each other, even across generations (Bloch 2016). We share intentionality because we are animals with distinctive life histories that require investments across expansive and multigenerational social networks (Hawkes 2014). Images in rock art can thus be continually reimagined by new artists to share new understandings of what it means to be human.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Bruno David and Ian McNiven for their invitation to contribute to The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art, their encouragement as we prepared the manuscript, and their diligent editing. Our thanks go to an anonymous reviewer who helped focus and improve an earlier version of this chapter. As always, we owe a great debt to our Martu friends and family for fundamental support and perspectives discussed here. Our research with Martu is supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1459880, BCS-0850664, BCS-0314406, BCS-0127681), The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, The Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Christensen Fund.

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Douglas W. Bird Department of Anthropology Pennsylvania State University

Rebecca Bliege Bird Department of Anthropology Pennsylvania State University

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