BU Research Blog

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Mirte Korpershoek (PhD, FST) with this poster entitled: Rock art as an environmental archive.

Click the poster below to enlarge.

Rock art occurs worldwide, across societies and time-periods. Traditionally, rock art studies examine the intention behind the images: the symbolism and shamanistic ritual interpretations. In my research, I am investigating whether rock art depictions are useful to understanding the palaeoenvironmental context of the people who created the art. I will compare the images -focusing on depictions of humans, animals and activities/tools- to published archaeological assemblages, to establish to what extent rock art accurately depicts the way of living and environments of the artists. I will also compare themes in rock art from various locations to see whether there are any similarities and what this could mean. Machine learning will be applied to these themes to identify the most common figurative motifs per region. Here I will present the first results from South America: I discuss the prevalence of human and wild animal depictions from this region.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.