There has been a great deal of controversy surround the interpretation of prehistoric rock art images. A number of different explanatory models have been applied. What do you feel are the most worthwhile and successful strategies to help us understanding prehistoric rock art?
This is a really interesting question, and I must emphasise that I do not have any expertise in it - it simply caught my eye!
I guess answering this question also depends on exactly what you wish to interpret in these images. For a pragmaticist like myself, the relevant question would be: How can such pieces of rock art be interpreted from a communicative point of view, i.e. can we interpret either the communicative acts embodied by these artworks, or the communicative intention of the artist. But maybe this is not the question is about, so apologies if this answer is irrelevant to the discussion.
One would think that the real difficulty here, from the pragmaticist's point of view, is that one can only make 2nd order guesses about interpersonal communication reflected by a dataset, which is culturally and diachronically distinct - this is a problem I have extensively analysed (in more modern context) in the book Kadar and Haugh 2013. Understanding Politeness. Cambridge University Press.
In the course of my own journey into interpreting/analysing interpersonal communication, I came across cases cases in which the analyst needs to draw information on communicative intensions, and the ideologies/perceptions that underlie such intensions on the basis of graphic data, rather than language. Funnily, good ol' semitics, an area which is considered as 'outdated' by many in linguistics, has been rather useful. I published a short (and not too ingenious) paper on this:
A graphic-semiotic analysis of the Chinese multimodal elevation and denigration phenomenon. Sino-US Language.
I don't know if any of these answers help at all. The topic is fascinating, and I would love to learn more about your research.
Imagine a prehistoric tribe who communicates with shouts one of the people screams, on the wall and points to the bar saying "gr", the rest, do not know what is going on, car throw and kill it, but it takes one and pointing a the line he yells: " ku by da "gr"". Yes, an alphabet could be created. Of course it is doubtful to distinguish the subject level and the metaphor. This person painted on the wall the other phenomes, which consisted of their language. However, to read the word you need to know alphabet, we must associate that letter with the phoneme. Languages differ in this regard, but the principle of learning the letter with the phoneme. Languages differ in this regard, but the principle of learning the association of the symbol and the phoneme which first takes place behaviourally through speech, and letter we have these associations given in the form of thought also had a particular tone for each individual, that is, the inton.
In the symbol there is infirmation, eg. on the kettle symbol there is informatio "note becaouse hot". To be able to read the symbol you must know the content of the information it transist, It should be noted, however, that the content of the symbol can not be understood until we know its informational bacground, i.e. the word "hot note', as most can not read Egyptian hieroglyphics and treat it as just nice pictures.
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