The Role of Palaeolithic Cave-Art: Estimating Social Investment in Symbolic Expressions Through the Making Cost

Abstract The symbolic expression, due to its social and cultural potential, should make a decisive contribution to the reconstruction of Palaeolithic social systems. Paradoxically, the limitations of the traditional study methods do not facilitate the exploitation of this possibility. In this article, we have presented an initial proposal to approach the study of visual rock art from a different perspective, focused in the calculation of the resources invested in the creation of rock art. This allows us to relate it directly to the societies that produced it and the implications it may have had on them. Furthermore, the use of cutting-edge technologies in this approach enables an exhaustive reconstruction of such processes and, ultimately, an objective, quantifiable, and global replicable system to calculate the exact minimum costs and social investment in Palaeolithic art. Consequently, the degree of complexity of the actions related to artistic production and the number of resources invested in it have palaeo-ethnographic implications for the organisation systems of Palaeolithic people. That is, ultimately, we can infer these societies in terms of structural questions such as hierarchy, inequality, division of labour, or knowledge transmission.