Predation, Propitiation and Performance: Ethnographic Analogy in the Study of Rock Paintings from the Lower Parguaza River Basin, Bolivar State, Venezuela

Rock art sites located in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples offer extraordinary opportunities for interpretation using ethnographic analogy. Nonetheless, we must examine the pertinence of a direct historical approach when dealing with sequences of rock art that may extend back several millennia. Recent decades have witnessed increasingly sophisticated ethnographic analyses that reveal the intimate relations between human and non-human entities and the generative role of myth, music, dance, artifacts, and physical settings in the enactment of creative contexts of lowland South America. This literature has led to a reassessment of the meaning of rock art images, the significance of context, and the place of sites in the landscape. In the pictographs found in several rock shelters on the lower Parguaza River of Venezuela, depictions of a wide variety of human and non-human figures offer insight into the relations between predation, propitiation, food, illness, and the different paths to spiritual knowledge that prevail in the myths and practices of local indigenous populations to this day. In this contribution we explore the promise and limits of ethnographic analogy in the study of sites from this area and offer an analysis of the development of the sites through time, with an eye on both disruption and continuity.