Resumen de Towards a more rigorous definition of terms: are there scenes in European Palaeolithic art?
Taking well-known examples of rock art from the European Palaeolithic, the paper puts forward new definitions of established terms like "composition", "juxtaposition", "association" and "scene", based not on pragmatic considerations but on a Reception Theory analysis of perception, i.e. how we actually ¿see¿ rock art. Of course this raises questions regarding the objectivity of everyday perception and, specifically, of perception of visual representations. The issue of Palaeolithic scenes is a problematical one, but I argue there are such scenes, though not necessarily those usually identified as such. On the basis of an initial discussion of "composition", the paper puts forward criteria for distinguishing between representational juxtapositions, associations and scenes, arguing for greater theoretical rigour in rock art discourse
