Mark Sapwell
Ph.D Student
Email Me: mas218@cam.ac.uk
Webpage
Thesis Title: Thinking through Images: examining the role of art in Late Mesolithic to Early Bronze Age Fennoscandia
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Current Research
The main aim of my current research is to explore how ideas are developed and changed through the use of visual culture. Many groups of people of differing subsistence strategies and social organisations neighboured each other within prehistoric northern Europe and these groups were involved in various forms of contact and exchange on differing scales. Such extensive networks of interaction were made possible by the river and lake systems of Fennoscandia, which are often punctuated by immense landscapes of rock art. My research explores how the making and viewing of these rock images is actively involved in the formulation and reformulation of ideas of the world, and linked with the many changes in material culture that we see from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age.
The study concentrates on Zalavruga in Karelia, north western Russia and Nämforsen in Norrland, north Sweden, which are extensive rock art landscapes which were used and re-used over a long period of time. Using G.I.S. analysis at varying scales, photogrammetry and comparisons with the surrounding archaeology, I explore how the changing appearance and composition of the rock art images infer an historical environment where opinions of the world and people are created, perpetuated, challenged and reformed.
I aim for this research to contribute new methods and considerations for examining the compositions of rock images, using G.I.S software as a valuable thinking tool. I aim also to increase the significance of visual culture in interpretations of prehistoric society and in people's lives today, by viewing art as an active and powerful means of changing the way others think of the world and themselves.