Semi?3tica de la imagen en Arqueolog?-a: el caso de los a€?escutiformesa€?

摘要

The Semiotics of images in Archaeology: the case of ‘shell-like motifs’. Within societies which do not possess any writing system or another material support for linguistic texts, images frequently are one of the common discursive endorsements of group ideology. The image, as it appears in rock art, ceramics or archaeological textiles, has much to say on how disappeared cultures thought about themselves and the world, as well as on the fight over power that is, following Anthony Giddens, one of the three aspects of social interaction, understood as “the ability to produce a difference on a state of things or a preexistent events course” (Giddens 2011:23). If we want to analyze and study images –in our case, archaeological images-, peircean semeiotics is an extremely useful tool, very able to lay way for us to well sustained and effective interpretative hypotheses. Following these lines, we present hereby the semeiotic analysis of representations of personified axes, known as “escutiformes”, whose presence in the late rock art of Argentinean northwest area (s. X - XV), has always been associated to the idea of sprouting and consolidation of individuals or elites of power that struggled over the control of certain territories and resources, in a context of endemic conflict that affected great part of central and southern Andes communities during this period.