Este trabajo se centra en el tema de la materialidad de las producciones visuales y su análisis arqueológico desarrollado por diversos autores del sur de Sudamérica. Para ello, se presentan dos secciones complementarias. Por una parte, se realiza una revisión sistemática de seis trabajos relativos a este tema, publicados en el presente volumen. Esta incluye referencias y reflexiones acerca de temas, materiales, métodos, unidades de análisis, propiedades formales y conceptos usados. Por otra parte, se realiza una propuesta de criterios relevantes para el estudio de la materialidad de las imágenes, que incluye aspectos relativos a composición visual; representación de referentes; escalas y unidades de análisis; tecnología y economía; contexto, y datos cuantitativos. Así, el trabajo pone el foco en la experiencia actual de develar huellas que la agencia humana ha dejado como resultado de las prácticas de mirar y hacer arte en el pasado.

Over more than a century, several proposals have been made on the composition and technical features of the pictorial recipes used by Levantine prehistoric painters. In this paper all these proposals are surveyed and tested through systematic experiments to determine the technical affordance of pigments and binders in different pictorial recipes. Experimental results were then used as independent analytical parameters employed as diagnostic criteria to systematically study an archaeological sample of nine sites located in the Maestrazgo region (Spain) and their surroundings. Results reveal that out of 112 experimental recipes, only 16 afforded the production of paintings technically similar to Levantine rock art.

Through our research at Bahía Yendegaia on the Beagle Channel in southernmost Patagonia—the ancestral territory of the Yagán people—we discovered the first rock art site on Tierra del Fuego Island. The geometric visual images found at Yendegaia Rockshelter present motifs and compositions analogous to those recorded at other sites on the southern archipelago associated with the marine hunter-gatherer tradition. They also show graphic similarities to the rock art paintings attributed to terrestrial hunter-gatherer populations from the Pali Aike volcanic field, located on the north side of the Strait of Magellan in mainland Patagonia. Both, however, display quantitative differences, which suggest that they emerged from different visual traditions but from the same field of graphic solutions. Navigational technology enabled the canoe-faring Fuegian people to have long-distance mobility and to maintain a flow of social information mediated via visual imagery expressed in material forms, such as rock art and expressions of portable art. Ethnohistoric reports suggest a cooperative social interaction more than a competitive one. This cooperative social dynamic would have been necessary for the survival of marine societies in the harsh environmental conditions characteristic of the southern part of south Patagonia.