Abstract

Current ethnographic records show that different communities of the south-central Andes continue to actively use some sites with rock art or paintings, revealing a continued use of those places over many centuries. Rituals, sacrifices and other ceremonies have been recorded there, and in some cases, new and modern images are still being inscribed on the rock walls or the slopes of some hills. As shown by various data collected from the sixteenth century to the present, rock art is not only to be “looked at”, but it also involves acts of movement, music, and, frequently, the use of ritual drink. It is also part of an ontology in which the visual aspect is one of its constituting elements of understanding and organization of the world. The paintings “say” or “give” messages; they can communicate with site-goers. Hence, an initial proposal is presented here that aims to acknowledge an ontological status characteristic of the Andean “looking” or “seeing”, which is, in turn, engaged in a context of multi-sensoriality and the use of complex semiotics to produce the meaning and the resulting activation of the narratives of the memory. Numerous accounts collected in the south of Peru, the highlands of Bolivia, and the north of Chile and Argentina (the South Andes), show that for the contemporary Andean populations these images are active records linked both to the memory of things past and to present situations deemed important by these communities. These accounts suggest that for some of these contemporary communities, paintings are also part of their cultural legacy (this “was left to us by the Incas”).