SIGNBASE: A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO ABSTRACT SIGNS IN THE PALEOLITHIC

In the Paleolithic around 100,000 to 10,000 years ago, abstract motives also referred to as signs, patterns, or marks are abundant in parietal art as well as on mobile objects. In the case of parietal art, several studies have been dealing with such abstract signs. However, studies scrutinizing signs on mobile objects, such as figurines, tools, or personal ornaments, are rare and mostly limited to either single objects, or to particular assemblages. Our project SignBase aims to enable large-scale comparisons by collecting abstract motives on mobile objects from all over the European Paleolithic, the African Middle Stone Age, as well as further finds of the Near East and South East Asia. In contrast to the chronological difficulties of dating parietal art, abstract motives on mobile objects are usually well dated, at least with reference to the given techno-complexes. Our project ultimately aims to enable quantitative comparative studies on the development of abstract graphical expressions before the emergence of writing systems. This includes the application of classification algorithms allowing us to study the signs in geographical and chronological dimensions. Furthermore, while any inference about their meaning is inevitably speculative, information-theoretic analyses can shed light on the evolution of their information encoding potential and compare it to later graphical behavior such as early written language.