A Horse Depiction from the Poylovo Rock Art Site (Minusinsk Basin): Technological and Stylistic Features

Abstract

In most cases when researcher starts working on rock art site he can approximately attribute petroglyphs to some periods. Often we can say if stylistic is archaic or quite recent. But images without any special chronological features are very common too. And every scholar has an experience of attempts to classify and date this kind of depictions. This paper is focused on one petroglyph from the site Poylovo, which can be assigned to this category of images. This rock art site is situated near the self-titled village in Kuragino region of Krasnoyarsk territory. The depiction in the same time has archaic and recent features and it is located in quite complicated context on the panel with calcite. In this paper we propose one of the possible ways to work with such ambiguous and complicated depictions. It’s about combining technological features and surface context analysis with tracing of natural and artificial modification of rock surface. The result gives basis for discussion and for analogies search.