Arts préhistoriques : un tournant ontologique ?

Social anthropology and archeology have long been seen as sister disciplines. However, when social anthropology has taken up the question of ontologies as early as the 1990s, archeology did not follow in such a blatant manner. For the study of prehistoric arts, ontological approaches remain few. In archaeology, such attempts face major methodological challenges, which relate to the archaeologist's point of view, the materiality of archaeological remains, the difficulty or impossibility of using ethnography, the polysemy of images, the pervasiveness of the tradition of representation, and finally to the fact that anthropologists have not yet provided a unified epistemological framework. This contribution proposes to portray and analyze past and current ontological approaches to prehistoric arts, by offering a short critical history, followed by a study of the paths taken to meet “the challenge of alterity” (Moro Abadía and Porr, 2021).