Rock Art Research

Since the late 1980s, researchers have perceived compelling similarities between rock paintings from the Chiquitanía region, southeastern Bolivia, and those associated with the Nordeste tradition pictograms first identified during the 1970s in Piauí and Rio Grande do Norte states, northeastern Brazil. Separated by almost 3000 km, the rock art similarities between these two South American regions have, for some time now, prompted the plausible existence of continental-wide networks of Amerindian cultural contact and exchange as early as the transition of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. In this paper, we propose a re-think of the idea that indigenous groups bearing the Nordeste tradition conceptual scheme were responsible for part of the rock art found in southeastern Bolivia by adding biogeographic, palaeoenvironmental, ethnoecological and ontological elements. We aim to outline a complementary hypothesis that may help explain some of the rock art aspects found in both areas, interconnected by the open and xeric neotropical biomes of the Dry Diagonal.