The integration of the experimental archaeology and the spatial analysis for a statistical approach to the study of prehistoric art

The main aim of this research is to reconstruct the production sequence that has led to the creation of mobiliar art objects engraved on limestone blanks coming from the Mesolithic site of Cocina cave's (Valencia, Spain)(Salazar D.C., Garcia Puchol O., 2017). This aim will be attempt through the experimental approach based on the principles of the Experimental Archaeology. This kind of approach started in the 60s of the last century under the theoretical input of the New Archeology (Binford L.R., 1972). The experimental protocol is constituted by a series of procedures, repeatable wherever and by whomsoever, by ensuring that the result can be verified in every context. The experiments obtained represent what is defined a "reference comparative", useful to provide hypothesis on the actions that contributed to the creations of the archaeological. In our case study, the comparison phase between the experimental and the archaeological objects is undertaken by the microscopic analysis of the engraved. These traits act as a "fingerprint" of the instrument that produced them, and, indirectly illustrate the hand that made it (Adams, J.L.2013). A series of trials were carried out by groups of people from different age, ethnic and cultural background. All the experimenters created a series of lines on limestone using lithic tools similar to the archaeological tones. No rules were imposed for experimentation, but everyone had the "artistic" freedom to fill the area of the limestone blanks in the way they preferred. All the experimentations have been documented taking notes of: the support used, the working tool used, the ordered sequence of the engraved lines and their typology (vertical, horizontal, oblique). After this experimental work, we started studying the arrangement of the lines within the experimental samples in terms of space and engravings time execution. The aim is to establish statistically how the individual exploit the "artistic" space and whether there were differences based on age, sex or Culture. A software that combines the experimental archaeological analysis and the spatial study of the artistic surface is being developed in Python (Downey A.D., 2012). The main objective of this software is to collect the data for the statistical analysis, extracting all the necessary features from high resolution images of the experimental objects via a semi-automatic procedure. To this end a simple and intuitive graphical user interface has been designed, which will allow to extract a description of the scratch in terms of equations of straight lines.The images are acquired following a simple protocol which allows the software to auto calibrate (Hartley R,Zisserman A., 2003), and translate the equation from an image reference frame to a metric world reference frame, so that all the data are expressed in the same unit of measure. The data collected with the software that we are developing will be fed to statistical analysis routines that will be developed using classical statistical analysis environments like R and/or the python libraries Pandas and Scipy.