文章词汇words

rock art岩石艺术

motif艺术主题

style艺术风格

tradition艺术流派

symbol符号

figurative image象征图案

geometric image几何图案

Iconography图像学

naturalism自然主义

aboriginal土著的

informant信息提供者

文章翻译translation

一、澳大利亚岩石艺术的发现过程

Ever since European first explored Australia, people have been trying to understand the ancient rock drawings and carvings created by the Aborigines, the original inhabitants of the continent. Early in the nineteenth century, encounters with Aboriginal rock art tended to be infrequent and open to speculative interpretation, but since the late nineteenth century, awareness of the extent and variety of Australian rock art has been growing. In the latter decades of the twentieth century there were intensified efforts to understand and record the abundance of Australian rock art.自从欧洲人第一次探索澳大利亚，人们就开始了解那些大陆的原始居民-土著人创造的古代岩石画和岩石雕刻。在十九世纪早期，人们并不经常见到这些土著的岩石艺术，并且对此只有一些推断性的解释，但是自十九世纪晚期以来，人们对这些现存的种类繁多数量庞大的澳大利亚岩石艺术的了解越来越多。后来的二十世纪几十年里，更多的精力被投入到了解和记录这些数量众多的澳大利亚岩石艺术中。

二、关于澳大利亚岩石艺术的的三个问题

The study of this art is a relatively new discipline in Australia. Over the past four decades new discoveries have steadily added to the body of knowledge. The most significant data have come from a concentration on three major questions. First, what is the age of Australian rock art? Second, what is its stylistic organization and is it possible to discern a sequence or a pattern of development between styles? Third, is it possible to interpret accurately the subject matter of ancient rock art, bring to bear all available archaeological techniques and the knowledge of present-day Aboriginal informants?岩石艺术的研究在澳大利亚是一门相对比较新的学科，在过去四十多年的发现使这门学科不断变得充实。其中最有意义的资料主要集中于三个问题：首先，澳大利亚岩石艺术的年代。第二，它的组织风格是什么？是否可能找出这一系列风格的发展变化的顺序或者模式？第三，有没有可能在利用当前的考古技术和对当今土著博学者的信息准确的解读出这些岩石艺术的主题？

三、澳大利亚岩石艺术的年代

The age of Australia's rock art is constantly being revised, and earlier datings have been proposed as the result of new discoveries. Currently, reliable scientific evidence dates the earliest creation of art on rock surfaces in Australia to somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. This in itself is an almost incomprehensible span of generations, and one that makes Australia's rock art the oldest continuous art tradition in the world.澳大利亚岩石艺术的所处的年代一直在修正，一些新发现为早期的年代测定提供了依据。目前，可靠的科学证据测定出最早的岩石艺术创作于大约在3万到5万年前。这一年代本身几乎是不可思议的年代跨度，使得澳大利亚岩石艺术成为世界上最古老的艺术流派。

四、澳大利亚岩石艺术的结构和组织

Although the remarkable antiquity of Australia's rock art is now established, the sequences and meanings of its images have been widely debated. Since the mid-1970s, a reasonably stable picture has formed of the organization of Australian rock art. In order to create a sense of structure to this picture, researchers have relied on a distinction that still underlies the forms of much indigenous visual culture-a distinction between geometric and figurative elements. Simple geometric repeated patterns-circles, concentric circles, and lines-constitute the iconography (characteristic images) of the earliest rock-art sites found across Australia. The frequency with which certain simple motifs appear in these oldest sites has led rock-art researchers to adopt a descriptive term-the Panaramitee style-a label which takes its name from the extensive rock pavements at Panaramitee North in desert South Australia, which are covered with motifs pecked into the surface. Certain features of these engravings lead to the conclusion that they are of great age-geological changes had clearly happened after the designs had been made and local Aboriginal informants, when first questioned about them, seemed to know nothing of their origins. Furthermore, the designs were covered with "desert varnish," a glaze that develops on rock surfaces over thousands of years of exposure to the elements. The simple motifs found at Panaramitee are common to many rock-art sites across Australia. Indeed, sites with engravings of geometric shapes are also to be found on the island of Tasmania, which was separated from the mainland of the continent some 10,000 years ago.尽管现在这一的引人注目的古迹被人们发现，但是人们对于这些岩石图像的产生的时间顺序和含义存在着广泛的争议。二十世纪七十年代中期以来，一种合理的稳定描写形成了了澳大利亚岩石艺术的组织结构。研究人员通过区分岩石艺术图案中的几何元素和象征元素来研究其结构，这一区分依然普遍存在于当地视觉文化中的。简单的几何重复图案-圆、同心圆和线条组成了在澳大利亚发现的最早期岩石艺术遗址的图像。这一特定的艺术主题在这些古老的遗址上的频繁出现让岩石艺术研究人员采用了一个描述性的术语-Panaramite风格-一个因Panaramitee（位于澳大利亚南部沙漠的北部）广阔的岩石路面而得名的称号-这些岩石的表面都刻有这些主题。这些雕刻的某些特征可以得出结论：他们年代久远。很明显在图样被雕刻之后发生了地质变化而且当地的土著的博学者被第一次问道这些雕刻时，似乎对他们的起源一无所知。此外，这些雕刻图案被沙漠岩漆所覆盖，沙漠漆岩是岩石表面经过数千年的暴露于自然环境形成的光滑面。实际上有几何图形的雕刻在塔斯马尼亚岛也有发现，塔斯马尼亚岛1万年前就从澳大利亚大陆分离了出去。

五、澳大利亚岩石艺术风格的变化顺序

In the 1970s when the study of Australian archaeology was in an exciting phase of development, with the great antiquity of rock art becoming clear. Lesley Maynard, the archaeologist who coined the phrase "Panaramitee style," suggested that a sequence could be determined for Australian rock art, in which a geometric style gave way to a simple figurative style (outlines of figures and animals), followed by a range of complex figurative styles that, unlike the pan-Australian geometric tradition tended to much greater regional diversity. While accepting that this sequence fits the archaeological profile of those sites, which were occupied continuously over many thousands of years， a number of writers have warned that the underlying assumption of such a sequence-a development from the simple and the geometric to the complex and naturalistic-obscures the cultural continuities in Aboriginal Australia, in which geometric symbolism remains fundamentally important. In this context the simplicity of a geometric motif may be more apparent than real. Motifs of seeming simplicity can encode complex meanings in Aboriginal Australia. And has not twentieth-century art shown that naturalism does not necessarily follow abstraction in some kind of predetermine sequence?在20世纪七十年代澳大利亚考古蓬勃发展的阶段，随着大量岩石艺术的出现，考创造了词组"Panaramitee 风格"的古学家莱斯利o梅纳德认为澳大利亚岩石艺术的发展顺序可以这样确定下来:几何风格被简单的象征风格（人物和动物的轮廓）所替代，随后又被一系列复杂的象征风格所替代，这种复杂的象征风格不同于泛澳洲的几何图案，它有着巨大的地区差异性。澳大利亚岩石艺术的这一发展顺序和这些广泛存在着岩石艺术地区的考古资料相一致。一些学者警告说，这一顺序隐含的假设（从简单的和几何图案发展到复杂的自然主义图案）隐藏了原始澳大利亚文化上的连续性，在原始澳大利亚，几何的符号体系一直是非常重要的。在这一背景下，几何主题的图案的简单性很可能比真是的东西更明显。在原始澳大利亚，看似简单的图案也能包含复杂的含义。20世纪的艺术难道还没有表明自然主义并不需要遵循某种抽象的顺序吗？