On 2010-08-12 06:29, chimera wrote:
So a symbol can relate to a road map, with detailed directions.
This resembles Aboriginal abstract "maps" :
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MEANING OF SYMBOLS

The use of a fixed set of symbols would seem to make interpretation easy, but only those directly involved in creating a ground painting can give its meaning with absolute authority. Related mythological sites, on the traveling route of some Dreamtime creative animal, might well have very fine shades of variation. Again, bird tracks are very similar, as are several other animal tracks. Further, some symbols have a multiplicity of meanings; a series of concentric circles can mean a camp-fire, home, cave, rock-hole, clay-pan, spring, tree or mountain – the list is not exhaustive; a sinuous line can mean a snake, running water, lightning, a hair-string girdle, native bee honey storage, or a bark rope.

LEVELS OF INTERPRETATION

A single design element can in itself have several interpretation levels. Thus-to take a hypothetical example-a circle might be described, in the secular context, as a particular geographical region; become a specific water-hole to a first-stage initiate; be a bundle of hair-string carried by a mythological hunter who visited the water-hole to a second stage ritual man; be extended to mean an object made from the hair-string to a still more knowledgeable man; and have its meaning extended even further to the complete ritual man. Each revelation is made only after the older custodians are certain that the previous step, with its associated songs and ceremonial detail, is fully comprehended by the younger men.


FROM THE GROUND TO CANVAS

Even if an outsider may be privilege enough to be shown a ground painting, it is highly doubtful that any person other than a man of central Australian Aboriginal origin will ever be permitted to understand its ultimate meaning. .To see the geographical locations of mythological events is to gain an important aid to understanding of ground painting and associated ceremonies. It may well be useful to see them in different weather conditions, fully appreciate the mythological associations. Thus, Watulpunyu, a Walpiri Water Dreaming site in the depiction of which there are several circle (representing rock holes) and sinuous lines (representing both mythological lighting and running water), leaps into life when you visit it.
Including Extracts from “The Aboriginal Arts and Culture Centre, Alice Springs “

ICONOGRAPHY IN DESERT ART

A Dreaming name denotes a Dreamtime being, a site associated with that Dreaming and the country surrounding that site. Woodrow W. Denham, Alyawarre Ethnographic Archive

Central desert Aboriginal art depicts the Dreaming of their Ancestors. The artist paints the journeys, actions, sacred objects, designs and sites associated with their Ancestors.

The artists use iconography and abstract imagery to depict the sacred ceremony or the site pertaining to that dreaming.

The paintings refer to the sacred sites where the Dreaming occurs and where the power is still all pervasive. The symbols or signs denote places and sites or the tracks and pathways of the Ancestor. The Dreamings, often painted from an aerial perspective are abstract in form and lend themselves to various interpretations – the sacred and the public.

Widely used imagery includes for example, concentric circles usually represent a group of people or site or place, a campsite or a water/rock hole. These are places of great significance. The u-shapes can represent the sitting figure and the indentation they leave with their haunches. Tracks of the Ancestral beings and animals are represented by meandering or straight lines. Arcs can represent boomerangs. Short straight lines represent digging sticks or clapping sticks and spears. A morass of dots can represent the topography of the artist’s country or homeland.

DOT PAINTING

There are several theories on the origination of the dot-style of painting. One theory is that they imitate the markings for the ground ceremonial paintings. These ephemeral works are fashioned out of daubed dots of ochres and bird down and other materials. Spinifex, bushes, shrubs and other clumped grasses form a dot-like pattern across the desert landscape resulting in a dotted landscape when viewed from above. The Aboriginal views his country – his ancestral sites – from this aerial perspective.]