  Prehistoric rock art is often analyzed predominantly as the product of
artists intentions to create public representations of their perceptual
experiences and mental imagery. However, this representation-centered approach
tends to overlook the performative role of much material engagement. Many forms
of rock art are better conceived of as traces from artists repeated engagement
with a surface, including with previous traces. For these artists, a
potentially more relevant intention was ritualized interaction, such as
communion and petition, which were realized as materially mediated transactions
with the agencies that were believed to animate specific areas of the
environment. If so, we can expect the motifs to be strongly clustered on
ritually attractive areas, rather than to be evenly distributed on canvas-like
surfaces that would maximize their visibility as public representations. Here
we propose a novel way of testing the interaction-centered approach in terms of
preferential attachment, which is a concept from network science that describe
the well-known social phenomenon that popular agents tend to attract more
followers. We applied this approach to a case study of an archaic site in
Chihuahua, Mexico, and found that its petroglyph distribution has the form of a
power law, which is consistent with preferential attachment. We conclude that
this approach could be developed into a measure of the entanglement between
ritual processes and products in prehistoric material engagement.
