Seeing different motifs in one picture: Identifying ambiguous figures in South Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art

Abstract

Ambiguous figures, as described in visual perceptual psychology, are single pictures that contain several possible, mutually exclusive, motifs. When looking at a rock-art panel, petroglyphs at a first glance can seem to be distributed randomly, but when physically moving around on the panel new patterns can start to emerge. We discovered that some figures seemed to represent two different motifs depending from which angle they were observed. The figures thus became ambiguous. Some specific cases of images in South Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art—of ships, cows and circles—lend themselves particularly well to be analysed as ambiguous figures. Furthermore, we propose that these images represent some sort of narrativity, which needs to be understood in order to make a perceptual switch between different motifs in one picture. Using a semiotic approach, we describe the experiential requirements on the perceiver for seeing the different motifs.