Constructing Cupule Science: Robert G. Bednarik and the Methodological Evolution of Non-Iconic Rock Art Studies

Rock art is the most widespread and abundant form of surviving remains in palaeoart. Among them, fully non-iconic percussion petroglyphs, represented by cupules—due to their extreme morphological simplicity, lack of iconographic content and absence of ethnographic references—have become crucial yet most intractable materials for reconstructing the origins of human cognition and early symbolic behaviour. Traditional research has long relied on stylistics, iconography and ethnographic analogy: methods that are highly subjective, lack falsifiable criteria and are inherently unsuited to non-figurative remains. The subtractive technology of petroglyphs makes direct dating extremely difficult, and taphonomic biases are often misread as patterns of cultural evolution, resulting in the long-term marginalisation of ancient cupule remains within mainstream archaeology. Australian scholar Robert G. Bednarik, precisely addressing this fundamental attribute of non-figurative petroglyphs in palaeoart and taking cupules as his core research subject, has, through over forty years of transcontinental practice, systematically constructed a ‘rock art science’ methodological system distinct from traditional art history and archaeology. Following a chronological thread, this paper traces its foundations from the 1980s Australian Parietal Markings Project (PMP), through the establishment of direct microerosion dating technology and the theoretical construction of taphonomy and metamorphology, to the publication of the textbook Rock art science in the 21st century, the empirical breakthrough of India’s EIP Project, and further to the deepening of kinetic energy metamorphosis (KEM) theory, archaeotribology, and the exogram-based cognitive framework. It elucidates how cupules have become the key test case for testing and refining the entire falsifiable, evidence-first, interdisciplinary methodological system. This paradigm has been widely implemented in Australia, India, China, Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and elsewhere, driving rock art research from a descriptive-interpretive model towards a replicable, verifiable multidisciplinary scientific pathway. It effectively remedies the subjective deficiencies of traditional approaches, opens a new empirical avenue for research on the origins of symbolic cognition in the Lower Palaeolithic, and achieves theoretical feedback to geology, tribology and cognitive science.