Discourses, Marks, Experience. An Archaeology of Intermediality

This paper takes up some theoretical issues of the debate on intertextuality – particularly the relationship between multimodality, intermediality, and intertextuality –and it will do so from a specific point of view: that of the material and cognitive archaeology of expressive artefacts. There are two basic ideas in the paper: multimodality, i.e. the simultaneous use of expressive materials addressed to different sensory channels, contributed to the establishment of specific practices and skills of the genus Homo starting 400,000 years ago; however, the current concept of intermediality derives from a set of transformations in expressive practices that matured between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago and involved the spring of both the concept of medium and that of (inter)textuality.