Perhaps, but we study roman graffiti where people from antiquity did the same thing, like, I get that its bad and should not be condoned but tourists have been carving their name into this thing for thousands of years.
Not to derail, but this reminds me of a cave in Southern Arizona. Graffiti is banned and it’s heavily enforced, but there is ‘historic’ graffiti from the 1920-40s that is preserved. I always found this case very interesting.
I'll put forth that nothing of this sort, from the semiconductor age onwards, can be an artifact as we have far more readily available and detailed records to work from.
Such graffiti is only an artifact when it's purpose, history and other aspects are lost to time due to lack of alternative documentation.
In effectively all cases these days there is simply no additional value obtained from graffiti like this, unlike that of street artists doing murals or painting trains.
I believe it is 50 years in the US. I can't find it on mobile, but I remember reading an article a while back about some simple "john was here" on some anasazi petroglyph that hadn't been removed because it was from the late 1800s or early 1900s and was considered historic.
But also one of the most human things to do. What are precivilization cave paintings but graffiti? Leaving a mark on the world is a basic human instinct. That some things are better left intact is something that has to be learned.
Pre agricultural revolution pictographs and petroglyphs are almost certainly not graffiti. Religious function, navigation, resource marking, animal migration records, record keeping... these are some of the more likely functions.
Tbf, sometimes graffiti is a territorial marking and this is also a likely function.
I read in an art history book that cave paintings were used as a form of magic/manifestation and the farther down into the cave the more powerful it became.
A lot of these kinds of things are historians/anthropologists/whatever making things up. If something doesn’t have an obvious purpose then it is labeled as ceremonial or religious. A single artifact gets turned into an elaborate story with very shaky justification. These “just so” stories make good tales, but that’s it. The question ends up being “how could they possibly know this!?” And the answer is, they couldn’t.
Definitely the kind of thing you’d read in an art history book.
I have heard artists critical of art history in the same way tech people are critical of tech journalists. Something along the lines of folks who don’t really understand a subject because they don’t/can’t do it writing from a position of authority about it and doing it badly.