The Archaeology of Rock-Art

This collection on rock-art explores how we can learn from it as a material record of distant times.

Christopher Chippindale (Edited by), Paul S. C. Taçon (Edited by)

9780521576192, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 January 1999

392 pages, 3 tables
25.7 x 18.3 x 2.1 cm, 0.7 kg

Pictures, painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces, are amongst our loveliest relics from prehistory. This pioneering set of sparkling essays goes beyond guesses as to what the pictures mean, instead exploring how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times: in short, rock-art as archaeology. Sometimes contact-period records offer some direct insight about indigenous meaning, so we can learn in that informed way. More often, we have no direct record, and instead have to use formal methods to learn from the evidence of the pictures themselves. The book's eighteen papers range wide in space and time, from the Palaeolithic of Europe to nineteenth-century Australia. Using varied approaches within the consistent framework of informed and proven methods, they make key advances in using the striking and reticent evidence of rock-art to archaeological benefit.

1. An archaeology of rock-art through informed methods and informal methods Paul Tacon and Christopher Chippindale
2. Finding rain in the desert: landscape, gender and far western North American rock-art David S. Whitley
3. Towards a mindscape of landscape: rock-art as expression of world-understanding Sven Ouzman
4. Icon and narrative in transition: contact-period rock-art at Writing-on-Stone, southern Alberta, Canada Michael A. Klassen
5. Rain in Bushman belief, politics and history: the rock-art of rain-making in the south-eastern mountains, southern Africa Thomas A. Dowson
6. The many ways of dating Arnhem Land rock-art, north Australia Jean Clottes
7. The 'Three Cs': fresh avenues towards European Palaeolithic art Richard Bradley
8. Daggers drawn: depictions of Bronze Age weapons in Atlantic Europe Kalle Sognnes
9. Symbols in a changing world: rock-art and the transition from hunting to farming in mid Norway Meredith Wilson
10. Pacific rock-art and cultural genesis: a multivariate exploration Ralph Hartley
11. Spatial behaviour and learning in the prehistoric environment of the Colorado River drainage (south-eastern Utah), western North America Anne Vasser
12. The tale of the chameleon and the platypus: limited and likely choices in making pictures Benjamin Smith
13. Pictographic evidence of peyotism in the Lowe Pecos, Texas Archaic Carolyn E. Boyd
14. Modelling change in the contact art of the south-eastern San, southern Africa Pieter Jolly
15. Ethnography and method in southern African rock-art research Anne Solomon
16. Changing art in a changing society: the hunters' rock-art of western Norway Eva M. Walderhaug
17. Central Asian petroglyphs: between Indo-Iranian and shamanistic interpretations Henri-Paul Francfort
18. Shelter rock-art in the Sydney Basin (Australia) - a space-time continuum: exploring different influences on diachronic change Jo McDonald
19. Making sense of obscure pictures from our own history: exotic images from Callan Park, Australia John Clegg.

Subject Areas: Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA]