Rock Art as Landscape / Place

In recent years, rock art has come of age. Many new ideas concerning especially the cosmology of art have been the main focus of interpretation. Recently, Christopher Tilley has suggested that rock art, although ambiguous, reads similar to a text. The text/panel thus becomes a narrative. From this, the reader is able to deconstruct the text and make assumptions. Likewise, ideas have been discussed concerning rock art as contributing to, or acting as, landscape or place. It is within this session that landscape and place become prioritised in relation to rock art. Landscape/place can mean location and geography - the macroscape. It can mean landscape within the rock art itself - the microscape. Landscape/place can also be a constructive perception within the minds of the artist, the audience and even the rock art prehistorian.

Within this session, participants attempt to deconstruct rock art by incorporating some of the socio-symbolic and political mechanisms of landscape and place. The application and location of rock art, as a sense of place asks a number of fundamental questions. Firstly, does landscape play an important role to what is painted and how a site is chosen? Secondly, can rules forming the language of landscape be applied to the mechanisms behind the execution of petroglyphs? Finally, is there a chronological and geographical sequence occurring in certain core areas; are other core areas involved in this sequence? Individual participants will attempt to argue these points using a number of theoretical approaches from core European and African petroglyph areas. Outlined below are a number general theoretical ideas for this session.

Customs, or traditional ways of doing things, appear to be hard to dislodge once they have become established. Such practices become ritualised and, through repetitive performance, help constitute the identity and sense of 'place' of the people who practice them (turning a space into a place). But while the form of rituals may be reproduced intact over many hundreds of years, their content - what they mean for those who perform or observe them - is not fixed.

Ritual requires a focus. Hood (1988:65) has described rock art as a 'sociological and ideological product' which is 'actively manipulated within social strategies'. The focus for this activity is not merely 'a passive arena for adaptation' (ibid). For generations rock art sites may have acted as foci perpetuating a cult of ancestry. In the areas where we find art, the cult would have helped to forge and maintain a sense of 'place' and territorial identity for mobile and sedentary people. As part of this process of fixing community identity, it is probable that rock art incorporated earlier beliefs associated with traditional hunter-gatherer subsistence practices and landscape knowledge, which ascribed symbolic value to certain prominent landscape features - mountains, river valleys, estuaries and the sea (Tilley 1994, Nash 1997). These features may, since earliest times, have harboured food sources essential to the survival of communities inhabiting the post-glacial landscape. Equally, the landscape, and especially the mountains, may have 'acted' as a symbolic taboo, forbidden places perceived by indigenous communities as dangerous. Significant landscape features may also have served as 'signposts' in the landscape, guiding hunters and foragers on seasonal journeys around the loosely-defined territories which they exploited. Bradley (1993) suggests that 'paths' were important to hunter-gatherers, who identified their territories by means of such linear features linking particular places. It was these places which may later have been ritually and symbolically utilised to site the earliest rock carving sites.

Defining a Landscape - Rock Art as a boundary of cultural and social/political identity

Within archaeology we traditionally tend to look at sites, well ... as sites. The empirical approaches applied to the 'site' indeed reinforce an image that it is very much devoid of human meaning. In particular, the concept of recording rock art focuses firstly on subjectivity - what is depicted; objectivity - the extrinsic value of the site and stratigraphic deposition - what lies in front of, and underneath the art. Some attention, though has been given to landscape, albeit from a traditionally stale account of what can be seen. Recently, rock art and landscape studies have incorporated a text which relies more on personal experience and the cognitive value of the audience. It is obvious, therefore, that when rock art was executed, the artist intended it to remain indefinitely: with this the intentional location of the panel/rock art surface to the surrounding landscape.

By omitting landscape, and in particular, rock art as place, one is only looking at subjectivity and ignoring media. Arguably, landscape/place is as important as paint, the narrative artifact deposition. Within this paper, I wish to re-address the importance of landscape/place and suggest both be considered as part of an archaeological assemblage. More importantly, the intentionality of landscape/place was as important to the artist, as the images she or he were painting/carving.

Women's Art, Men's Art: Gender-Specific Image Selection

The prehistoric rock art of Italy and northern Europe appears to be dominated by numerous representations of ithyphallic warriors surrounded by the accoutrements of war and hunting, which has led to the assumption that the art was created by men for men.

In accepting this plausible interpretation, we are perhaps assuming an entirely superior position on the part of the males, resulting in a male domination or art, ritual and society, leaving females socially peripherized and archaeologically invisible. Before placing the art within a cultural context, and establishing relationships between the rock artists, their settlement and burial sites, it might be possible to approach the study of rock art from a different angle entirely, looking at the kind of images featured and their possible origins, and exploring possible sources of inspiration, and vision, both in terms of the 'vision' of the artist and their physical viewpoint within the landscape.

The art of non-western societies has often been used in attempting to bridge the conceptual gap between the prehistoric artist and the modern western viewer. A recent study of female Inuit artists is particularly relevant, as it has provided some valuable insights into the selection of subject matter within a non-western culture. Despite the obvious limitations of using ethnographic studies to facilitate an understanding of image selection in prehistoric art, some interesting themes emerge and differences in perception are revealed. Several recurring themes emerge in the art including legends and mythology, historical events, representations from daily life, hunting and memories of the artists' own lives and families. Some of these themes are apparently derived from external geography, such as representations of familiar scenes, objects and the surrounding landscape, while other subject matter is derived from the artists' own mental geographies.

The Inuit study, combined with the author's recent fieldwork at Val Camonica, works towards a greater understanding of how artists operate within their landscapes, manipulating both the artistic and physical space to emphasise chosen aspects of their physical and social environments. The paper suggests a new approach to the study of prehistoric art, image selection, and gender relations, while highlighting the inherent biases and preoccupations of the western viewer.

Crossing the border

There has been a tendency for rock art research to follow similar lines in a number of quite different study areas. The recognition of entoptic imagery is one example of this trend. Yet rock art can be regarded as a rather specialised form of material culture and at the regional scale it might be expected to show as much diversity as monuments and portable artefacts. Its character might also have changed in relation to different practices and different ways of perceiving and using the landscape. Such contrasts can be identified in the prehistoric rock art found on either side of the modern border between Portugal and Spain and may be related to much broader currents in Iberian archaeology, extending from the Atlantic to the West Mediterranean.

Scandinavian Rock Art

The paper aims to discuss how the study of spatial aspects on different levels can help illuminate the function of rock art in the Neolithic societies of Western Norway. It is argued that rock art played an important role in a period of social and economic transformation. Significant differences can be seen in the location and use of rock art sites by agrarian and hunter-gatherer groups. The importance of space and landscape on a local level will also be discussed, with a focus on one of Scandinavia's largest rock art aggregation sites at Vingen, Western Norway, situated in dramatic and evocative fjord and mountain landscape. Contrasts are noted in the choice and location of carving surfaces , such as fixed and mobile, land and sea related, open and secluded etc. Significant landscape features on a larger scale may also have played a role in the overall choice of location of this vast aggregation site. The perception of space and place and its relationship to the function of rock art in society will be discussed.

The ABC of prehistoric Pictures

Approaches to prehistoric rock-art in terms of style, meaning or topographical place in the landscape do not address the central point - that these ancient things are often pictures. No good theory of prehistoric pictures as pictures is in play, and one is needed. A simple and robust theory is developed that relates the subject A to the picture C in terms of geometrical transformation B that join them; it is demonstrated by brief example to be powerful and effective.

Sagaholm - rock art as microscape. A Scandinavian perspective

My contribution to TAG 97 considers a rather neglected variable in the theoretical debate concerning rock art - the way that the rock art is executed. The use of different technology on a rock panel have mostly been explained in chronological or functional terms. As if the different motives were separated diachronic or that the rock itself determined the technological choice. The result has been that the precipitants of the theoretical discourse concerning rock art have neglected this and considered the technological aspect as a passive component in a active "sign language".

A reason for this is, of course, that the rock art has been exposed to rain, ice, and wind erosion for several millennia, which has resulted in the different technologies being rather hard to distinguish and deal with in a theoretical discourse. The exception to this is the rock art that been found in a context that has prevented the erosion. My study concerns one of these fortunate cases - Sagaholm, a Bronze Age barrow from Ljungarum parish in Småland in the southern part of central Sweden. The barrow has been dated to Montelius per II/III, approximately 3200 - 3400 BP. It was excavated in 1971 and despite the fact that the barrow was partly destroyed about 15 slabs with rock art motives were found. Mostly horses, boats and humans.

My paper starts in a discussion about the four different ways that these particular rock carvings were made and how this can contribute to the interpretation of these motives. It is my opinion that we can talk about these rock carvings as metaphors that contain links to other synchronic phenomena in the Bronze Age. As if they where a microscape.

Between Land and Sea: Stone Age Rock Art in Mid Norway

Several trends can be found in the geographical distribution of Stone Age rock art in mid Norway, some of which follow major communication routes and may be interpreted as trail markers. One linear trend follows the coast, another follows the fjords and valleys from the coast to the inland mountain areas. The Trondhelm fjord area represent a third system, where the rock art is found at the transition between land and sea. This area may be viewed as one entity or as a system of several smaller basins, which are encircled by petroglyph sites.

Conspicuous topographic features seem to have been preferred, especially small islands and head-lands but virtually ass sites appear to have been closely related to the sea. Many are, however, located at the entrances of valleys leading into large hinterlands. Preferred topographic features appear to have changed during the rock art making period. Some sites are found at remote places with little space in front of the panels; others are found at places, especially beaches, where larger groups could meet.