Rock Art Ritual

Ritual landscapes and borders are recurring themes running through Professor Kalle Sognnes' long research career. This anthology contains 13 articles written by colleagues from his broad network in appreciation of his many contributions to the field of rock art research.

Social and behavioral scientists study religion or spirituality in various ways and have defined and approached the subject from different perspectives. In cultural anthropology and archaeology the understanding of what constitutes religion involves beliefs, oral traditions, practices and rituals, as well as the related material culture including artifacts, landscapes, structural features and visual representations like rock art. Researchers work to understand religious thoughts and actions that prompted their creation distinct from those created for economic, political, or social purposes. Rock art landscapes convey knowledge about sacred and spiritual ecology from generation to generation. Contributors to this global view detail how rock art can be employed to address issues regarding past dynamic interplays of religions and spiritual elements. Studies from a number of different cultural areas and time periods explore how rock art engages the emotions, materializes thoughts and actions and reflects religious organization as it intersects with sociopolitical cultural systems.

Winner of the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize We are nearly all intrigued by the petroglyphs and pictographs of the American Southwest, and we commonly ask what they "mean." Religion on the Rocks redirects our attention to the equally important matter of what compelled ancient peoples to craft rock art in the first place. To examine this question, Aaron Wright presents a case study from Arizona's South Mountains, an area once flanked by several densely populated Hohokam villages. Synthesizing results from recent archaeological surveys, he explores how the mountains' petroglyphs were woven into the broader cultural landscape and argues that the petroglyphs are relics of a bygone ritual system in which people vied for prestige and power by controlling religious knowledge. The features and strategic placement of the rock art suggest this dimension of Hohokam ritual was participatory and prominent in village life. Around AD 1100, however, petroglyph creation and other ritual practices began to wane, denoting a broad transformation of the Hohokam social world. Wright's examination of the South Mountains petroglyphs offers a novel narrative of how Hohokam villagers negotiated a concentration of politico-religious authority around platform mounds. Readers will come away with a better understanding of the Hohokam legacy and a greater appreciation for rock art's value to anthropology.

First published in 2005, this brief introduction to methods of studying rock art has become the standard text for courses on this topic. It was also selected as a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book in 2005. Internationally-known rock art researcher David Whitley takes the reader through the various processes needed to document, interpret, and preserve this fragile category of artifact. Using examples from around the globe, he offers a comprehensive guide to rock art studies of value to archaeologists and art historians, their students, and rock art aficionados. The second edition of this classic work has additional material on mapping sites, ethnographic analogy, neuropsychological models, and Native American consultation.

The rock art found in the World Heritage sites in the Alta area, Arctic Norway, comprise thousands of images including reindeer and elk as well as fish, birds, boats, humans and geometric patterns. They contain information about peoples who lived in this northern area from about 5000 BC up until the birth of Christ; such as possible social organizations, hunting and trapping, beliefs, rituals,stories, legends, myths, cultural changes and continuities. Communicating with the world of beings addresses an understanding of the rock art in terms of communication with other people and other than-human beings. The figures could have been seen and experienced as symbols in rituals or as expressions of identity, position, power and rights, as depictions of real events and perhaps for use in storytelling. Through rock art, people might also have been able to communicate with other-than-human beings who ruled parts of the environment – in order to petition favors for themselves or others. These other-than-human beings may have been perceived as good and evil powers and spirits of the different worlds of the universe; the dead or souls; which also included the animals depicted or were even embodied in the stone. This communication may have been based on a belief that both living beings and inert objects and natural phenomena had souls, a belief that may have existed ever since the earliest settlements. Such an animistic belief means that everything was seen as having a consciousness and identity of its own, independent and imbued with a will. Therefore, it was essential that the different participants communicated with one another as equal partners. In this beautifully illustrated book Knut Helskog provides a lyrical and personal interpretation of the chronology, patterning and possible meanings behind this extraordinary landscape of prehistoric rock art.

'A stimulating book, which is more ambitious in its interpretations than many recent rock art publications.' Antiquity magazine, praise for Volume One.

A comprehensive overview, by period and region, of the archaeology of ritual and religion. The coverage is global, and extends from the earliest prehistory to modern times. Written by over sixty renowned specialists, the Handbook presents the very best in current scholarship, and will also stimulate further research.

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.