The Archaeology of Rock-Art

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

Rock-art provides lively and captivating images of animals and people painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces. This collection explores how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times by adapting the methods of archaeology to the special subject of rock-art.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.