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In this broad overview the corpus of world rock art is defined and compared with the known distribution of Pleistocene rock art. The discrepancies are related to relative research efforts, to the taphonomy of rock art, and to issues relating to the age estimation of rock art. As each of these factors is examined, it becomes apparent that there have...
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... first qualified attempt to quantify the world's surviving rock art was undertaken by Anati (1984), who arrived at the estimate that the existence of over 20 million motifs has been demonstrated worldwide, and that a grand total of 'well over 50 million' rock art figures can safely be postulated (Fig. 1). Since then, much survey work and countless new reports and discoveries have occurred, and yet Anati's rough estimate has stood the test of time (cf. world map in Chakravarty & Bednarik 1997: 201). With all the progress we have seen in our knowledge of world rock art since the early 1980s, today's estimate would still be that there ...
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Citations
... Rock carvings, rock art, or petroglyphs are images created by removing parts of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or scratching, normally using lithic flakes or hammerstones as tools. Such petroglyphs, which should be distinguished from petrographs, i.e. images such as cave paintings drawn or painted on rock surfaces, can be found all over the world (except for Antarctica) (Bednarik 2012). In Europe, the largest concentration of petroglyphs can be found in Scandinavia, with rock art in the north which can be dated to 5000-first century BC and in the south to 2000-200 BC. ...
In Europe, Scandinavia holds the largest concentration of rock art (i.e. petroglyphs), created c. 5000–first century bc , many of them showing figurative and seemingly narrative representations. In this paper, we will discuss possible narratological approaches applied to these images. We might reasonably distinguish between three levels of pictorial narrativity: representations of (i) single events, understood as the transition from one state of affairs to another, usually involving (groups of) agents interacting; (ii) stories, e.g. particular sequences of related events that are situated in the past and retold for e.g. ideological or religious purposes; and (iii) by implication, master-narratives deeply embedded in a culture, which provide and consolidate cosmological explanations and social structures. Some concrete examples of petroglyphs will be presented and analysed from narratological and iconographical perspectives. We will as a point of departure focus on (i), i.e. single events, though we shall also further consider the possibility of narrative interpretations according to (ii) and (iii).
The Lower Palaeolithic cupules in the small cave of Daraki-Chattan are of different shapes and sizes. How they were made is the subject of this investigation. The hardness of the quartzite rock of the cave adds to the complexities in understanding the production process. The study of the more than 500 cupules on the vertical walls of the cave is a joint venture of Indian and Australian scientists, the EIP Project. The senior author commenced a program of replicating the cupules, in an effort to understand the circumstances of their creation, on an experimental rock panel close to Daraki-Chattan in 2002. The project of replicating different kinds of cupules encountered in Daraki-Chattan has been continued since then and was joined by the second author in 2004. This paper presents the gist of the replication project from 2002 to 2012.
Since the advent of the discipline of archaeology, its underlying theory has been a particular brand of uniformitarianism: the idea that existing forces and patterns have applied uniformly in the past. This paper proposes the introduction of an alternative unified theory, one that lends itself to falsification and logical quantification. Metamorphology is explained by first reviewing the principles of taphonomic logic, and by then extrapolating them to illuminate the entire gap between the reality of what happened in prehistory, and the record of these events as they are perceived and interpreted by the individual archaeologist. Metamorphology is defined as a refutable, logic-based theoretical framework that is derived essentially from taphonomic logic. This paper considers some of the relevant theoretical issues.
