Working with Rock Art: Recording, Presenting and Understanding Rock Art Using Indigenous Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Benjamin W. Smith, Knut Helskog, David Morris

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 328
• Series: Rock Art Research Institute Monograph Series, 4
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume contains contributions that consider new approaches to three areas: the documentation of rock art; its interpretation using indigenous knowledge; and the presentation of rock art.

'Working with Rock Art' is the first edited volume to consider each of these areas in a theoretical rather than a technical fashion, and it therefore makes a significant contribution to the discipline. The volume aims to promote the sharing of new experiences between leading researchers in the field. While the geographic focus is truly global, there is a dominant north-south axis with strong representation from researchers in southern Africa and northern Europe, two leading centres for new approaches in rock art research. Working with Rock Art opens up a long overdue dialogue about shared experiences between these two centres, and a number of the chapters are the first published results of new collaborative research. Since this volume covers the recording, interpretation and presentation of rock art, it will attract a wide audience of researchers, heritage managers and students, as well as anyone interested in the field of rock art studies.

✦ Table of Contents

ON DOCUMENTING ROCK ART
Rock art management: juggling with paradoxes and com­promises, and how to live with them / Anne-Sophie Hygen
Expressing intangibles: A recording experience with /Xam Rock Engravings / Janette Deacon
Aspects of documentation for conservation purposes exemplified by rock art / Terje Norsted
The spatial context of rock art sites: what might GIS have to offer in the absence of a temporal resolution of rock paintings? / Thembi Russell
Rock art in context – theoretical aspects of pragmatic data collections / Tilman Lenssen-Erz
Representing southern African San rock art: a move towards digitisation / D. Winnie Mokokwe
The routine of documentation / Knut Helskog
Prehistoric explorations in rock – investigations beneath and beyond carved surfaces / Trond Lødøen
ON UNDERSTANDING ROCK ART USING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Politics, ethnography and prehistory: in search of an 'informed' approach to Finnish and Karelian rock art / Antti Lahelma
Ethnography, history, rock art: the significance of social change in interpreting rock art / David Pearce
Symbols on stone – in the footsteps of the bear in Finnish antiquity / Juha Pentikäinen
Animals and humans: metaphors of representation in south-central African rock art / Leslie Zubieta
Ways of knowing and ways of seeing: spiritual agents and the origins of Native American rock art / David Whitley
Shamanism, rock art and history: implications from a Central Asian case study / Andrzej Rozwadowski
ON PRESENTING ROCK ART
Presenting rock art through digital film / Paul Taçon
Rock art at present in the past / Lindsay Weiss
The importance of Wildebeest Kuil: 'a hill with a future, a hill with a past' / David Morris
Theoretical approaches and practical training for rock art tourist guiding and management / Janette Deacon and Neville Agnew
Two related rock art conservation/education projects in Lesotho / Pieter Jolly
Scandinavian rock art in the past – the present – and the future / Gitte Kjeldsen
The presentation of rock art in South Africa: what are the new challenges? / Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu
Yellowstone, Kruger, Kakadu: nature, culture and rock-art in three celebrated national parks / Catherine Namono and Christopher Chippindale