Changing Pictures - 9781842174050

During the last few decades, there has been an immense global interest among archaeologists and anthropologists in studying rock art. Research in northern Europe, as elsewhere, has intensely explored a manifold number of methodological and theoretical perspectives. Most of these studies however, have been published in languages that seldom reach beyond the native speakers of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian or Finnish. Changing Pictures is the result of a workshop held at Linneaus University Sweden in 2008, whose main movitation is to try and apprise some of the current movements within this field of research and present it for an international audience.

These papers explore the relevance of older ideas, such as notions about prehistoric religion, ritual performance, sympathetic magic, animism and totemism, the mindscapes of landscapes etc., as well as the present `state of the art' in order to develop a broader understanding of the phenomenon we call rock art. This aspiration can be seen as a common thread, linking the different chapters in this book. Saying that, some, if not all, of the articles presented in this volume challenge the notion of `rock art' itself. They argue that sometimes the rock, the `canvas', and the rather intangible but equally important sensual encounters-such as sound, echoes, touch, temporal phenomenological changes and the perception of decorated rock art panels - should be regarded as at least as important as the `art' itself.

By reassessing traditional approaches to Scandinavian rock art and creatively reworking these ideas, whilst also addressing significant new concepts such as the agency of rock and the performativity of rock art, this anthology of papers offers not only a snapshot of current debates, but also reflects pivotal changes in the study of rock art.