This book explores ontological approaches to rock art in archaeology, and its 20 chapters are organized into four sections, plus a foreword and an introduction.
The book opens by exploring several theoretical perspectives on rock art. Graham Harman proposes understanding rock art as hypertime, highlighting how encounters among persons and rock art transcend specific moments in time and even personal lifetimes. Oscar Moro-Abadía and Amy A. Chase apply Viveiros de Castro's method of controlled equivocation to consider differences between art by anatomically modern humans (AMH) and Neanderthals, showing that AMH were deeply engaged with animals in art, whereas Neanderthals were not, which indicates that these different groups of humans looked at the same objects and subjects but understood them differently. Andrew Meirion Jones compares art from Europe and the Americas to explore how images make meaningful relationships visible within a historical ecology of life, shifting our analytical perspectives from representational to nonhierarchical approaches to rock art. David S. Whitley revisits ideas about shamanism and rock art, arguing that many ideas associated with the ontological turn in archaeology are relevant to shamanist perspectives, but warning us about political implications of some assumptions.
The second section of the book discusses applications of Indigenous knowledge in archaeology to develop ontologically situated perspectives on rock art. John Bradley and coauthors highlight political roles of other-than-human beings in social life, and how current engagements by Aboriginal Australians with rock art are political and multitemporal (as hypertime, following Harman). Similarly, John Creese shows how the making of rock art in the Canadian Shield was a practice through which humans cared for and tended to nonhumans, through ontologically situated political action. Martin Porr shows how the process of making and experiencing rock art in Australia is not based on prescribed understandings of images but on processes of being-with-rock-art—as Porr puts it, “things do not just exist; they, rather, occur” (p. 184). Inés Domingo Sanz focuses on rock art production, stressing the role of place, its historical nature, and the centrality of technological, contingent, and embodied elements of rock-art-making practices. Bruno David and coauthors reconsider the case of Cloggs Cave in Australia, where Indigenous knowledge emphasizes relations among birds, caves, and ancestors—and such ontological knowledge structured elements of the archaeological record of the cave.
Ontological perspectives require considerations of relationships among humans, animals, and other-than-human beings, and how these relations affect social life and create worlds. John Parkington and José M. De Prada-Samper explore the conflation of humans and elephants—elephantropes—on Soaqua rock art in South Africa, discussing how this motif blurred the nature–culture boundary, given that “human” behaviors and attitudes were also recognized among elephants, thereby shaping human practices. Carolyn E. Boyd discusses rock art in the Lower Pecos region of Texas, considering not just the visual symbols themselves but also the raw materials and techniques of rock-art making, which she characterizes as transactions between humans and other-than-humans. Focusing on rock art of the Canadian Shield, Dagmara Zawadzka explores the relevance of places as points of connection between humans and other-than-humans in shared ontological landscapes. In the same vein, Fredrik Fahlander discusses imagery in Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art as a means for humans to evoke nonhuman beings of symbolically powerful water worlds. Emmanuelle Honoré discusses how changes to iconography, themes, settings, and emplacements of rock art associated with hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in the Sahara reflect ontological transformations in human communities and relations with other-than-humans. Robert J. Wallis revisits the shaft scene in Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, France, which he argues derives from transactions among humans, the materiality of the cave, and other-than-human beings mediated by shamans.
Colonial encounters between Indigenous peoples and European colonial empires are examples of extreme ontological clashes, and the fourth section of the book considers these aspects of world history. Darryl Wilkinson demonstrates co-occurrences of colonial and precolonial petroglyphs in New Mexico that reflect deep engagements with ontological differences across time. Works of Indigenous rock art from colonial periods are hybrid forms that have emerged and are emerging from intersections of history, local practices, and landscape. Bryn Tapper discusses how Algonquian groups in Nova Scotia, Canada, appropriated European images and emplaced them within precontact rock art sites, the result of syncretism guided by a local ontology producing resilient social practices and landscapes. Jamie Hampson recognizes similar dynamics in rock art in Texas, where images related to colonial encounters were made not simply as scenes of “real life” but instead were made to incorporate new situations and participants into Indigenous ontologies. Peter Whitridge and James Williamson discuss graffiti in a World War II military facility in Red Cliff, Canada, where temporal trends and tensions are evident in this mid-twentieth-century mode of discursive rock art. The book ends with a chapter by David Robinson and coauthors about applications of virtual reality (VR) to broaden the presentation and experience of rock art and to develop new ways of studying it.
Ontologies of Rock Art considers important topics raised by the ontological turn in archaeology. Some chapters emphasize the relevance of images (the materiality of visuality), whereas others are more engaged with the act of making (the performative), but in most cases, place and landscape are understood as key elements for ontological perspectives on rock art. These different orientations are welcome, because they show how multiple dimensions of rock art are meaningful to its interpretation. The importance of understanding the multiple engagements of images and techniques of rock-art making and rock-art emplacement are well explored in the introduction by Moro-Abadía and Porr, and in the preface by Severin Fowles and Benjamin Alberti. Both chapters demand questioning our traditional understandings of rock art, shifting our focus to the ontological commitments involving the images and the roles of rock art as key political, social, and ontological participants in the creation of worlds. This book well illustrates how engagements of rock art, landscapes, process, experiences, and historical processes relate to ontologies and politics in past societies. Ontologies of Rock Art is valuable reading for those who are interested not only in rock art but also in archaeologies of landscape and ontologies.
