Rock art

In archaeology, rock art is human-made markings placed on natural surfaces, typically vertical stone surfaces. A high proportion of surviving historic and prehistoric rock art is found in caves or partly enclosed rock shelters; this type also may be called cave art or parietal art. A global phenomenon, rock art is found in many culturally diverse regions of the world. It has been produced in many contexts throughout human history. In terms of technique, the four main groups are:
* cave paintings,
* petroglyphs, which are carved or scratched into the rock surface,
* sculpted rock reliefs, and
* geoglyphs, which are formed on the ground.
The oldest known rock art dates from the Upper Palaeolithic period, having been found in Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. Anthropologists studying these artworks believe that they likely had magico-religious significance.

The archaeological sub-discipline of rock art studies first developed in the late-19th century among Francophone scholars studying the rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic found in the cave systems of parts of Western Europe. Rock art continues to be of importance to indigenous peoples in various parts of the world, who view them as both sacred items and significant components of their cultural heritage. Such archaeological sites may become significant sources of cultural tourism and have been used in popular culture for their aesthetic qualities. Whitley 2005, pp. 1–2.

Etymology

The term ''rock art'' appears in the published literature as early as the 1940s. It has also been described as "rock carvings", "rock drawings", "rock engravings", "rock inscriptions", "rock paintings", "rock pictures", "rock records", and "rock sculptures."

Background

Parietal art is a term for art in caves; this definition usually extended to art in rock shelters under cliff overhangs. Popularly, it is called "cave art", and is a subset of the wider term, rock art. It is mostly on rock walls, but may be on ceilings and floors. A wide variety of techniques have been used in its creation. The term usually is applied only to prehistoric art, but it may be used for art of any date. Sheltered parietal art has had a far better chance of surviving for very long periods, and what now survives may represent only a very small proportion of what was created.

Both parietal and cave art refer to cave paintings, drawings, etchings, carvings, and pecked artwork on the interior of caves and rock shelters. Generally, these either are engraved (essentially meaning scratched) or painted, or, they are created using a combination of the two techniques. Parietal art is found very widely throughout the world, and in many places new examples are being discovered.

The defining characteristic of rock art is that it is placed on natural rock surfaces; in this way, it is distinct from artworks placed on constructed walls or free-standing sculpture. As such, rock art is a form of landscape art, and includes designs that have been placed on boulder and cliff faces, cave walls, and ceilings, and on the ground surface. Whitley 2005, p. 3. Rock art is a global phenomenon, being found in many different regions of the world. Whitley 2005, p. 1. There are various forms of rock art. Some archaeologists also consider pits and grooves in the rock known as '' cupules'', or ''cups'' or ''rings'', as a form of rock art.

Although there are exceptions, the majority of rock art whose creation was recorded by ethnographers had been produced during rituals. As such, the study of rock art is a component of the archaeology of religion.

Rock art serves multiple purposes in the contemporary world. In several regions, it remains spiritually important to indigenous peoples, who view it as a significant component of their cultural heritage. It also serves as an important source of cultural tourism, and hence as economic revenue in certain parts of the world. As such, images taken from cave art have appeared on memorabilia and other artefacts sold as a part of the tourist industry.

Types

Paintings

In most climates, only paintings in sheltered sites, in particular caves, have survived for any length of time. Therefore, these are usually called "cave paintings", although many do survive in "rock-shelters" or cliff-faces under an overhang. In prehistoric times, these were often popular places for various human purposes, providing some shelter from the weather, as well as light. There may have been many more paintings in more exposed sites, that are now lost. Pictographs are paintings or drawings that have been placed onto the rock face. Such artworks have typically been made with mineral earths and other natural compounds found across much of the world. The predominantly used colours are red, black and white. Red paint is usually attained through the use of ground ochre, while black paint is typically composed of charcoal, or sometimes from minerals such as manganese. White paint is usually created from natural chalk, kaolinite clay or diatomaceous earth. Once the pigments had been obtained, they would be ground and mixed with a liquid, such as water, blood, urine, or egg yolk, and then applied to the stone as paint using a brush, fingers, or a stamp. Alternately, the pigment could have been applied on dry, such as with a stick of charcoal. In some societies, the paint itself has symbolic and religious meaning; for instance, among hunter-gatherer groups in California, paint was only allowed to be traded by the group shamans, while in other parts of North America, the word for "paint" was the same as the word for "supernatural spirit".

One common form of pictograph, found in many, although not all rock-art producing cultures, is the hand print. There are three forms of this; the first involves covering the hand in wet paint and then applying it to the rock. The second involves a design being painted onto the hand, which is then in turn added to the surface. The third involves the hand first being placed against the panel, with dry paint then being blown onto it through a tube, in a process that is akin to air-brush or spray-painting. The resulting image is a negative print of the hand, and is sometimes described as a " stencil" in Australian archaeology. Miniature stencilled art has been found at two locations in Australia and one in Indonesia.

Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs are engravings or carvings into rock which is left ''in situ''. They can be created with a range of scratching, engraving or carving techniques, often with the use of a hard hammerstone, which is battered against the stone surface. In certain societies, the choice of hammerstone itself has religious significance. Whitley 2005, p. 11. In other instances, the rock art is pecked out through indirect percussion, as a second rock is used like a chisel between the hammerstone and the panel. A third, rarer form of engraving rock art was through incision, or scratching, into the surface of the stone with a lithic flake or metal blade. The motifs produced using this technique are fine-lined and often difficult to see. Whitley 2005, p. 13.

Rock reliefs

Normally found in literate cultures, a rock relief or rock-cut relief is a relief sculpture carved on solid or "living rock" such as a cliff, rather than a detached piece of stone. They are a category of rock art, and sometimes found in conjunction with rock-cut architecture. However, they tend to be omitted in most works on rock art, which concentrate on engravings and paintings by prehistoric peoples. A few such works exploit the natural contours of the rock and use them to define an image, but they do not amount to man-made reliefs. Rock reliefs have been made in many cultures, and were especially important in the art of the Ancient Near East. Rock reliefs are generally fairly large, as they need to be to make an impact in the open air. Most have figures that are over life-size, and in many the figures are multiples of life-size.

Stylistically they normally relate to other types of sculpture from the culture and period concerned, and except for Hittite and Persian examples they are generally discussed as part of that wider subject. The vertical relief is most common, but reliefs on essentially horizontal surfaces are also found. The term typically excludes relief carvings inside caves, whether natural or themselves man-made, which are especially found in India. Natural rock formations made into statues or other sculpture in the round, most famously at the Great Sphinx of Giza, are also usually excluded. Reliefs on large boulders left in their natural location, like the Hittite İmamkullu relief, are likely to be included, but smaller boulders may be called stelae or carved orthostats.

Earth figures

Earth figures are large designs and motifs that are created on the stone ground surface. They can be classified through their method of manufacture. Whitley 2005, p. 14. ''Intaglios'' are created by scraping away the desert pavements (pebbles covering the ground) to reveal a negative image on the bedrock below. The best known example of such intaglio rock art is the Nazca Lines of Peru. In contrast, ''geoglyphs'' are positive images, which are created by piling up rocks on the ground surface to resulting in a visible motif or design.

Motifs and panels

Traditionally, individual markings are called motifs and groups of motifs are known as ''panels''. Sequences of panels are treated as archaeological sites. This method of classifying rock art however has become less popular as the structure imposed is unlikely to have had any relevance to the art's creators. Even the word 'art' carries with it many modern prejudices about the purpose of the features.

Rock art can be found across a wide geographical and temporal spread of cultures perhaps to mark territory, to record historical events or stories or to help enact rituals. Some art seems to depict real events whilst many other examples are apparently entirely abstract.

Prehistoric rock depictions were not purely descriptive. Each motif and design had a "deep significance" that is not always understandable to modern scholars.

Interpretation and use

Religious interpretations

In many instances, the creation of rock art was itself a ritual act.

Regional variations

Europe

In the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe, rock art was produced inside cave systems by the hunter-gatherer peoples who inhabited the continent. The oldest known example is the Chauvet Cave in France, although others have been located, including Lascaux in France, Alta Mira in Spain and Creswell Crags in Britain and Grotta del Genovese in Sicily.

The late prehistoric rock art of Europe has been divided into three regions by archaeologists. In Atlantic Europe, the coastal seaboard on the west of the continent, which stretches from Iberia up through France and encompasses the British Isles, a variety of different rock arts were produced from the Neolithic through to the Late Bronze Age. A second area of the continent to contain a significant rock art tradition was that of Alpine Europe, with the majority of artworks being clustered in the southern slopes of the mountainous region, in what is now south-eastern France and northern Italy.

* Finnish Rock Art
* Knowth
* Loughcrew
* Newgrange
* Neolithic and Bronze Age rock art in the British Isles
* Rock Drawings in Valcamonica (World Heritage Site)

Balma dei Cervi
at Crodo (Piedmont - Italian Alps)
* Grotta dei Cervi at Porto Badisco
Apulia
- Italy)
* Grotta del Genovese (Sicily)
* List of rock carvings in Norway
** Rock carvings at Alta (World Heritage Site)
* Madara Rider (World Heritage Site)
* Côa Valley Paleolithic Art (World Heritage Site)
* Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain (World Heritage Site)
* Rock art of the Iberian Mediterranean Basin (World Heritage Site)
* Tanum (World Heritage Site)
* , Rock Art Research Centre and World Heritage Archive, situated in Tanum, Sweden.

Africa

North Africa

* South Oran in Algeria.
* Saharan rock art
* Tadrart Acacus in Libya – World Heritage Site.
* Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria – national park and World Heritage Site, known for its 10,000-year-old paintings.
* Cave of Swimmers is a cave in southwest Egypt, near the border with Libya, along the western edge of the Gilf Kebir plateau in the central Libyan Desert (Eastern Sahara). It was discovered in October 1933 by the Hungarian explorer László Almásy. The site contains rock paintings of human figures who appear to be swimming, which have been estimated to have been created at least 6,000 to 7000 years ago. The Cave of Beasts 10 km westwards was discovered in 2002.
* Jebel Uweinat, a large granite and sandstone mountain, as well as the adjacent smaller massifs of Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Kissu at the converging triple borders of Libya, Egypt and Sudan, harbors one of the richest concentrations of prehistoric rock art in the entire Sahara. The rock art here mainly consists of the Neolithic cattle pastoralist cultures, but also a number of older paintings from hunter-gatherer societies.
* Sabu-Jaddi rock art site in Northern Sudan.
* North Sİnai Archaeological Sites Zone − World Heritage Site. Limestone cave decorated with scenes of animals such as donkeys, camels, deer, mule and mountain goats was uncovered in the site in 2020. Rock art cave is 15 meters deep and 20 meters high.
* Wadi Abu Dom

Western Africa

* Boucle du Baoulé National Park
* Dabous Giraffes

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