Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how ancient rock art in Europe compares with the treatment of portable objects. At the decorated outcrops several features were important, including the surfaces on which images were made and the ways in which features like mineral veins or running water brought them to life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is concerned with the rock art created in ancient Europe from the first adoption of farming. It draws on the results of archaeological fieldwork in Britain and South Scandinavia and is chiefly concerned with the pecked motifs created on outcrops and similar landforms during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. It begins by considering how and why these 'designs' differ from those applied to portable artefacts during the same periods.

Two features appear to be particularly important. By their very nature the locations of the decorated surfaces are fixed. Except when fragments were removed for use elsewhere, their relationship to the natural topography remains the same as it was when they were made. That remains the case even where the local environment has changed. At the same time the choice of surfaces for making rock art was by no means arbitrary and sometimes the designs incorporated features of purely geological origin: cracks and mineral veins, areas of quartz or other materials with unusual properties, running water, sunlight, moonlight and shadow. None has many equivalents among the decorated artefacts of the same periods, and, taken together, these elements brought the images to life at particular times of day, or particular seasons of the year. It is clear that they were addressed to a living audience (although that does not exclude other possibilities). New fieldwork is shedding light on how these places were used and the activities that took place there.