Ancient rock art sites with pictographs (images painted on stone) and/or petroglyphs (images carved or etched into stone) are found at sites around the world. One of the problems with regard to rock art is attempting to determine what these symbols mean. Too often casual observers fall into the “gaze and guess” trap in which they attempt to interpret the meanings based on their own cultural experience. Symbols are an important part of culture and when they are taken out of the context of the culture in which they were created, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand what they meant to the people who created them. Writing about rock art in the American Southwest in his book The Serpent and the Sacred Fire: Fertility Images in Southwest Rock Art, Dennis Slifer says:
“Accurate interpretation is difficult, however, because exact meaning cannot be proven, only assumed or extrapolated from ethnographic sources, such as existing Pueblo tribes. Because rock art now exists out of its cultural context, attempting to explain how it functioned and what it meant to past societies is tentative at best.”
One of the clues regarding the cultural context of many rock art sites can be found in their location. Such sites are often located some distance away from residential sites and many are in remote and difficult to access areas. Many researchers interpret the rock art at remote and difficult to access sites as being associated with spirituality and ritual. Writing about the European Paleolithic cave sites in her book A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong reports:
“The extraordinary underground caverns at Altamira and Lascaux give us a tantalising glimpse of Paleolithic spirituality. The numerous paintings of deer, bison and wooly ponies, of shamans disguised as animals, and hunters with their spears, were painted with exquisite care and skill in deep subterranean caverns, which are extremely difficult of access. These grottoes were probably the very first temples and cathedrals.”
It is common for rock art sites to be located at remote and fairly difficult to reach sites, including deep inside caves. Since these are sites not used for human habitation, archaeologists often interpret the location of the site as an indicator of religion or spirituality, as places where rituals of some kind may have been performed. Dennis Slifer puts it this way:
“Despite the varied locations of rock art, it seems clear that many rock art sites are in places considered sacred or that have power of some kind.”
Another clue regarding how rock art was used in ancient cultures comes from ethnographic and historic accounts of hunting and gathering people. In his report on the Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, in Discovering North American Rock Art, Michael Klassen writes:
“Most authors now recognize that rock art studies must rely extensively on oral traditions, ethnographic resources, and the idea of sacred landscapes to provide insights into meaning and to support explanations.”
Among the San people in the Kalahari region of Africa, we see that making the paint for pictographs involved a pilgrimage and that the resulting art is not simply viewed, but also touched. In his book The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, David Lewis-Williams writes:
“The importance of touching, and not merely looking at, rock paintings is confirmed by patches of paint that were placed on the walls and ceilings of rock shelters and then rubbed smooth.”
David Lewis-Williams goes on to say:
“Similarly, the making of positive handprints was probably closely associated with ritual touching of the rock rather than with the making of ‘pictures’ of hands.”
Hunting Magic
Rock art throughout the world has often been interpreted as an element of hunting magic. Hunting and gathering people throughout the world have used hunting magic or hunting rituals to ensure success in the hunt. These rituals often involve what anthropologists call the Law of Similarity: a belief that there exists a connection between the animals and images of those animals. The Law of Similarity assumes that things that resemble each other can also influence each other. In discussing Upper Paleolithic European cave art in his book Human Evolution, Robin Dunbar writes:
“The large number of animals, some of whom seem to have arrows projecting from their flanks, inevitably led to the suggestion that the paintings depicted magic rituals to ensure hunting success. Many paintings do, indeed, depict animals that were commonly hunted—but by no means all.”
Prior to hunting, so the hunting magic interpretation goes, the hunters would perform ceremonies before the images of their desired prey, perhaps even ritually killing the images. However, at some sites, in spite of animal images, this may not have been how the images were used. At rock art sites in the Northwestern Plains of North America, there are images of elk. In an article on Wyoming’s Gateway Site in the Wyoming Archaeologist, James Keyser and George Poetschat report:
“Surprisingly, given their current popularity as game animals, elk food bones are conspicuously absent from the Northwestern Plains archaeological record.”
In other words, while the elk are common in rock art, they were not frequently hunted for food. James Keyser and George Poetschat put it this way:
“The regular occurrence of rock art elk combined with their apparent rarity as a food source in Plains sites begs the question of why they are drawn so regularly in rock art and, more specifically, why they are shown shot with arrows at eight sites (including three individuals at Gateway).”
An examination of the ethnographies of the various Indian nations who inhabited this area—Crow, Sioux, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Mandan, and Hidatsa—reveals that the elk is associated with supernatural power, particularly love medicine. Instead of seeking power to ensure hunting success, these rock art images may have been involved in rituals to ensure success in the seduction of women and for increasing virility.
Shamanism
In shamanistic cultures certain individuals have an ability to enter into a trance state to communicate with the spirit world. Some rock art may reflect the visions encountered while in the trance state. David Lewis-Williams writes:
“People tend to hallucinate what they expect to hallucinate. There was, however, probably a recursivity between rock art images and visions: visions were painted on the rock art walls, and then these paintings prompted people to see similar visions. As a result, rock art probably exercised a conservative, stabilizing effect on the range of mental imagery that shamans experienced.”
Among the San or Bushman of the Kalahari Desert, the shaman uses a trance-inducing dance to experience supernatural potency. In their article on Bushman art in the Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, David Lewis-Williams, Thomas Dowson, Andrew Lock, and Charles Peters write:
“The art tradition of the Bushman is essentially a pictorial rendition of this trance experience, realized in the context of their conception of the supernatural potency of the objects and animals that inhabit their world.”
Shamanistic trance states are found not only among hunting and gathering people, such as the San and !Kung, but also in farming societies such as Neolithic Ireland. In their book Newgrange, archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Matthew Stout write:
“Some suggest that the people who decorated the passage tomb at Newgrange drew on the imagery of ritualized altered states of consciousness.”
Geraldine Stout and Matthew Stout also report:
“One experiment with hallucinogens produced a pen-and-ink drawing that combined spirals and lozenges uncannily similar to those on the entrance stone.”
Detail of the entrance stone at Newgrange.
Sex and Sexuality
Some rock art throughout the world shows human sexuality. This ranges from the depiction of male erections and exaggerated female genitalia, to illustrations of sexual acts, including intercourse and oral sex. David Lewis-Williams writes:
“In North America, supernatural power was associated with sexual potency, and shamans were believed to be especially virile. Rock art sites were symbolic vaginas, and entry into the wall of a rock art site was thus akin to intercourse. Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep. In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic.”
In their research monograph Crow Rock Art in the Bighorn Basin: Petroglyphs at No Water, Wyoming. James Keyser and George Poetschat report:
“Although sexual symbolism is common in Plains rock art, only a few obvious depictions of sexual acts are drawn.”
With regard to the sex acts shown at the No Water Site (48 WA 2088) in Wyoming, Keyser and Poetschate write:
“One plausible reason for the explicitness of these scenes and the association of tally marks with them is that the artists responsible for this panel were carving these petroglyphs to keep track of their sexual exploits.”
Personal and Tribal Histories
In some instances, particularly on the Northern Plains of North America, rock art may be a pictorial representation of a personal event. In the Northern Plains rock art, some of the illustrations are similar to the drawings that American Indian warriors show of their war exploits.
Writing
There are a few people who feel that some of the rock are may be a primitive form of pictographic writing. However, there are almost no archaeologists, art historians, or linguists who have studied rock art who would agree with this hypothesis.
