The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  CONCLUSIONS

  The carvings and stelae in Valcamonica–Valtellina bespeak the preoccupation of, amongst others, the agricultural and pastoral populations in the southern Alps during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic. They can be analysed in terms of daily preoccupations (maps of topographical features), status competition and identity (items of personal ornamentation, weapons), and mythology and local religious traditions (Casini and Fossati 1994), although many of the motifs remain abstract. Much work still needs to be done in relating the insights gained from this corpus to other archaeological evidence, such as the trends evident in settlements and burial sites, or the economy and long-distance relations with other cultures, in order to further understand the role of these long-lived ritual landscapes in the social and ideological development of Alpine populations.

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  * * *

  * This text was first received in December 2009 and revised in December 2011

  CHAPTER 46

  ROCK ART AND THE ROCK SURFACE NEOLITHIC ROCK ART TRADITIONS OF BRITAIN, IRELAND, AND NORTHERNMOST EUROPE

  ANDREW COCHRANE, ANDREW MEIRION JONES, AND KALLE SOGNNES

  INTRODUCTION

  THE Neolithic engraved and incised rock art of Britain and Ireland is a feature of both open-air rock surfaces and upstanding monuments like passage tombs and stone circles. In this respect it is similar to the rock art of parts of Iberia (Fairén-Jiménez, this volume) and northern France. A key feature that marks out this art as different to other areas of northern Europe is the emphasis on the carving of abstract images. For instance, rock art in northern Fennoscandia and Russia, like elsewhere on the Eurasian Taiga (cf. Martynov 1991) is dominated by representational images depicting elks, but red deer and reindeer are depicted too. Great variations are, however, found and several regional traditions can be identified (Lindqvist 1994; Simonsen 1974). Boat images are frequent in some of these traditions and at the Atlantic coast of Norway the boats are followed by images rendering whales, fish, and waterfowl (Sognnes 2001), which together form a maritime complex partly contrasting the elk-dominated Taiga complex. Yet, maritime motifs are surprisingly few considering the many coastal and lakeside rock art sites. These traditions originated in the Mesolithic but lasted through the Neolithic (c. 4000–1800 BC), which in most of Norway (for instance) is largely characterized by hunting, fishing, and gathering until at least the third millennium (Prescott 1996), complicating the use of period terminology. As evidenced by the distribution of artefacts of, respectively, southern and northern origins, some contact, however, existed between these groups and Neolithic farming communities elsewhere in northern Europe. In Finland rock paintings only are known; virtually all are found at the large lakes in the south-east (Kivikäs 1995; Lahelma 2008). In north-western Russia rock carvings dominate, with foci at Lake Onega and the White Sea (Savvatejev 1977, 1982), whilst paintings and carvings are found at the Kola Peninsula (Shumkin 1990). This is also the case in the northern regions of Norway and Sweden (Bøe 1932, Engelstad 1934; Gjessing 1932, 1936; Hagen 1970, 1976; Hallström 1938, 1960; Helskog 1988; Simonsen 1958).

  Studies of open-air rock art in Britain have tended to focus on landscape location to provide a context for interpretation (e.g. Bradley 1997). Studies of passage tomb imagery have focused on structural symbolic analyses (e.g. Thomas 1990; Tilley 1991; Bradley 1998) or ‘hermeneutic’ interpretations (e.g. Thomas 1992, 1993), or compared motifs with images generated during altered states of consciousness (e.g. Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1993; Dronfield 1995, 1996). In recent years, however, new approaches have been developed which blend image position within rock art panels, passage tombs, and the environment (e.g. Shee Twohig 1996; Thomas 2001). In pursuing these recent approaches, we focus here upon the relationship between motifs and rock surfaces through time. We argue that a consideration of the dynamic between image and surface offers a route into considering why rock art traditions differ so starkly in Britain and Ireland from the rest of continental Europe.

  Studies of Scandinavian ‘Neolithic’ rock art to a large extent have focused on chronology; when this art was made, and how it relates to the rock art of the Bronze Age. During recent years much effort has concentrated on dating by means of Holocene land uplift in coastal Norway and Sweden (e.g. Hesjedal 1994; Lindqvist 1994; Ramstad 2000) and in the lake districts of Finland (Kivikäs et al. 1999). Interpretations of the symbolism and cultural context of the art have widened from a total dominance of hunting magic interpretations to landscape studies (Gjerde 2002; Sognnes 2001), detailed readings of individual panels (Sognnes 2008a), structuralist studies (Hesjedal 1994), and analyses that suggest the art was associated with shamanism (Gjessing 1936; Grønnesby 1998) and totemism (Hesjedal 1994). Whilst the rock art of northernmost Europe, with its emphasis on a non-domesticated world, may look strange and alien from a European Neolithic perspective, we will argue that contacts between the hunter-gatherer-fishers of the north and farmers in central and western Europe were important in the development of the imagery during this period.

  THE OPEN-AIR ROCK ART OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND

  As noted, one of the major characteristics of open-air rock art in Britain and Ireland is the emphasis on abstract images, including simple cup marks, cups with one or more rings, cup marks with tails/radial lines (or cup and rings with tails/radial lines), spirals, and rosettes (see Fig. 46.1). Mostly, these particular images are relatively simple, al
though they can be combined into patterns of striking complexity. These traditions bear similarities with other regions of Europe, in particular Galicia in Atlantic Iberia (Bradley 1997; cf. Fairén-Jiménez, this volume), whilst cup marks are a component of the Bronze Age rock art traditions of southern Scandinavia dating after 1800 BC. Whilst these two regions—Galicia and southern Scandinavia—incorporate abstract images within a wider representational repertoire, representational images are extremely rare in Britain and Ireland.

  FIG. 46.1. Carved rock surface, Ormaig, Kilmartin, Scotland, photographed at night.

  (Photograph: Aaron Watson and Andrew Cochrane).

  FIG. 46.2. Main areas of distribution of rock art in the British Isles (Bradley 1997).

  (Reproduced by kind permission of Richard Bradley).

  Representational images are confined to a few instances: the carving of early Bronze Age dagger and flat axe motifs on the inner ring of the upright standing stones at Stonehenge, Wiltshire (Bradley 2000; Cleal et al. 1995) and the carving of flat axe motifs on burial cairns at Ri Cruin and Nether Largie Mid and North, Kilmartin, Argyll, west Scotland (Simpson and Thawley 1972; Jones 2001). In addition, representational motifs are found on the outer kerb of early Bronze Age burial monuments at a few sites in southern England, including two dagger motifs, two flat axes, and five cup marks at Badbury barrow, Dorset (Piggott 1939), and a series of images of unshod human footprints and cup marks on a cist slab incorporated into a barrow at Pool Farm, Somerset (Beckensall 1999, 70). The nature and context of these representational images suggests that representation is a later element of rock art traditions in Britain and Ireland, associated in particular with the early Bronze Age (c. 2300–1500 BC), and will not be considered further here.