This volume derives from a workshop held at the University of
Kalmar (now Linnaeus University), Sweden between the 20-24 of
October 2008. The aim of this gathering was to provide a forum for
rock art researchers from different parts of northern Europe to
discuss traditional as well as current interpretative trends within
rock art research. Changing Pictures aims to return to traditional
interpretative notions regarding the meaning and significance of
rock art to investigate if and why any information had been left
behind to recover and rethink. During the last decades, there has
been an immense global interest among archaeologists and
anthropologists in studying rock art. Research in northern Europe,
as elsewhere, has intensely explored a manifold of methodological
and theoretical perspectives. Most of these studies however, have
been published in languages that seldom reach beyond the native
speakers of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, Russian or Finnish.
Therefore an important motivation for this volume is to try to
apprise some of the current movements within this field of research
and present it for an international audience. These papers explore
the relevance of older ideas, such as notions about prehistoric
religion, ritual performance, sympathetic magic, animism and
totemism, the mindscapes of landscapes etc., as well as the present
"state of the art" in order to develop a broader understanding of
the phenomenon we call rock art. This aspiration can be seen as a
common thread linking the different chapters in this book. Saying
that, some, if not all, of the articles presented in this volume
challenge the notion "rock art" itself, arguing that sometimes the
rock, the "canvas" and rather intangible but equally important
sensual encounters, such as sound, echoes, touch and temporal
phenomenological changes and the perception of decorated rock art
panels, should be regarded, at least, as important as the "art"
itself. By reassessing traditional approaches to Scandinavian rock
art and creatively reworking these ideas, whilst also addressing
significant new concepts such as the agency of rock and the
performativity of rock art, this anthology of papers offers not
only a snapshot of current debates, but also reflects pivotal
changes in the study of rock art.
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