As the editors point out, "rock art is the oldest archive of human activity," and its interpretation, although fraught with difficulty is thus of prime importance. This collection of papers, taken from the 15th UISPP congress, mainly look at specific symbols and their interpretation. Thus there are papers on faceless anthropomorphic symbols, the pentagram, spirals and lozenges, bulls horn symbols, footprint and handprint symbols, cupmarks and triangles, and net patterns and ruled rectangles. The volume is completed by two essays on particular rock art sites in Portugal and Galicia.

Ten essays from a session of the 15th UISPP Congress (2006), which demonstrate the importance of the cognitive-processual approach pioneered by Colin Renfrew in studying prehistoric iconography. Topics include the location and orientation of passage tombs in Ireland, the symbolic use of celestial bodies in Bronze Age Hungary, ship images in rock art, female statues in Romania, symbolism in the East European Chalcolothic, rock art in France, and metal deposits in the Alps. There are also three purely theoretical papers.

These papers arose from a workshop at the 15th uispp congress which aimed to provide an opportunity for researchers from a number of institutions to compare ideas and to seek to develop a standardised system for recording rock art, or a family of interconnecting systems, based on information technology. The papers present various cataloguing systems, and explore issues of conservation, accessibility, and of intellectual rights.