Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe

Signing the Land

Mr Richard Bradley, Richard Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134708925
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Archeologia

Along the Atlantic seaboard, from Scotland to Spain, are numerous rock carvings made four to five thousand years ago, whose interpretation poses a major challenge to the archaeologist. In the first full-length treatment of the subject, based largely on new fieldwork, Richard Bradley argues that these carvings should be interpreted as a series of symbolic messages that are shared between monuments, artefacts and natural places in the landscape. He discusses the cultural setting of the rock carvings and the ways in which they can be interpreted in relation to ancient land use, the creation of ritual monuments and the burial of the dead. Integrating this fascinating yet little-known material into the mainstream of prehistoric studies, Richard Bradley demonstrates that these carvings played a fundamental role in the organization of the prehistoric landscape.

PART I

TERMS OF REFERENCE

How can I give you any notion…of what earth was in its original bleakness, before we brought to it the order of industry, the terraces, fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens of the world we are making in our own image?

Do you think of…[the] land you now inhabit…as a place given you by the gods ready-made in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, glowing out of a tree in some pasture or shaking their spirit over the pebbles of a brook in clear sunlight, in wells, in springs, in a stone that marks the edge of your legal right over a hillside; if the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine.

David Malouf (1978) An Imaginary Life

CHAPTER ONE
NEW DIRECTIONS, NEW POINTS OF VIEW
The experience of prehistoric rock art

INTRODUCTION

As archaeologists, we sometimes wonder how we can know about the past, but members of the public may have a different question in mind, for time and again they ask us where we get our ideas.

Our answers are often rather pretentious, and sometimes they are misleading, for we claim that our research grows directly out of the body of abstract ideas that we talk of as archaeological theory. That is both true and false. It is true that without an explicit range of theories and assumptions we cannot say anything at all about the past, but such a reply is also rather evasive. Archaeologists work in many different ways, but as often as not the cue for a new piece of research is a pattern that is identified by chance and one which has not been predicted. That moment of recognition is first and foremost an experience, but an experience that can only be understood in terms of a theory. We may have some ideas about the significance of that discovery, but from then onwards the experience itself becomes less important. If the initial observation is to be communicated—still more, if it is to be understood—we must work out why it occurred in the first place. We have to retrace the processes by which that experience was formed and, having done so, we must analyse them as strictly as we can. We must find out whether such an imaginative leap was justified by any evidence and we must trace its implications using the theories and methods at our command.

The subject of this book is one which easily provokes such reflections. For years it has attracted the attention of ‘alternative archaeologists’, nearly all of whom have interpretations of their own. Whilst I was excavating a monument which contains several prehistoric rock carvings, members of the public suggested many reasons why these designs were made. Nearly all those ideas emerged spontaneously from what they saw, and a few were certainly influenced by strong personal beliefs. The sources of such ideas are important to those who suggest them, and they must not be dismissed by archaeologists. The question is whether there is any method by which such interpretations can be assessed.

The late Ronald Morris, who spent many years studying the prehistoric rock carvings of the British Isles, heard many accounts of this phenomenon. In fact he listed more than a hundred separate interpretations of these images, marking them out of ten for plausibility. Applying his professional judgement as a lawyer, he awarded marks of six and above to just 22 per cent of the suggestions; 53 per cent were marked between one and five, and 25 per cent failed entirely, with a mark of nought (Morris 1979, 16–28). Every archaeologist who has studied the same material would add to Morris’s list and no doubt they would rank those ideas in their own ways. The important point is not that different people prefer different interpretations, or that many of those ideas are very subjective. It is that such ideas must be discussed in a disciplined manner if they are to inform prehistoric archaeology. One aim of this book is to offer such a discussion.

What is rock art, and what has its study to offer to the well-established discipline of field archaeology? This is where the question of experience is so important. I can best approach those questions by describing my first encounter with rock carvings, for that experience was instrumental in persuading me to study them in detail.

Archaeological field projects tend to flow into one another, and this study of prehistoric rock art, which was carried out at various points between 1990 and 1995, had its origin in an excavation which I conducted during the 1980s. Together with Mark Edmonds, I was excavating the Neolithic axe quarries at Great Langdale in north-west England, and we were coming to realise that our work was producing unexpected results (Bradley and Edmonds 1993, chapters 7 and 10). There was a clear sequence of quarries on these sites, and although the people who had used the later stone sources were making axes more efficiently than their predecessors, it was impossible to study their activities in terms of technology alone. The later quarries were located on perilous ledges, yet to reach these places at all people would have crossed exposures of equally suitable rock which they did not use. They preferred to work, at great inconvenience to themselves, in a spectacular natural setting with an enormous view.

One day we closed the excavation and went on a field trip to West Yorkshire, and here we visited a number of recently published rock carvings on Ilkley Moor. Many of the boulders and outcrops were decorated with abstract motifs (Ilkley Archaeology Group 1986). It was because of our work at Langdale that we were less impressed by these carvings than we were by their natural setting. Some of the most elaborate carved surfaces were located in positions that commanded extensive views over the lower ground (Pl. 1). Once again this was a way of considering the prehistoric landscape that had played little part in the archaeological literature. It was not consistent with the studies of settlement sites that I knew best. Nor were the carved rocks really monuments like so many of the structures built at prominent places in the uplands. That visit to Ilkley Moor set me wondering just how such places had been used.

SOME DEFINITIONS

Having approached my subject obliquely, I must retrace my steps and offer a more formal definition of this material. The term ‘rock art’ is unsatisfactory, but, as happens with so many technical terms, it is too late to look for an alternative now. It is meant to describe the distinctive practice of painting or carving natural surfaces in the landscape. It is the fact that these motifs were created on stone that has ensured their survival, but we should not suppose that they were limited to this particular medium. Similar motifs might once have extended to other materials; an example is the Australian practice of carving living trees (Rhoads 1992). They may have been found still more widely, for example in body paintings, house decoration, the patterns on clothing or even as the owners’ marks on domesticated animals (Layton 1991; Odak 1989).

In fact the distribution of prehistoric rock art may have been drastically reduced. In the area studied in this book many exposed rocks are too friable to retain any evidence of decoration. Some surfaces are being destroyed by acid rain, whilst the prevailing climate between Scotland and northern Spain is far too moist to allow any paintings to survive. These are serious problems, but they are not insuperable, for with few exceptions we can say that the motifs carved on natural surfaces in the landscape are not quite the same as those found on stone-built monuments. To that extent at least we are dealing with a distinctive phenomenon.

The word ‘art’ poses a further problem. I should make it clear that this is another technical term which has been used for so long that it is difficult to replace it now. A more neutral terminology would refer to ‘rock carvings’, ‘rock drawings’, ‘rock motifs’ or even to ‘petroglyphs’. In each case this would be done to avoid any implication that we are studying a purely aesthetic phenomenon. These carvings might have been a medium for creative self-expression, but that is not a claim that we could substantiate today. The subtitle of this book emphasises a different approach. Among other things, the motifs are ‘signs’; they are items of information that were inscribed at specific points in the terrain. Taken singly or in combination, those signs would have carried particular meanings for particular people. I shall argue that we will understand this material better if we consider how such a system worked in terms of the broader uses of the landscape.

ROCK ART RESEARCH AND LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY

I have described my reaction at first seeing the rock carvings on Ilkley Moor. Why did it seem so difficult to interpret these sites according to the methods employed in landscape archaeology? Once again the problem is partly one of definition. Just as we can be misled by contemporary conceptions of ‘art’, so we can form a false impression of the prehistoric landscape. As we shall see, the rock carvings of Atlantic Europe span the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods, but until recently archaeologists studying those phases had placed too much emphasis on the distribution of fixed resources. They tended to think in terms of a stable pattern of settlements, boundaries and fields, not unlike the world that we inhabit today. The distribution of human activity was determined by the requirements of sedentary agriculture (Barker 1985). Consequently, the best way in which to study the landscape was to think in terms of agricultural territories radiating out from permanent settlements.

This way of thinking about the landscape raises a number of problems. First, the importance of cereal agriculture is often assumed rather than demonstrated, with the result that it has been enough to identify the presence of domesticated resources for archaeologists to postulate a pattern of sedentary mixed farming. This does not make enough allowance for the importance of mobility long after the first experiments with agriculture. Second, this approach overlooks a fundamental distinction in the archaeology of many regions where fixed settlements are first found with any regularity in the later second and first millennia BC. Until then the main features of the landscape are specialised monuments devoted to the dead. It is to this period that the rock carvings probably belong.

I mentioned that some of the more striking rock art on Ilkley Moor is located in places with an extensive view over the lower ground. This suggests a very different perception of the landscape. In fact this particular example encapsulates the problem quite effectively, as John Bintliff has taken exactly the same concentration of rock carvings to mark the centre of an agricultural territory and has supported his view by plotting them on a map of the local soils (Bintliff 1988, 129–30). But the siting of some of these carvings at viewpoints makes it at least as probable that they overlooked areas of settlement on the more sheltered land in the valleys. If so, then they were towards the edge of the prehistoric landscape rather than at its centre.

The anthropologist Tim Ingold has commented on a similar distinction. Hunter gatherers, he says, exercise a different form of land tenure from settled farmers. For hunter gatherers (and I would extend his scheme to other mobile peoples) tenure is based on ‘sites and paths’. Territories are conceived in terms of the trails running through the landscape and the views across it. Such paths and places may be controlled by specific groups. ‘In agricultural societies, on the other hand…the cultivator appropriates the land in plots, which may be relatively dispersed or consolidated’ (1986, 153). It is only in this case that territories can be considered in terms of continuous boundaries.

A rather similar point is made by Peter Wilson:

The hunter/gatherer pins ideas and emotions onto the world as it exists…. A construction is put upon the landscape rather than the landscape undergoing reconstruction, as is the case among sedentary people, who impose houses, villages and gardens on the landscape, often in the place of natural landmarks.

(1988, 50)

The landscape archaeology of prehistoric Europe is primarily an archaeology of settled communities. Hunter gatherers have been studied effectively for many years, but the same approaches very rarely extend to the archaeology of later populations. It is only recently that more attention has been paid to what Spanish archaeologists have described as the ‘archaeology of mobility’ (Infante, Vaquero and Criado 1992).

These distinctions are important when we consider the chronological and geographical distribution of European rock art. I am not concerned with the Palaeolithic or Mesolithic periods, but even after those phases the evidence is widely distributed, with major groups of sites in southern France, northern Italy, the Iberian peninsula, Scandinavia, Britain and Ireland. Apart perhaps from northern Italy and south Scandinavia, these regions have certain features in common. Either they are too remotely located to have experienced intensive mixed farming or they are areas in which agriculture was adopted gradually and where it may not have assumed an overriding importance until the Later Bronze Age or Iron Age. A few areas like the northern part of Scandinavia remained beyond the agricultural frontier entirely (Hagen 1990), whilst in most of the others it is difficult to identify a stable pattern of settlement contemporary with the creation of the rock art. Even where cultivation coexisted with hunting and pastoralism, the rock carvings tend to be found in those areas best suited to mobile exploitation.

Still more important, rock art tends to disappear by the period of agricultural intensification during the Later Bronze Age and Iron Age. Again there are exceptions, but for the most part it appears that the establishment of a fully agricultural economy and a network of permanent settlements epitomises a quite different way of seeing the world. I shall discuss the evidence from Atlantic Europe in later chapters, but the point to emphasise here is that over a much wider area rock art seems to be a feature of the period in which mobility remained important and animals, both wild and domesticated, played a significant role in the economy (Bradley 1993, chapter 2). When that way of life changed, rock art generally went out of use.

If this is correct, it means that rock art was more significant in those situations in which Ingold envisages a pattern of land tenure based on paths, places and viewpoints. It lost much of its impact as this was replaced by a territorial system depending on stable mixed farming. As we have seen, only then could territories be conceived in terms of an enclosed area and a continuous boundary. It is this second system that has provided so much of the evidence studied by archaeologists. Perhaps rock art may have a part to play in studies of another kind of landscape.

THE STATUS OF ROCK ART STUDIES IN EUROPEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

If the assumptions of landscape archaeology have their limitations, there are more criticisms to make of the state of rock art research as it affects our understanding of the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods in Europe. In fact the most serious criticism is that in many regions it plays little part in the study of prehistory. It exists as a separate field, with its own institutions and its own publications. Outside Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula, it is very difficult to connect this kind of research with the dominant concerns of modern archaeology.

To some extent this has come about through an overemphasis on discovery and documentation. Both are laudable aims, but one sometimes feels that they have become an end in themselves. At one extreme there are regions like the British Isles where virtually all the work has been conducted by amateur archaeologists. Their records are of varying quality, although the best of them are excellent. The problem is that not all these people have wished to interpret their findings in a wider context. This is not surprising when so few sites are protected and displayed to the public.

At the other extreme there are groups of sites like those at Valcamonica and Mont Bego where the exceptional quality of the rock art has generated an academic industry (Anati 1994; De Lumley 1995). It has also led to a curiously introverted kind of research, which seems quite out of contact with the main currents in modern archaeology. At its worst it has led to the creation of grandiose interpretations of the imagery based on the literature of comparative religion (Anati 1993). Such projects have an explicit methodology for recording the rock art but seem to lack an equally coherent framework for interpreting it.

In between these two extremes there are many studies which concentrate on the details of the motifs found in prehistoric rock art. Again this is undoubtedly necessary if we are to understand its distribution and chronology, but these results have been won at a price. The carvings, and in some cases the paintings, are detached from the surfaces on which they were created and reproduced on the printed page in exactly the same manner as portable artefacts. As a result publications of this material have an over-familiar air, as if the authors were publishing catalogues of metalwork or pottery. At times this approach breaks up any comp...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PLATES
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: TERMS OF REFERENCE
• PART II: ROCK ART AND THE LANDSCAPE OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND
• PART III: ROCK ART AND THE LANDSCAPE OF ATLANTIC EUROPE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY