t in the many middens in northern Norway dating to the Stone Age, elk bones are missing, as are those of bear. This suggests that both animals were given some sort of preferential burial, as witnessed by the bear graves from the early Middle Ages, or thrown into a river/water, as among the Voguls (Kannisto et al. 1958). Alternatively, these animals may never have been hunted or eaten, but this is contrary to the hunting scenes in the rock art. In the forested areas of northern Sweden, elk bones become dominant in the archaeological record, while their continued prominent position in the rock art of that area indicates their continued ritual significance. It appears that there were regional cultural differences in ritual behaviour associated with elk.
Okladnikov and Martynov (1972, cited in Jacobson 1993: 92-93), claimed that the sun cult and solar rituals were important in Neolithic Siberia and that the boats frequently overlaying or underlying the elk refer to the passage after death from one world to another. The predominance of female elk points to the animal as a source of life. However, the relationship of the elk with the major rivers suggests that, if the rivers were considered by Neolithic cultures to be the paths that souls took to the netherworld, the world of the dead, then elk were as closely associated with death as with life (Jacobson 1993: 92-97). Assuming that the elk-boat relationship refers to the passage after death, the elk must also have been invoked in funerary rituals.
The elk is an animal which thrives in water, in river valleys and marshes, during the summer, and in forests during the winter. More than any other terrestrial animal, it connects with water and this behavioural characteristic might have become a metaphor for a spirit animal that mediated land and water — therefore boats with elk-headed prows. The elk heads on boat prows do not have antlers and therefore may be female. Some have asserted that elk without antlers in herds represent a winter phenomenon (Ramqvist et al. 1985), while others (Hagen 1976; Mikkelsen 1986; Tilley 1991) have focused more on them as an indicator of femininity, a point of view which is also common among Russian scholars (Jacobson 1993). The elk has been associated ethnographically with totemism, death and resurrection (Tilley 1991); it was polysomic, as has been shown for rock art symbols elsewhere (Lewis-Williams 1998).
Our knowledge of the elk in prehistory is based on artifacts, osteological remains and engravings on artefacts and rock surfaces, while our understanding of the meanings of the elk is based solely on the ethnographic record. The problems in applying analogies need hardly be repeated (e.g. Wylie 1985; Lewis-Williams 1991,1995). Ethnographic examples associated with the elk in a north European and Siberian context may, however, provide a part of the framework for interpreting the rock art when complex patterns in the ethnography fit closely with complex patterns in the rock art. In the cosmology of the Siberian populations, the elk represents one of the most important spirits, while in Sami folklore information about the elk is minimal; there seems to be no continuity within northern Scandinavia. The elk, however, especially the female animal, was once an important animal in the world of beliefs of the populations of northern Scandinavia, as has been claimed for northern Russia, and across the taiga and tundra of Siberia (Jacobson 1993: 2). According to Anisimov (1963a: 110), the elk was also an ancient totem among the Evenk.
According to Jacobson (1993: 242), the role of the elk among the Evenk and the Ket of western Siberia has Bronze Age roots, and these peoples’ myths are thus especially relevant as an analog)’. In the ethnographic record there is a heavenly elk, a mother elk, a cosmic elk, a gigantic female elk, associated with hunting and regeneration (Anisimov 1963b: 161- 162; Jacobson 1993: 242). The elk seems to be connected to all cosmic worlds. It was a creator linked with the creation of the mountain and rivers in the middle world (An