ions of seeing and recording, and why I had gone wrong in my redrawing of the rock art. I had focused on the figures themselves as so many before me had done (such as Gjessing 1936; Simonsen 1958; Hallstrom 1960; Maimer 1981). In good Scandinavian tradition, I had traced all of the figures onto plastic sheets, joined them together and then reproduced all within a single redrawing, but without really seeing the surrounding rock or the surfaces between the images. I knew that aspects of the surfaces had to be recorded, but I really did not know which features to record. Traditionally, some fissures and cracks are drawn, especially if they run through engravings, but they are not included in the discussion of meaning. Recently Coles (2000), in his re-analysis of the so-called Dansarm (‘the dancer*) rock engraving panel in southern Sweden, recognised that fissures and cracks subdivide larger panels into smaller units. The point applies to Norway as well. In 2004, my own cooperation with the artist bore fruit — another copy, and with better technical drawing control (Helskog & Hogtun 2004). Also, from 2002 I became involved with a large Scandinavian project Rock Art of Northern Europe — and I introduced high-level technology and video scanning to my recording practices. These methods give an accurate three-dimensional recording of the surface topography, emphasising the spatial interrelationship between the engravings and the surface on which they are located (Helskog 2003). The method is still expensive, but will no doubt become a standard method of documentation in the future.
Figure 10.3 The main part of Bergbukten I. This redrawing shows a common type of rock art documentation in which only the engraved figures are represented.
It Is devoid of ’disturbing’ topographic features and has flattened out an otherwise undulating surface.
Not much can be gained from It concerning any meanings that may be derived from the relationships between the figures and the rock surface.
Figure 10.4 Bergbukten I. A perspective drawing which emphasises the relationships between the figures and the rock surface.
The view is from the direction of the shoreline. This is a more ’correct’ representation than the redrawing In Figure 10.3.
(Drawing by Ernst Hagtun, Tromso Museum).
In retrospect, one of the rewarding aspects of working with rock art is the fact that the research is rarely destructive, unlike the practice of excavation: what goes unrecorded can be recorded later. For that I am grateful, and have been many times.
The recognition of ‘panels’ on rock art surfaces is as old as the discovery of rock art. At times the physical layout of the compositions is clearly distinguished within panels (Hallstrom 1960), or panels can be regarded as metaphoric pages a few meters apart or separated by cracks (Tilley 1991). In some cases the panels are ‘natural’, such as the slabs found in the Kivik grave, or those found under the Bronze Age grave mound of Hogholmen (Goldhahn 1999), or among the ledges at New Zalavruga (Sawatejev 1970). Panels have always been recognised, yet much focus has been on individual figures (e.g. Maimer 1981) — which figures are located adjacent to which others and, although less so, on the relationship between the figures and the rock surface. The focus on the figure might partly be explained by the constraints placed by the strong preoccupation with chronology, and therefore with the need to ‘prove’ which figures are contemporaneous and which are not to record all cracks and fissures in a panel involves subjective choices and afterwards there is the problem of distinguishing cracks and fissures from the rock an images in the photographs and the repro copies of the plastic sheets. And what about the different colours, the elevations, the depressions, the seeping water, the changing gradients — all of which can complicate and make tracings unintelligible. The inability to draw is part of the reason why documentation by drawing/tracing has been primarily two-dimensional, supplemented by a vast array of photographs. Photographs, 