 the slopes There are mainly elk, three bears, a reindeer, a fox, two hares, and human figures with bows and arrows and spears (one with a drum, some in a procession, two with elk-headed poles, four holding on to an oval and each other), a face, and a long line ending in a circle with a central point. It is a compact panel, and the story narrated and the landscape involved appear different from those in the two previously described panels. The elk dominate. The elk- headed poles are a central focus at the highest section, in contrast to their location at the lower part of the other panels. The vertical structures that point towards the vertical division of the universe are absent; instead, the figures are interwoven in an entirely different way, and boats and fish are not included. There is also no lack of surrounding rock surfaces where engravings could have been made, but were not.
I note also that, at the large, horizontal, undulating to sloping panel Bergbuktcn I, with a reindeer corral, the lower animals closest to the shoreline are all elk (Figure 10.2).
Figure 10.7 Bergbukten IV 8. A redrawing emphasising engraved figures and cracks.
In this case most of the surface is relatively flat, with a gradient of approximately 45° -
The northern and southern sections are oriented in slightly different directions.
Note the concentration of elk in the lower section.
Figure 10.8 Bergbukten IV B. The northern part of the panel, looking south.
In contrast to Alta, the engravings at Zalavruga in northern Karelia, Russia, are all on relatively flat horizontal surfaces on an old river bank. The distinction between panels on horizontal and sloping surfaces is not as pronounced as at Alta. Some of the panels are separated by pools of rainwater and small ledges. Inside the pools no engravings are found. Bur, clearly, the surfaces are chosen because they fit the story or the story can be fitted to the surface. At Staraja (Old) Zalavruga (Zalavruga I [Sawatejev 1970: figure 14]) the surface is smooth and few other surfaces could have fitted a composition of this size and form, especially if the form of the surface was significant. The location was on a small north promontory on the shore landscape, unlike that of any other section (Sawatejev 1970: figure 16). Three large elk and some boats are depicted towards the top of the west slope, and a ‘wedge’ of reindeer cuts off the outermost part of the promontory (Figure 10.9). The water would have bounded the western, northern and eastern surfaces. There are no engravings immediately to the south, while to the north1 northeast, downslope, there are smaller-sized figures such as human figures on skis, elk, boats and a few beluga (white whales). The large figures, considered by some researchers to be the oldest (Stoljar 1977), include large elk, elk-headed prow boats, all female. These large figures occur behind, almost within, the wedge formation of reindeer. They all move from the left (north) to the right — along the shoreline. Fifty metres further to the south-southeast, at the site New Zalavruga, is the well-known hunting scene in which three skiers hunt three elk (Sawatejev 1984) and in which the ski tracks and the tracks from the elk move downhill in accordance with the topography of the rock surface. As stated earlier, the positioning of the elk requires a thorough examination in all panels before any specific conclusions can be drawn for these Karelian sites, but, as at Alta, it is evident that the ancient Karelian population also used elk and the surface as a part of the story being told.
On a sloping rock surface, when illustrating a story in which the sky, earth, water and below (underworld) played a part, one would expect the sky to be positioned uppermost, below to be lowermost, and the world in which people live to be depicted in the middle. In the Alta panels, this seems to be the case. Yet, some of the figures — birds, reindeer, boats and fish — also signal different environments, but this may also be related to the different worlds. The spatial relationships between the figu