er societies to agricultural societies (Hagen 1973) or, as in Alta, within hunting-fishing-gathering societies (Helskog 1988,1989). The explanations for visualising stories and choosing form and content are bound to be multiple, and the stories, storytellers and experiences will be culturally bound. Furthermore, connecting the rock art to the vast range of stories/narratives known from ethnographic sources, or to the many recorded beliefs and rituals, is difficult. But the repetition of figures depicted in rock art indicates that the stories in Alta focused on a relatively small number of figures and outdoor activities: there is a focus on the ’few’ rather than on the massive range of activities that might have been depicted. Even given a possible ’freedom’ of choice, the artist chose within tight parameters. So why the selectivity? It is this choice we find on the rock surfaces.
Compositions imply that the artist had a story to tell, which again means that the surface chosen had to ’fit’ the story, or that the story needed to be appropriate to the surface. Any artist, past or present, was/is bound by this simple relationship. A story may or may not have been created because of the form of the surface, but we can see that some rock engravings (and therefore their stories) were positioned because of the features on or in the surfaces. Rock surfaces must have been, at least at times, instrumental in the choices made. At a particular ritual area some surfaces might have been more conducive to conveying particular narratives and messages than others. Alternatively, as Pat Vinnicombe noted while we were walking through the Drakensberg before the symposium for David Lewis- Williams, “in a living nature the story might have been in the surface already, and the figures only needed to be added” (Patricia Vinnicombe pers. comm. 2000).
When a surface was engraved, the panel — the surface and figures — might become bound to a particular story and ritual. Yet, we know that, at some surfaces, figures are added at later points in time. Panels can expand. The panels discussed in this chapter are all dated to approximately the late 7th and early 6th millennia BP. If engravings added to these panels were intentionally related to those made earlier, then there was an accumulative effect in which the story was continued in some form. If not, then the new composition represents only a later chronological instant in the life of the panel and the story at that point was probably different from earlier stories told on the same panel. Indeed, stories might have changed with changing contexts. If place was a meaning-giving element, environmental changes might have caused changes in the ritual associations between the panel and its landscape. In Arctic Scandinavia in particular, where new land emerged from the sea with shore displacement and climatic changes throughout the Holocene, old associations might have been broken.
Where a landscape remained unchanged, rock art panels would have been more prone to have been engraved in variable manners over a long period of time. For panels where the landscape changed, the rock art would more likely have been made over a shorter period of time and will therefore appear fairly uniform and homogeneous. Examples of both alternatives can be found among the panels at Lake Onega, eastern Karelia, Russia. It is well documented that the panels are all located adjacent to water. There are several cases along rivers and lakes where engravings still arc, or until recently were, overflowed by water (Sawatejev 1970, 1984; Ramqvist ctal 1985; Shumkin 1990; Tilley 1991: 56). Panels appear to have touched water (Bertdsson 1987; Hesjedal et al. 1996; Helskog 1999). In Alta, there is a chronological difference between panels at different heights above sea level: those lower down are younger than those higher up. New panels continued to hug the shoreline as the land rose. This does not necessarily mean that those panels at a higher altitude were discarded, but new engravings seldom appear to have been added to the older surf