g 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, snapped at a hundredth of a second, copy an image onto a flat surface and do not necessarily enhance one’s observation of a surface the way drawing docs. In addition, how does one record the surrounding/adjacent surfaces, sounds, smells, and the ambience of a place? Archaeologists are selective when recording data; capturing all is not possible. In the case of rock engravings, the easiest, least cumbersome choice is to focus on the figures. Today I find that good documentation is demanding and time consuming.
Even in those cases where figures and surface features are recorded by nibbling, interpretations do not include comment on the structure of the surface any more frequently than where the figures are traced and when fissures and cracks are recorded (e. g. Poikalaincn & Emits 1998). If the rock surfaces — the landscapes in which the rock art story is told (Helskog 2004) — are meaning-rich, then we also have to make sure that when curators ‘mend’ rock surfaces to preserve rock art they do not inadvertently destroy part of that landscape.
Our traditional strong focus on the figures constrains what we see, record and interpret: this is what I mean by the tyranny of the figures in the chapter title.
Myths and folklore are an important source of information on any culture: some offer an explanation as to why things are as they are — events and natural phenomena, sickness, good or bad hunts — and they serve to reinforce social order, the organisation of society and relationship with the supernatural. The origin of stories can only be speculated upon. Some ‘travel’ between populations and others appear to be indigenous; some were perhaps first narrated by a shaman following an experience in an altered state of consciousness (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988). Judging from the diversity of shapes and the content of global rock an, the cultural dimension in the choice of what is depicted was a dominating factor. In Scandinavia, it can be demonstrated how form and content changed through time, from prehistoric hunter-gather