Thinking Through Images

Swedish Rock Art Series 7

THINKING THROUGH IMAGES NARRATIVE, RHYTHM, EMBODIMENT AND LANDSCAPE IN THE NORDIC BRONZE AGE

Christopher Tilley

Oxford & Philadelphia

Preface: thinking images through In the blitz of the 2020 pandemic, I received a confidential email from Chris Tilley saying he had composed a ‘swansong’ over his 30-year long engagement with north European rock art. He asked me to write an introduction: ‘… like something a bit different from the standard format of a few laudatory comments and I have several ideas if you would be interested. Something more in the direction of a reflexive critical engagement in terms of Scandinavian rock art research perhaps.’ I agreed. The manuscript arrived a few days later, and I had a go at it. I waited a while for further instructions on how to avoid any ‘laudatory comments,’ but, being somewhat impatient, I went ahead and composed the following introduction.

For your information, I probably know Chris much better than he knows me. We only met twice. The first time was in 2004 at a rock art conference in Bergen, Norway. No surprise. I remember that he talked about the choreography afforded by the interplay between art and rock in the Simrishamn area in Scania, southernmost Sweden (Tilley 2004). We exchanged some courtesies in the hotel bar. The second time was in London in 2019. I was there to examine one of his PhD students. We greeted each other before the ritual began and arranged to have dinner afterward.

However, after the examination came to an end, I managed to get lost in UCL’s winding corridors. I met many friendly faces. When I finally found the right building and office, it was well beyond dinner time, and Chris had given up on me and decided to go home.

Admittedly, I was disheartened. Let me explain why.

In 1989, amid the processual and post-processual turmoil, I started to read archaeology at Umeå University, situated in northernmost Sweden. The archaeological department was crafted around a group of mid-1970s students who were occupied fulfilling their academic careers. Their archaeological perception had been forged during late romantic evenings drinking red wine while collectively reading Hegel and Marx. All tables were round. Maurice Bloch’s (1983) Marxism and Anthropology was mandatory

reading for all first-year undergraduates. In Umeå, it was still the heydays of the processual era. Binford was the opium to reveal the past as it once was. He was considered close to divine. When Big Lew came to Umeå to present some lectures, decades of alumni turned up. There was no seat left in the largest lecturing room on campus. People were standing along the walls, sitting in the stairs, or on the floor. Some tried to get a glimpse of the Big Man through the crowded entrance way – Binfordmania. Afterward, I found myself in a long line-up to shake the Master’s hand.

A bit unexpectedly, Binford declared that he had enjoyed my harmonica playing from the night before in the students’ bar – ‘Damn, I thought I was back in Texas!’ My fellow undergraduates did their best to follow Binford’s pursuit and estimate how many calories a band of hunters could gain by killing an elk, or how many hours it would have taken to dig all the hunting pits. Halfway through the first semester, we were kindly asked to declare if we were idealists or materialists.

This harmony of illusions started to change – at least for me – one pale afternoon in 1991. We were having one of the too-typical-Swedish-seeming-endlessly-long-coffeebreaks, sitting like a band of hunter-gatherers around the most oversized round table, when one of my lecturers came bursting in waving a book in his hand. His voice was trembling when he cried out: ‘Something terrible has happened!’ My first thought was that somebody had been robbed or died. Then he added in a high-pitched voice: ‘Chris Tilley has written a book about Nämforsen!’1 Commotion. It was like somebody had stolen the Crown Jewels. My next thought was: ‘I have to get my hands on that book!’

Reading Material Culture and Text: the art of ambiguity back in 1991 was a decisive moment behind my mounting interest in rock art. Moreover, it marked the start of a 30‑year dialogue with Chris’s writing, which I have nourished in my tussles in becoming an archaeologist. So, without his knowledge, my academic life-world has been closely

xiv Thinking Through Images interwoven with Chris’s research, which helped me find an archaeological voice.

Another impetus for my passion for these northern pictorial worlds is Jarl Nordbladh, in Chris’s words: ‘The founding father of contemporary interpretative rock art research.’ I first met him in 1990 at a Nordic student conference on the Island of Møn, south-east of Copenhagen in Denmark. The guest lecturers included Klavs Randsborg.

He did not miss the opportunity to master both his own and visiting students with his impressive encyclopaedic knowledge. Jarl was different, and so was his redeeming lecturing style. He calmly sat down on the desk in front of us and asked some simple questions: ‘Why are you here?’ ‘What is archaeology for you?’ ‘What do you want archaeology to become?’ After a year of indoctrination, Jarl came down as a revelation.

Back in Umeå, I began a search for things Jarl had written. It was testing. His ‘prolegomena to the study of Scandinavian petroglyphs and semiotics’ from the early to mid-1970s (Nordbladh 1978a; 1978b), turned out to be just that – a prologue. I realized that Jarl is more fond of discussing archaeology than putting his thoughts into words.

To be clear, I consider both equally important. I also realized that very few of Jarl’s peers knew how to appreciate the wordings he composed on interpreting rock art. Persistent rumours proclaimed that his thesis was incomprehensible.

At my Alma mater, it was known as the ‘smelly thesis,’ an odour caused by the glue that had been used in binding together the carelessly stencilled pages, which, of course, was a thought-out Jarlian aesthetic. His thesis was used as a warning why you should avoid doing a PhD by compilation.

Monographs were all that counted. The glue in Jarl’s thesis was not only smelly, it turned out to be useless. Few, if any, of his theses are still holding together, but it is still an inspirational read.

Jarl introduced semiotic perspectives in rock art research when few of his contemporary colleagues knew how to formulate a theory to reach an informed interpretation (Nordbladh 1980). Jarl’s plot was that rock art was not made to appease any god of thunder, or similar weather phenomenon, but that the signs were used as a media of communication between social beings (Nordbladh 1978a).

At the time, this thought seemed revolutionary.2 His way to reveal the plot was to detect meaningful patterns on the chaotic panels. Which subject matters were combined, and which were not? How can such patterns be significant for us to understand people in the past? Jarl found out that only a few of all possible combinations of glyphs had been articulated and, interesting enough, the same articulations

could be found in different rock art areas (Nordbladh 1980).

In the famous words of Lord Polonius: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it!’

Not many of today’s rock art scholars are acquainted with Jarl’s thesis. Even fewer have taken the time to try to comprehend its content. The messy but informative statistical analysis is built on extensive fieldwork and months of decoding. The maps in his thesis are overlooked.

They are hard to grasp, some would say perplexing, which has led to a situation in which many scholars have missed out on his innovative landscape analyses. Many of his conclusions are re-articulated in ensuing rock art discourses without acknowledging where they were first formulated.

To be fair, it took me several days to decode the maps in Jarl’s thesis. I had to stencil them, put them together with sticky-tape, and use color-codes – blue for the sea, green for land, black dots for burials, red for rock art and green for what-ever-else – before I could start to understand what Jarl tried to communicate. The final bricolage, composed by some forty to fifty A4 papers, which I still have somewhere, was enormous and covered many square meters. It occupied the whole floor in my dormitory room at Ålidhem. I had to stand on toes on my desk to be able to view it at once – like a bird soaring in the air. Sometimes, reading a thesis about rock art demands its choreography.

There is a clear silver-lining from Jarl’s prolegomena to The Art of Ambiguity. Looking back, it is hard to apprehend how such an inspiring book could stir up so much fuss (cf.

Malmer 1993; Tilley 1993). Otherwise, sensible people started to add odd declarations in their acknowledgments, such as: ‘This article was written before Tilley’s book about Nämforsen was published, and nothing in it has changed the conclusion presented here.’ Part of these (over-) reactions might be explained by Chris’s mission to debunk hardcore positivists – declaring that the only objective fact about archaeology is that it is subjective. Another part of the crime was that his book offered alternative readings of the rock art in Nämforsen, which seem to have put some readers into an existential void. This innovative inference defied the modernistic mirage that promotes that science shall be written in singulars, with a capital S, and accurately aim for the truth. Suddenly the reader was offered a smörgåsbord of possible solutions of the riddle we call the past. Some found it outrageous. Swords were drawn to protect Nämforsen from ‘the intruder’ (e.g. Baudou 1997).

Looking even further back, or at the concurrent stateof-the-art of rock art research, it is easy to reveal how alternative readings of the same artworks have always been a part of this discourse. I suppose this is one of the allures of

Preface xv rock art. Without any connection and guidance of Indigenous voices, everybody can have their say. In more than one way, rock art acts like an archaeological Rorschach-test.3 Take five scholars and show them a rock art panel, or just a single image, and you end up with at least six explanations. It is inevitable. There is no filter between the pictures on the rocks and our thoughts. What you see is often what you get.

‘Here they engraved a boat because they had boats, but this boat reminds me of cultic activity from medieval France.’ ‘… and Here was an Elk too…’. Ambiguity has always been a part of rock art research, and always will be, so this could not have caused people’s discontent. I suspect that what in the end made Material Culture and Text such a distressing read for some scholars, was that Chris urged the reader to consider their situated beings and make archaeology matter.

It is now well-attested that archaeologists have a penchant for emplacing themselves in the intricate process of describing what we see, what I used to refer to as the myopicsyndrome. An example: a few years ago now, I pondered over the simple question of who it was that had made all the stunning images we find on the rocks in northern Europe, a question also raised in this book. Few had actually spent time trying to answer this rather trivial question. The images were considered self-sufficient. Intriguingly, I found out that the answers offered by contemporary colleagues often mirrored their own situated beings (Goldhahn 2007: 94–8).

A distinguished retired professor suggested that elderly people in the Bronze Age society made the engravings – Bronze Age Griots; people who had actually known previous generations of noteworthy heroes that had passed away. A professor and internationally leading scholar suggested it was traveling chiefs who travelled around Europe, gathering stories to tell about their journeys when they had returned home, who made rock art. The rock art specialist, who aimed to document all rock art panels in northern Bohuslän, suggested that special specialists made the rock art. Female colleagues wondered where had all the women gone? ‘Were they all men?!’ The Mirror Age. The engraved imageries act as a gigantic Rorschach-test.

The present book offers an alternative to such myopic readings because it unfolds together with a perspicuous selfreflective discourse. In the opening chapter, Chris describes his earlier rock art encounters leading up to when the present study came about and how these helped him think through images. It started with a book – Hallström’s monumental study about Nämforsen from 1960. It passed through Dalsland and Tisselskog, south-east Scania, Östergötland, and Vingen in Mid-Norway, before it landed at one of the first rock art panels to be documented in northern Europe –

the famous ‘Cobbler’ from Backa in Brastad parish on the west coast of today’s Sweden.

The reader is invited to follow this journey in a very literary sense. We learn that the more time Chris has spent exploring the engraved imageries at a place or region, the more he has been intrigued by other phenomena than the ‘original meaning’ of the images. He has explored if and how we can decode the imageries so that we can embrace their ambiguity as something meaningful; how different rock art panels relate to and constitute each other for the observer; how the images create a choreography of movement, some which might be thought-out by the ‘artists,’ others that might have been created by the images recursive properties affording us to explore them in an envisaged way; how the canvas sometimes constitutes a part of the art; how the surrounding landscape is in symbiosis with the canvas and the motion of the artworks, and more.

Chris also invites the reader to digest how certain dominant discourses among concurrent research affect our preconceptions about the images he explores in the study from Disåsen in Backa. His most sincere criticism is directed to colleagues who cherry-pick certain images and divorce them from the people who made and viewed them; the landscape settings; the way the rock art panels unfold and relate to other panels in the vicinity; how the panels introduce you to the images in a certain way and reveal other properties of themselves; how a ‘divorced image’ effectively interplays with other features and images on a panel and, last but not least; how the image unfolds itself to the viewer.

The reader is in for a treat. This does not necessarily mean that I agree with all the interpretations advocated in the present study. For instance, in the final part of the book, Chris states that he wants to present some thoughts about the Backa engravings that ‘stand free’ from the suffocating research history of north European rock art. I recognize that feeling; to paraphrase Freud, we all seem to be discontent with the contemporary rock art discourse. In this case, this feeling seems a bit contradictory, not least since we often been told by Chris that all forms of research practices are entangled in different forms of power discourses (i.e.

Tilley 1989). What are a research history and our constant referencing to our colleagues’ ‘tedious misinterpretations’ if not a struggle of power and control? Writing anything sensible about the past free from influences, or without implicit or explicit references to other academics works, past or present, seems to be an impeccable illusion.

That said, I think it is time we say a succinct farewell to ‘traditions’. In my studies of Bredarör on Kivik, the very ‘origin’ of rock art research in northern Europe (Goldhahn

xvi Thinking Through Images 2018a; 2020), I have been amazed over the fact that there are so few interpretations of this monument and its fascinating engravings (Goldhahn 2013), and the same might be said about the rock art from northern Bohuslän. All contemporary interpretations of the engravings from Bredarör were formulated before 1848. The many ensuing attempts to present ‘new’ and sometimes even ‘final’ solutions to apprehend the enigmatic imageries from the Bredarör cairn, or other related rock engravings, are only prolonged echoes of thoughts formulated before. Not even recent analyses of the recovered material from the 1931-campaign (Goldhahn 2013), or the unforeseen ‘discoveries’ of new images in the famous cist (cf. Goldhahn 2015; Toreld and Andersson 2015) or, just recently, left-over-finds of original slabs from the burial constructions (Wallebom 2020), has managed to add to pre-existing interpretations. Unexcitingly, all that these new data have brought on, so far, is the endless plea for more accurate documentation of the engravings (Bertilsson et al. 2015).

Following Kristeva (1986: 37), any text ‘is the absorption and transformation of another’. The texts we create are full of implicit and explicit references that constitute a ‘mosaic of quotations’. For instance, the profound impact Jarl’s and Chris’s research had on my own is not always shining through in my list of references. Sometimes, you have to read between the lines. To use an analogy to our own practice, a text can be equated to an intricate stratigraphy on an archaeological dig, a unique bricolage full of evident and concealed quotations from past and present generations thoughts, ballasted with their preconceptions, coloured by their interpretations, a configuration of century-old theses and anti-thesis, twists and turns, and more.

Originality is pretty rare, sometimes extinct. The refresh­ ing and quite literal pictorial reading that Chris affords for the rock art in Backa in Brastad in this book, for example, can, in more than one way, be seen as a reverberation of Carl Georg Brunius’s factual readings of the rock art in Tanum that we find in his unpublished thesis from 1818 (cf. Brunius 1868). Almgren’s thesis from 1927, which Chris for good reasons tries to free himself from – not least the formers starry-eyed emphasis on Indo-European mythology – was formulated as an anti-thesis to Sven Nilsson, who thought to observe Semitic people in the form of Phoenician sunworshipers on the rocks (e.g. Nilsson 1868; 1872; 1875).

Parades and cultic processions were essential for both. This was also a vital part of a different scholar’s readings of the engraved artworks during the 18th and 19th (Goldhahn 2020), as well as 20th and 21st centuries. There is no escape here.

To make things unambiguous, I am not a big fan of the modernistic striving to create ‘traditions’ so that the observer can stand outside the discourse she analyses as an elevated onlooker, like an illusionist, not in our quest to understand the present-past, or in defining and probing previous or concurrent research ‘paradigms’. Such traditions are nested and relational. According to my altered state of reality, there is no proper way to understand, apply, or criticize Kristiansen and Larsson’s thesis The Rise of Bronze Age Societies from 2005, without putting it in relation to Sven Nilsson’s thoughts about Bredarör on Kivik from the 1840s and, 1860s and 1870s. In turn, Nilsson was an ensuing progeny of Forssenius and Lagerbring’s thesis from 1780, which was a synthesis of Wessman’s thesis from 1758 and Brocman’s anti-thesis from 1762 (Goldhahn 2013; 2018a; 2020). Likewise, the interpretation of ‘Holy Weddings’ on the rocks in Bohuslän – sigh – was first conveyed by a priest in the early 1800s, who probably used this to moralize over sinful youngsters in his vicarage, a reading which still unfolds throughout different eras attempts to interpret these imageries. The book that you now hold in your hand adds another layer to this intricate stratigraphy.

Another reason for a more active engagement with the nested history of rock art research, to engage more closely with former generations of rock art scholars, their strives, failures and successes, is to try to avoid George Santayana’s famous saying that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Nilsson’s thesis about Phoenician colonies in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age, for instance, was met with wonder and awe to begin with, partly because it favoured a religious interpretation of the engravings.

However, it failed to be validated archaeologically because Phoenician objects have never been found in Scandinavia (Goldhahn 2013: 119–58). The same criticism has recently been raised towards scholars who argue that the engravings should be understood as a reflection of Pan-European cosmopolitism, and Viking-Age-like-long-distance-trades/ raids. As it turns out, there is very little in the archaeological record from northern Bohuslän that can actually sustain such grand narratives (Petersson and Toreld 2015). The success of such blunt recapitulations of century old grand narratives, to re-invent what has already been invented, rests on our short memories, which make us parochial. Without a dialogue with present-past scholars, such myopic reinventions will fail us in demanding more thorough archaeological analysis that starts with actual evidence and tries to contextualize this in ways so that we can humanize the past.

You need to be able to handle the Harris Matrix to be able to sort out the intricate mosaic of both implicit and explicit

Preface xvii quotations. That said, instead of trying to stand outside any particular theoretical tradition or ontology, which will always be an attempt to recreate a modernistic myth about an objective observer, we ought to embrace these diverse perceptions of forms as our contemporary fellow travelers, engage and try to learn from present-past colleagues, and use them more actively in a way to clarify our situated beings.

The present book affords an important contribution for such pursuit, so that we can start to think images through.

I learned this the hard way. For over a decennium, I have actively tried to change my wordings about the artworks we find in northernmost Europe. For example, take the notion of ‘rock carvings’. It is a blunt translation of the Swedish notion hällristning, a direct translation would read ‘panel carvings;’ an innocent notion which embodies a deep-time stratigraphy. Neither notions make any sense anywhere else in the world than in northernmost Europe. First, most of the engravings are pecked, so to call them ‘carvings’ is erroneous. Rock peckings would be a more suitable notion, but this would just recreate the same dilemma – all engravings are not pecked. Carved images do occur, among other places in Tisselskog in Dalsland (Andersson 1994), but these are pretty rare (Goldhahn 2016). Alternative and more neutral notions, which not imply how the images were created, have been around for some time now. Nordbladh (1980) used ‘glyphs’. ‘Petroglyphs’ or ‘engravings’ are used by international scholars and it is accepted and promoted in existing bilingual rock art glossaries (Bednarik 2003).

All in vain. By the power of tradition, most North European scholars stick with ‘rock carvings,’ which just happen to be pecked: ‘these carvings are pecked, and some carvings are also carved’ – sigh! The carving-notion is a direct heritage from the notorious Vikings, who did carve runes on bones, birch bark, and stones. They also painted the rune-stones, a proud tradition in North-European rock art that scholars desperately hold on to, by painting the engravings red. The notion ‘ristning/carving’ was introduced during Romanticism to define engravings as a prehistoric phenomenon, who at the time were thought to be made during the Late Iron Age by Gotic speaking people, ancestors of Danes, Norwegians and Swedes – Vikings. Curiously, people who stubbornly hold on to the anachronistic notion of ‘rock carvings,’ all seem to be ‘reinventors’ who are discontent with the long and vivid history of north European rock art research, which they actively recreate by using this anachronistic wording. On the bright side, this antiquated concept may soon become validated, although the Bronze Age has recently been ‘discovered’ to be the first ‘Viking Age’.

Irony aside, archaeology has recently tried to embrace a flat ontology in the strive to understand the present-past.

I would like to propose we should attempt to apply a similar perception of form on past, present and emerging colleagues. Let us once and for all embrace that we are part of a long and animated research history and approach the history of archaeology from a ‘flat-earth perspective’. Let us entangle our thinking about rock art through generations of colleagues such as Gjessing, Brunius and Bureus. Thinking images through Forssenius and Lagerbring’s understanding of Bredarör, which they thought depicted Roman triumphs in 1780, or Brunius’s thoughts about depicted amorous escapades from 1818, might be as prosperous as trying to debunk some concurrent scholars myopic fables of traveling chiefs and Pan-Indo-Eurasian mythologies.

Parts of my great delight reading this book has been following Chris exposing present-past ‘Cherry Pickers’.

There are many reasons for their success. To pick a few cherries and present a Grand Narrative that presents a final ‘larger-than-life-solution’ to any archaeological enigma seems to be more efficacious than to problematize how such solutions are reached, not least among funding institutions that more and more seem to strive against a kind of ‘billboard archaeology’. In some academic quarters, it is considered better to be seen in media than to present something innovative and intelligible about the present-past.

Advertise your ‘path-breaking’ research under headings such as ‘the oldest,’ ‘biggest’ and ‘richest’, or adapt to the latest invention in high-tech archaeology, aDNA analysis, and more, and you will get your funding come through to ‘rewrite the past’. Meanwhile, we are still reproducing preconceptions and interpretations of rock art that have not changed much since the end of the 19th century.

Fortunately, we cannot blame it all on the Cherry Pickers. Sometimes the panels dictate which images will be highlighted, or not. Some images seem to demand our visual attention, dominating over other figures, leaving these ‘invisible’. I find it remarkable that there are still enthralling images on famous engraved panels such as Vitlycke, Fossum, Aspeberget, Litsleby, Lökeberg, or the ‘Cobbler’ at Backa in Brastad, just to name a few – panels that have been explored for hundreds of years – that have never been highlighted or even mentioned by the researchers that use these panels to discuss the many meanings of north European rock engravings. There are always left-overs when the Cherry Pickers have had their feasts. Cup marks are treated as pits.

In the present study, Chris creates an Antipode to such eclectic impressions of imageries and perceives them all

xviii Thinking Through Images as counterparts – an attempt to think images through. He affords a reading of the imageries as they unfold when you approach the panels as if all of these were engraved anew – a clear statement against any form of cherry picking.

The benefit of a bottom-up perspective in analysing a rock engravings assemblage becomes clear through Chris’s interpretation of the panels from Backa. Instead of reducing the imageries, like the cherry pickers elected approach, we find a thick description highlighting in detail the complex relationships and interplay between imageries, which appear and reappear for the reader as the book unfolds. To my delight, bird motifs are given special attention (cf. Goldhahn 2019), especially cranes (Grus grus), which have often been neglected by previous research. Some of the most complex rock art panels with bird figures in northern Europe are situated at Backa in Brastad. The presented analysis contests modern categorization resting on naturalism and explores how avian elements are embedded in other categories of imagery in the form of hybrid beings, such as ‘horse-birds’ and ‘bird-horses;’ bird masks on anthropomorphic figures and human feet on animal figures; animated prows on water vessels; forked bird hands – on anthropomorphic beings – possibly representing crane feet, and more. The intimate relations between human and non-human beings are crucial and needs to be considered more seriously in future research of these pictorial stone-worlds.

The book also touches on more intangible aspects of the life-worlds of those who made and used the engravings, especially the importance of sound and rhythm. In envisaging the many meanings of rock art, we have to include: ‘The sounds of the seascape, the cry of the gulls and the salty brackish smells of the coastal flatlands and rocks’ as well as ‘the musty earthy odours of fields and woodland, animals and crops, wood smoke and the domestic hum of everyday agrarian life’. This would also include the perhaps rare occasions when the images were pecked and repecked, when the percussion and pulsing sound of stone against stone would echo over the living and their thriving ancestors in the Brastad area. Such repeated audio-visual actions would be familiar to Bronze Age people, happenings that would be interwoven with the intricate rhythm of everyday life that now and then would be recast in more ritualized practices and ceremonial life-worlds; the coming and going of seasons predicted by clever bird beings and other other-than-humans; the smell of tilting earth and itchy legs at harvest; the heated roar of red deer and elks in the autumn; the tense screams of domesticates when they were brought to the slaughter; barking dogs and baaing sheep; the taciturn sounds of falling snow; dripping ice from the roofs a kind-hearted somewhat

lukewarm afternoon in early April; and more. To try to capture such intangible aspects of past life-worlds is not only a theoretical elaboration to satisfy the restless minds of today’s academics; it is a quest to humanize ourselves and the present-past life-worlds that we are trying to make sense of.

In this context, there is something more to be said about the agency of the images themselves. First, there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that these have been painted or enhanced in any way beyond the actual process of engraving. There are hundreds of finds of engravings in burials (Goldhahn 2018b). Neither figurative images nor cup marks from burial contexts have been found enhanced with pigments. Most of these stand out as ‘fresh,’ and it seems that they all were created in extended burial rituals manifested in the monuments where these were found (Goldhahn 2016).

The same goes for the thousands of rock art sites and tens of thousands of artworks that have been discovered in recent years. None of these engravings has been found containing traces of pigment (Goldhahn 2008).

However, we know that the newly created images would shine like bright quartz. They would stand out from the aged darker surfaces on the panels. Once a figure had been engraved, they would slowly start to fade, returning to the dark abyss of timelessness. In a similar way to the artists who created the artworks, the images would have been born, aged and died. They had biographies. Some images would have been revitalized, altered or even changed. Others could have been ‘revived from the dead’. The pictorial drama of the panels, images that was switched on and off (i.e.

Hauptman Wahlgren 2004), would have constituted a vital part of how a panel would afford the engraved artworks; a perspective which challenges both Cherry Pickers as well as those who want to interpret the final panels as a deliberately articulated piece of art.

Many times, it is close to impossible to see the engravings today, and some of those that have been seen and documented, cannot be found again, or only made visible with the help of artificial light. This was probably also the case during the era when these images were created, viewed, used and reviewed.

All panels were probably not in use at a particular time.

Some modern vandalism on engraved panels with imageries that I have encountered, has mysteriously ‘disappeared’ within a year or two. The intriguing visual culture of the Bronze and Early Iron Age would not necessarily have been so visual after all. Rain, sun and artificial light might have brought the images to life, affording them anew. The rocks’ animacy may have inspired people to add, alter, change or even reduce the images on the rocks. Some images were

Preface xix bluntly killed. These ever-changing dramas are, of course, acknowledged in the present book, but I still think we should try to formulate and explore some novel approaches that can help us understand how all these possible possibilities could have been played out. There is still much left to do if we want to think images through.

Reaching the end of Chris’s book made me wonder if this really could be the end, a desolate swansong after 30 years of enthusing encounters with north European rock art?

I doubt it and hope that such feelings and expressions are caused by the somewhat tiresome and exhausting creative process of putting another book-project to rest. We can only wait and see. Meanwhile, I hope that the reader feels the rhythm and finds inspiration from Chris’s quest to approach the engraved artworks from the present-past more seriously, because archaeology matters. It is high time we start thinking images through. The reason for this is simple: if we do not think images through, the images will think through us.

Joakim Goldhahn Centre for Rock Art Research and Management, School of Social Science, University of Western Australia, Perth 19 November 2020 Notes 1 Nämforsen is a rapid in Ångermanälven River in mid-Sweden containing many examples of hunter-gatherer rock art.

2 Much later, I have found out that many contemporary and renowned scholars simultaneously embraced semiotic-inspired approaches to rock art, seemingly unconscious of each other’s existence, such as David-Lewis Williams in South Africa, John Clegg in Australia, and Meg Conkey in the US. André Leori-Gouran’s structuralist-inspired research on the Paleolithic artworks from caves in France were their guiding stellar.

3 A Rorschach or inkblot test is used in psychoanalysis to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

A set of symmetrical ink blots of different shapes and colours is presented one by one to the subject, who is asked to describe what they suggest or resemble.

References Almgren, O. (1927) Hällristningar och kultbruk: Bidrag till belysning av de nordiska bronsåldersristningarnas innebörd.

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