Making Scenes. This item is unavailable.Making Scenes

Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?

Iain Davidson was appointed at the University of New England in 1974 and was awarded a Personal Chair in 1997.  He was appointed Emeritus in 2008 and took up the Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2008–9.  Iain has worked on Spanish Upper Palaeolithic (including Palaeolithic Art), archaeology and ethnography of Northwest Queensland, Australian rock art, archaeology and heritage, colonization of Sahul, language origins, and cognitive evolution.

April Nowell is a Palaeolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. She specializes in the origins of art, language, and other symbolic behavior, in the emergence of the modern mind and in the growth and development of Neandertal and early modern human children.