POWERFUL PICTURES ROCK ART RESEARCH HIST

Focusing on stunning paintings and engravings from around the world, Powerful Pictures interrogates the driving forces behind global rock art research. Many of the rock art motifs featured in the 16 chapters of this book were created by indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, and it sheds new light on non-Western rituals and worldviews, many of which are threatened or on the point of extinction. Stemming from a conference in Val Camonica in northern Italy, the book is arranged by continent, although it tackles how early research in some countries (e.g., Sweden, France, Spain, the USA, Canada, South Africa) influenced the trajectory of archaeological investigations in others (e.g., Australia, India, Mexico, Germany, Mongolia, Russia). All of the contributing authors have vast experience working with rock art and Indigenous communities, many of them holding posts in prestigious university departments around the world. The book will be of particular interest to professional historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, and indeed anyone who is interested in art, symbolism, and the past.

Jamie Hampson is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Department at the University of Exeter. He has a PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge, and an undergraduate degree in history from Oxford. Jamie works primarily on rock art, identity, and Indigenous heritage projects in the USA, southern Africa, Australia, and Europe.

Sam Challis is Head and Senior Researcher at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, lecturing undergraduates in global hunter-gatherer and rock art studies, and advising graduates and postdocs. His focus is on the interactions between Indigenous peoples, and with Europeans, as expressed in rock art around the world, with research directed toward understandings of all these processes in terms of the New Animisms.

Joakim Goldhahn holds the Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair at the Centre of Rock Art Research and Management at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses mainly on north European and Australian rock art. Other topics include the European Bronze Age, human-animal relatedness, burial rituals, landscape and monumentality, ritual specialists, and the history of archaeology, resulting in 28 books and over 200 scientific publications, including Birds in the Bronze Age - a North European perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019).