The Archaeology of Rock-Art by Paul Tacon
Pictures, painted and carved in caves and on open rock surfaces, are amongst our loveliest relics from prehistory. This pioneering set of sparkling essays goes beyond guesses as to what the pictures mean, instead exploring how we can reliably learn from rock-art as a material record of distant times: in short, rock-art as archaeology. Sometimes contact-period records offer some direct insight about indigenous meaning, so we can learn in that informed way. More often, we have no direct record, and instead have to use formal methods to learn from the evidence of the pictures themselves. The book's eighteen papers range wide in space and time, from the Palaeolithic of Europe to nineteenth-century Australia. Using varied approaches within the consistent framework of informed and proven methods, they make key advances in using the striking and reticent evidence of rock-art to archaeological benefit.
R. Alexander Bentley is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, Durham University, England. Herbert D. G. Maschner is professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, and the co-editor (with Christopher Chippindale) of the Handbook of Archaeological Methods (AltaMira Press 2005). Christopher Chippindale is research professor in archaeology at Cambridge University, curator for British collections at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, and a former editor of the journal Antiquity.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780521572569 |
| ISBN 10 | 0521572568 |
| Title | The Archaeology of Rock-Art |
| Author | Paul Tacon |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 1999-01-21 |
| Number of pages | 392 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |