1st Edition

Seeing and Knowing Understanding Rock Art with and without Ethnography

    The purpose of Seeing and Knowing is to demonstrate the depth and wide geographical impact of David Lewis-Williams’ contribution to rock art research by emphasizing theory and methodology drawn from ethnography. Contributors explore what it means to understand and learn from rock art, and a contrast is drawn between those sites where it is possible to provide a modern, ethnographic context, and those sites where it is not. This is the definitive guide to the interplay between ethnography and rock art interpretation, and is an ideal resource for students and researchers alike.

    1: Rock art with and without ethnography; 2: Flashes of brilliance: San rock paintings of heaven's things; 3: Snake and veil: The rock engravings of Driekopseiland, Northern Cape, South Africa; 4: Cups and saucers: A preliminary investigation of the rock carvings of Tsodilo Hills, northern Botswana 1; 5: Art and authorship in southern African rock art: Examining the Limpopo-Shashe Confluence Area; 6: Archaeology, ethnography, and rock art: A modern-day study from Tanzania; 7: Art and belief: The ever-changing and the never-changing in the Far West; 8: Crow Indian elk love-medicine and rock art in Montana and Wyoming; 9: Layer by layer: Precision and accuracy in rock art recording and dating; 10: From the tyranny of the figures to the interrelationship between myths, rock art and their surfaces; 11: Composite creatures in european Palaeolithic art; 12: Thinking strings: On theory, shifts and conceptual issues in the study of Palaeolithic art; 13: Rock art without ethnography?; 14: Meaning cannot rest or stay the same; 15: Manica rock art in contemporary society; 16: Oral tradition, ethnography, and the practice of North American archaeology; 17: Beyond rock art: Archaeological interpretation and the shamanic frame

    Biography

    Benjamin Smith, Geoffrey Blundell, Christopher Chippindale