Handbook of rock art research

Abstract

Handbook of Rock Art Research. DAVID S. WHITLEY (ed.). AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2001. 863 pp., 250 figures, tables, biblio., index, glossary. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7425-0256-2. This remarkable book represents the first comprehensive overview of world rock art ever published. It is ambitious in its goals, encyclopedic in its coverage (more than 800 pages long), and mostly successful in presenting what we know right now about how to study prehistoric rock art, how to give it meaning in both specific and general contexts, and how it looks to us in its varied forms around the world. There is very little in this book about southeastern North America (and what there is isn't very good), but that should not detract from its value as a resource to the readers of this journal. Handbook of Rock Art Research will be rewarding to specialists in rock art study, resource managers, and who are interested in the theories and methods at large in the discipline today. For those not current with the topic, rock art studies today are a microcosm of archaeology as a whole, and this book provides a fine, detailed overview of the field. David Whitley opens the volume with a long introduction that ranges widely over the history of rock art studies in North America, its place in the modern world of American archaeology, and current issues and problems in the study of rock art sites. I found his presentation insightful for the most part, illuminating central problems with chronology, constituency, and interpretation, though it was obviously written by an American from an American point of view and doesn't reflect much of an international perspective. 1 don't ' agree with Whitley's presumption, running through much of his discussion, that there continues to be an opposition between scientific archaeologists and some other, presumably nonscientific, at the root of modern intellectual debate; this is a straw man that obscures, in my view, fundamental issues in basic rock art archaeology. In the end, though, I agree that rock art research cannot be divorced from archaeology more generally in theoretical or methodological realms. I have long held rock art to be an archaeological problem first and foremost, to be addressed with proper archaeological methods and techniques. After the introduction, the Handbook is divided into three coherent sections. The first, perhaps the most useful to a general audience, deals with Analytic and Management Methods. Larry Loendorf offers a cookbook on recording and documentation techniques that both encompasses the meager available literature on rock art recordation and provides useful insights from Loendorf's own considerable experience in the field. Johannes Loubser gives his view of management and conservation. James Keyser considers relative dating techniques, including the stylistic and stratigraphie methods that have always been the core of rock art chronology; like Loendorf's paper, this is a fine reference for general techniques employed by rock art students. The next two chapters deal with absolute dating of rock art. Marvin Rowe gives a complete and authoritative overview of direct ^sup 14^C age determination of organics in pigments by AMS, a discussion that will be of use to all concerned with understanding the requirements, strengths, and weaknesses of the method, not just rock art scholars. Ronald Dorn presents an honest appraisal of the various techniques heretofore proposed to provide absolute ages for engraved petroglyphs. As Dorn, who developed some of the methods, freely admits, most of these techniques are problematic at best; he concludes his review with pessimism for the current state of the art and optimism for the potential of future technologies. Marvin Rowe returns with another encyclopedic chapter, this time to review physical and chemical techniques for analyzing production and taphonomic histories of rock art. …