Thinking Through Images: Narrative, rhythm, embodiment and landscape in the Nordic Bronze Age

By Christopher Tilley

This book provides a general self-reflexive review and critical analysis of Scandinavian rock art from the standpoint of Chris Tilley’s research in this area over the last thirty years. It offers a novel alternative theoretical perspective stressing the significance of visual narrative structure and rhythm, using musical analogies, putting particular emphasis on the embodied perception of images in a landscape context.

Part I reviews the major theories and interpretative perspectives put forward to understand the images, in historical perspective, and provides a critique discussing each of the main types of motifs occurring on the rocks. Part II outlines an innovative theoretical and methodological perspective for their study stressing sequence and relationality in bodily movement from rock to rock. Part III is a detailed case study and analysis of a series of rocks from northern Bohuslän in western Sweden. The conclusions reflect on the theoretical and methodological approach being taken in relation to the disciplinary practices involved in rock art research, and its future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789257021

Christopher Tilley

Christopher Tilley is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. He has written and edited numerous books on archaeology, anthropology and material culture studies. His recent books include The Materiality of Stone (2004), Handbook of Material Culture (ed. 2006), Body and Image (2008), Interpreting Landscapes (2010) and An Anthropology of Landscape (2017).

Book preview

Swedish Rock Art Series 7

THINKING THROUGH IMAGES

NARRATIVE, RHYTHM, EMBODIMENT AND LANDSCAPE

IN THE NORDIC BRONZE AGE

Christopher Tilley

Published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083

© Oxbow Books and the author 2021

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-701-4

Digital Edition: ISBN is 978-1-78925-702-1

Kindle Edition: ISBN is 978-1-78925-703-8

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942677

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

Text design and layout by Frabjous Books, UK

For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact:

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Front and back cover photographs by Christopher Tilley

To Marion Brandis

and

Jarl Nordbladh

founding father of contemporary interpretative rock art research

Swedish Rock Art Series

Swedish Rock Art Series Bronze Age rock art represents a unique Nordic contribution to world culture, and more than 17,000 localities are known in Sweden alone. They constitute one of the World’s most complex and well-preserved prehistoric imageries. Centered in the World Heritage site of Tanum in western Sweden, the Swedish Rock Art Research Archive (Svenskt Hällristnings Forsknings Arkiv – SHFA, www.shfa.se) at the University of Gothenburg was established in 2006 to further documentation and research on this Bronze Age heritage. All original documentation – from large rubbings to photos – are being scanned and made accessible for international research. Based on this material Swedish Rock Art Series will present ongoing research and new documentation in years to come. Thinking Through Images, by Chris Tilley, is the most recent addition to the series, which now comprises seven monographs. The publishing costs for this book were sponsored by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Acknowledgements

Preface: thinking images through (Joakim Goldhahn)

PRELUDE

Theorising the powers of imagery

The structure of the book

PART I: ARIAS: MOTIFS AND INTERPRETATIONS

Boats

The development of a ‘maritime’ perspective

Boats and cosmological structures

Boats and exchange

Landscape, value and identity

Wealth and value in Bohuslän: the alternative affluence of carvings

Boats and death rituals: art for the living, or for the dead?

Boat motifs on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Humans

Human figures on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Feet and shoe-soles

Feet and shoe-soles on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Animals

Animals on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Birds

Birds on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Carts/wheeled vehicles

Carts on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Circles/discs, circle crosses and ‘sun’ wheels

‘Sun stands’

Other motifs

Cupmarks

Cupmarks on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

PART II: CABALETTA: LANDSCAPE SETTING AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: THE RHYTHMIC VISUAL ARTS OF NARRATIVE

The carvings and the surrounding landscape at Brastads-Backa

Overall distribution of the carvings

Cairns, stone settings and burial mounds

Processions, performances, ritual

Narrative

What time are these images?

Narrative structures on the rocks

Rhythmanalysis

A semiotics of embodiment

An animate world

PART III: FINALE: PERAMBULATING THE ROCKS

Brastads-Backa: a brief history of research

The southern series of rocks

Rock 26:1

Rock 26:3

Rock 26:2

Rock 26:6

Rock 26:4

Rock 587

Rock 18

Rock 18:2

Rock 18.1

Rocks 18:3 and 18:4

Rocks 22:1 and 22:2

Rock 21:1

Rock 16:1

Rock 15:1

Rock 14:1

Rock 19:1

The northern series of rocks

Rock 4:1

Rock 2:1

Rock 9:1

Rock 1:1

Rock 1:2

Rock 5:1

Rocks 589 and 596

Rock 48:1

Rock 6:1

Rock 586

The northern series summarised

CONCLUSIONS

The image sequence

The southern series of rocks

The northern series of rocks

Dominant images

Southern series

Northern series

Storyline 1: shadow play and becoming an adult in the society of the crane

Shadow people

Storyline 2: between walking feet and moving carts: life, death and the ancestral dead

The way feet walk

Carts and directionality

Storyline 3: animism and the spiritual connection between persons, animals and things in everyday life

Storyline 4: materially choreographing embodied experience of presentational forms

POSTLUDE

Reflections

References

List of figures

Figure 1.1 The general distribution of the northern and southern rock art traditions in northern Europe

Figure 1.2 The location of major rock carving/painting localities in Scandinavia and sites discussed in the Prelude

Figure 1.3 Location map of Bohuslän, Sweden and Brastad parish

Figure 2.1 The most frequently mentioned areas in southern Scandinavia and places discussed in the text

Figure 2.2 The chariot of the sun

Figure 2.3 Diagram showing the daily journey of the sun as shown on Danish razors from the late Bronze Age according to Kaul

Figure 2.4 Bradley’s interpretation of the Klinta stone

Figure 2.5 Bradley’s interpretation of the Borgen rock carvings

Figure 2.6 The decorated slabs discussed by Skoglund in the Sagaholm barrow

Figure 2.7 The cosmological structure of Bronze Age society according to Kristiansen and Larsson

Figure 2.8 Central material attributes of the ‘Divine Twins’ in the Early and Late Bronze Age

Figure 2.9 Examples of rock art scenes where the sun or suns are carried on a ship or twin ships according to Kristiansen

Figure 2.10 Examples of twin ships with some actors and action added

Figure 2.11 Day ship and the transition from night to day ship according to Kristiansen

Figure 2.12 Kaul’s typological scheme for boat depictions

Figure 2.13 Measure boat depictions in relation to shore line displacement in the Tanum area of Bohuslän

Figure 2.14 The different parts of boats on rock carving depictions

Figure 2.15 Examples of boats on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.16 The boats with human crew on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.17 Examples of prow heads on the boats at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.18 The unique boat with human hands on rock 1:1A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.19 Examples of human depictions on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.20 The ‘cobbler’ image on rocki 1:1A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.21 Examples of feet and shoe-soles on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.22 Examples of animals on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.23 Phallic pregnant horse with human front foot forward

Figure 2.24 Razors from Denmark and north Germany and the rock carving panel from Jörlov, Bohuslän

Figure 2.25 The rock carvings at Kallsängen documented by Coles

Figure 2.26 Examples of birds on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.27 The three cranes at the bottom of rock 1:1A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.28 The cart images on the rocks at Brastads-Backa arranged according to a south-north sequence

Figure 2.29 Examples of ‘sun’ discs, wheels and circle crosses on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 2.30 The ‘sun stands’ on the rocks at Brastads-Backa arranged in terms of their order of occurrence in a southnorth sequence

Figure 2.31 Examples of other infrequent motifs on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 3.1 The location of Brastad parish on the Stångenäs peninsula of northern Bohuslän

Figure 3.2 The landscape in the immediate surroundings of the Brastads-Backa ridge

Figure 3.3 View across the landscape from the north-east towards the wooded Brastads-Backa ridge

Figure 3.4 Map of the Stångenäs peninsula during the earlier and later Bronze Age showing the distribution of rock carvings, cairns and stone settings

Figure 3.5 One of the barrows in the burial ground a short distance to the north-east of the northern series of rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.1 Sketch of the landscape locations and distances between the southern and northern sequence of rocks at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.2 The southern sequence of rocks at Brastads-Backa showing sequential movement between them

Figure 4.3 The northern sequence of rocks at Brastads-Backa showing sequential movement between them

Figure 4.4 Peder Alfsøn’s illustration from 1627 of rock 1:1A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.5 The first illustration in Oscar Almgren’s Hällristningar och Kultbruk (1927)

Figure 4.6 Rock 26:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.7 Rock 26:3 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.8 Rock 26:2 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.9 Rock 26:6 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.10 Rock 26:4 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.11 Rock 587 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.12 Part of rock 18 at Brastads-Backa seen from north-east

Figure 4.13 Looking south across rock 18 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.14 Sketch of the panels and possible movement patterns between them on rock 18 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.15 Overview of the carvings on the panels numbered and discussed in the text

Figure 4.16 Rock are 18:2 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.17 The south-west part of rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.18 Panels 1 and 2 on rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.19 Panel 3 on rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.20 Panels 4 and 5 on rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.21 Panel 6 on rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.22 Panels 9-11 on rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.23 Shadow people

Figure 4.24 Panels 7 and 8 on rock 18:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.25 Rock area 18:3 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.26 Rock area 18:4 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.27 Rocks 22:1 and 22:2 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.28 Rock 21:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.29 Rock 16 Surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.30 Rock 16:1 Surface B at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.31 Rock 16:1 Surface B at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.32 Rock 15:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.33 Rock 14:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.34 Rock 19:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.35 Rock 4:1 Surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.36 Rock 4:1 Surfaces B–E at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.37 Rock 2:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.38 Rock 9:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.39 Overview of rock 1:1 Surface A at Brastads-Backa with visual fields A and B marked

Figure 4.40 The top part of rock 1:1 Surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.41 The middle part of rock 1:1 Surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.42 The lower part of rock 1:1 Surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.43 The ridge above rock 1:1 Surface A at Brastads-Backa showing the rising balcony like rock outrcops

Figure 4.44 One of the balcony-like ledges above rock 1:1 looking south

Figure 4.45 The ‘cobbler’ and the human figures above him with shadow legs on rock 1:1 surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.46 Looking down from above rock 1:1 at Brastads-Backa to the ‘cobbler’ image below

Figure 4.47 The two pairs of interacting human figures to the left and right of rock 1:1 surface A above the ‘cobbler’

Figure 4.48 The lower part of visual field B above the head of the ‘cobbler’ on rock 1:1 surface A at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.49 The succession of human images on the lower part of rock 1:1 Surface A from the bottom to the top of the panels defined by cracks in visual field A

Figure 4.50 Rock 1:1 Surface B at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.51 Rock 1:2 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.52 Rock 5:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.53 Looking across the carved rock 5:1 from the south-east

Figure 4.54 Rock 589 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.55 Rock 596 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.56 Rock 48:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.57 Looking across the top of rock 6:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.58 Rock 6:1 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 4.59 Rock 586 at Brastads-Backa

Figure 5.1 Diagram showing possible movement patterns from rock to rock in the southern and northern series of rocks at Brastads-Backa

List of tables

Table 1 The frequency of the main motif types on the rocks in the southern series at Brastads-Backa

Table 2 The frequency of the main motif types on the rocks in the northern series at Brastads-Backa

Table 3 The frequency of boats facing across or up and down the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Table 4 Frequencies of free-standing upright human depictions of different heights on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Table 5 Frequencies of feet and shoie-sole depictions on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Table 6 Maximum lengths of feet and shoe-soles on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Table 7 Cart images on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Table 8 The presence of circkes, discs and wheels on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Table 9 Major characteristics of the cupmarks on the rocks at Brastads-Backa

Acknowledgements

My first debt is to my son, Benjamin, for accompanying me to the rocks in Brastad parish and helping me to find them in the landscape. My second is to my daughter, Alice, seen together with me in a shadow image in Figure 4.23, who has been a constant source of support throughout. My third is to my partner Marion, who took that photograph. She transformed my sketchy diagrams into publishable images and through discussions encouraged me to develop another way of seeing images pecked in stone.

My fourth is to Wayne Bennett my long-term fieldwork collaborator and friend for his enormous help with the fieldwork for this book. We have been carrying out landscape field research together now since the mid-1990s and he has been involved in three of my previous studies of Scandinavian rock art. His tremendous enthusiasm and sheer energy have always been enormously supportive. When I flag and get fed up with walking around in a thorny thicket in a tangle of stones, he invariably insists that we carry on until we find that rock. In the field I usually talk while Wayne takes notes and observes and corrects me when he thinks I’m going wrong, if what I’m saying that does not adequately capture the materiality of what is before us. We endlessly talked about the rocks and in this case specifically conversations developed about their ‘music’. Wayne in a former life used to be a stage manager at the Royal Opera House in London and his perspective owed a lot to that whereas mine is more the beat of rock ‘n roll: alternative rhythmic beats.

I have tried to make my debt to academic colleagues clear enough in the numerous references to the book and in some of the more extended discussions of particular perspectives and ideas. However, there are a number in the field of southern Scandinavian rock art research whose work I have found most influential in the context of researching and writing this particular book. They are Tommy Andersson, Lasse Bengtsson, Richard Bradley, John Coles, Åsa Fredell, Flemming Kaul, Joakim Goldhahn, Kathy Hauptman-Wahlgren, Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Larsson, Johan Ling, Peter Skoglund, Andreas and Christina Toreld. I sometimes profoundly disagree with their own interpretations or positions while finding others both helpful and challenging. The meaning and significance of the imagery on the rocks has not died because in their writing and research they have kept it alive.

The majority of the text was written between January and September 2020. This was during a rare sabbatical term when I was free from all but a few teaching and administrative responsibilities and continued during the extraordinary conditions of the corona virus pandemic in which my university, together with research library facilities, was shut down. As a result of my long-standing medical condition of having Type I diabetes I had to stay at home and not venture out of the house for four months. The writing then continued when I voluntarily shut myself down over the summer vacation. This was the longest extended period of time in my entire academic career that I actually had the opportunity to read and to think and to write.

Beyond my own books and materials, I have been entirely dependent on those available on the internet. I had intended to go back to the research area once more to make some final new observations, check some details in the text, and take more and better photographs of the rocks to illustrate particular points. This was because at the end of the research I would hopefully have greater insight about what I was supposed to be seeing and what was important. That was not, and could not be the case, during the period of fieldwork initiating the study. But that final visit unfortunately proved to be impossible due to continuing restrictions on international travel to Sweden from the UK.

Some passages in a modified form in Part I were first published in my book Landscape in the Longue Durée (Tilley 2017). A short part of the Prelude concerning my own rock art research was previously given as a talk in University of Lund in early January 2018. I am most grateful for the invitation by Anna Cabak Rédei and Peter Skoglund for the invitation to speak and their hospitality. Otherwise, due to the pandemic situation, I have not presented any of this work in academic seminars or conferences nor benefited from comments or feedback on such public occasions.

When I was in the process of writing the conclusions, I stumbled across a reference to Joakim Goldhahn’s new book Birds in the Bronze Age (2019) in an article he had recently sent me about Aboriginal rock art. I instantly ordered it and was delighted to find that I was not in splendid isolation in thinking that birds were significant. In it I found a detailed discussion in which we both appeared to be fellow travellers with regard to both the importance of birds in the Bronze Age and aspects of an animist perspective. I felt much less lonely and isolated in following a bird track across the rocks. I am most grateful to him for writing the Preface to this book and his comments on the text. The series editors Kristian Kristiansen and Johan Ling generously provided me with critical comments and suggestions that have helped me improve the text. Needless to say, for its shortcomings I am responsible. Many thanks to all those who gave kind permission for the reproduction of illustrations in the text that are acknowledged in the captions. I am most grateful to Julie Gardiner for her excellent copy editing of the manuscript and to the production team at Oxbow for the layout and design of the book.

The book is dedicated to Jarl Nordbladh who started the interpretative discourse rolling and for his interest in and support for my early research in Sweden and to Marion.

Autumn Equinox 2020

Preface: thinking images through

In the blitz of the 2020 pandemic, I received a confidential email from Chris Tilley saying he had composed a ‘swansong’ over his 30-year long engagement with north European rock art. He asked me to write an introduction: ‘… like something a bit different from the standard format of a few laudatory comments and I have several ideas if you would be interested. Something more in the direction of a reflexive critical engagement in terms of Scandinavian rock art research perhaps.’ I agreed. The manuscript arrived a few days later, and I had a go at it. I waited a while for further instructions on how to avoid any ‘laudatory comments,’ but, being somewhat impatient, I went ahead and composed the following introduction.

For your information, I probably know Chris much better than he knows me. We only met twice. The first time was in 2004 at a rock art conference in Bergen, Norway. No surprise. I remember that he talked about the choreography afforded by the interplay between art and rock in the Simrishamn area in Scania, southernmost Sweden (Tilley 2004). We exchanged some courtesies in the hotel bar. The second time was in London in 2019. I was there to examine one of his PhD students. We greeted each other before the ritual began and arranged to have dinner afterward. However, after the examination came to an end, I managed to get lost in UCL’s winding corridors. I met many friendly faces. When I finally found the right building and office, it was well beyond dinner time, and Chris had given up on me and decided to go home.

Admittedly, I was disheartened. Let me explain why. In 1989, amid the processual and post-processual turmoil, I started to read archaeology at Umeå University, situated in northernmost Sweden. The archaeological department was crafted around a group of mid-1970s students who were occupied fulfilling their academic careers. Their archaeological perception had been forged during late romantic evenings drinking red wine while collectively reading Hegel and Marx. All tables were round. Maurice Bloch’s (1983) Marxism and Anthropology was mandatory reading for all first-year undergraduates. In Umeå, it was still the heydays of the processual era. Binford was the opium to reveal the past as it once was. He was considered close to divine. When Big Lew came to Umeå to present some lectures, decades of alumni turned up. There was no seat left in the largest lecturing room on campus. People were standing along the walls, sitting in the stairs, or on the floor. Some tried to get a glimpse of the Big Man through the crowded entrance way – Binfordmania. Afterward, I found myself in a long line-up to shake the Master’s hand. A bit unexpectedly, Binford declared that he had enjoyed my harmonica playing from the night before in the students’ bar – ‘Damn, I thought I was back in Texas!’ My fellow undergraduates did their best to follow Binford’s pursuit and estimate how many calories a band of hunters could gain by killing an elk, or how many hours it would have taken to dig all the hunting pits. Halfway through the first semester, we were kindly asked to declare if we were idealists or materialists.

This harmony of illusions started to change – at least for me – one pale afternoon in 1991. We were having one of the too-typical-Swedish-seeming-endlessly-long-coffee-breaks, sitting like a band of hunter-gatherers around the most oversized round table, when one of my lecturers came bursting in waving a book in his hand. His voice was trembling when he cried out: ‘Something terrible has happened!’ My first thought was that somebody had been robbed or died. Then he added in a high-pitched voice: ‘Chris Tilley has written a book about Nämforsen!’¹ Commotion. It was like somebody had stolen the Crown Jewels. My next thought was: ‘I have to get my hands on that book!’

Reading Material Culture and Text: the art of ambiguity back in 1991 was a decisive moment behind my mounting interest in rock art. Moreover, it marked the start of a 30-year dialogue with Chris’s writing, which I have nourished in my tussles in becoming an archaeologist. So, without his knowledge, my academic life-world has been closely interwoven with Chris’s research, which helped me find an archaeological voice.

Another impetus for my passion for these northern pictorial worlds is Jarl Nordbladh, in Chris’s words: ‘The founding father of contemporary interpretative rock art research.’ I first met him in 1990 at a Nordic student conference on the Island of Møn, south-east of Copenhagen in Denmark. The guest lecturers included Klavs Randsborg. He did not miss the opportunity to master both his own and visiting students with his impressive encyclopaedic knowledge. Jarl was different, and so was his redeeming lecturing style. He calmly sat down on the desk in front of us and asked some simple questions: ‘Why are you here?’ ‘What is archaeology for you?’ ‘What do you want archaeology to become?’ After a year of indoctrination, Jarl came down as a revelation.

Back in Umeå, I began a search for things Jarl had written. It was testing. His ‘prolegomena to the study of Scandinavian petroglyphs and semiotics’ from the early to mid-1970s (Nordbladh 1978a; 1978b), turned out to be just that – a prologue. I realized that Jarl is more fond of discussing archaeology than putting his thoughts into words. To be clear, I consider both equally important. I also realized that very few of Jarl’s peers knew how to appreciate the wordings he composed on interpreting rock art. Persistent rumours proclaimed that his thesis was incomprehensible. At my Alma mater, it was known as the ‘smelly thesis,’ an odour caused by the glue that had been used in binding together the carelessly stencilled pages, which, of course, was a thought-out Jarlian aesthetic. His thesis was used as a warning why you should avoid doing a PhD by compilation. Monographs were all that counted. The glue in Jarl’s thesis was not only smelly, it turned out to be useless. Few, if any, of his theses are still holding together, but it is still an inspirational read.

Jarl introduced semiotic perspectives in rock art research when few of his contemporary colleagues knew how to formulate a theory to reach an informed interpretation (Nordbladh 1980). Jarl’s plot was that rock art was not made to appease any god of thunder, or similar weather phenomenon, but that the signs were used as a media of communication between social beings (Nordbladh 1978a). At the time, this thought seemed revolutionary.² His way to reveal the plot was to detect meaningful patterns on the chaotic panels. Which subject matters were combined, and which were not? How can such patterns be significant for us to understand people in the past? Jarl found out that only a few of all possible combinations of glyphs had been articulated and, interesting enough, the same articulations could be found in different rock art areas (Nordbladh 1980). In the famous words of Lord Polonius: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it!’

Not many of today’s rock art scholars are acquainted with Jarl’s thesis. Even fewer have taken the time to try to comprehend its content. The messy but informative statistical analysis is built on extensive fieldwork and months of decoding. The maps in his thesis are overlooked. They are hard to grasp, some would say perplexing, which has led to a situation in which many scholars have missed out on his innovative landscape analyses. Many of his conclusions are re-articulated in ensuing rock art discourses without acknowledging where they were first formulated. To be fair, it took me several days to decode the maps in Jarl’s thesis. I had to stencil them, put them together with sticky-tape, and use color-codes – blue for the sea, green for land, black dots for burials, red for rock art and green for what-ever-else – before I could start to understand what Jarl tried to communicate. The final bricolage, composed by some forty to fifty A4 papers, which I still have somewhere, was enormous and covered many square meters. It occupied the whole floor in my dormitory room at Ålidhem. I had to stand on toes on my desk to be able to view it at once – like a bird soaring in the air. Sometimes, reading a thesis about rock art demands its choreography.

There is a clear silver-lining from Jarl’s prolegomena to The Art of Ambiguity. Looking back, it is hard to apprehend how such an inspiring book could stir up so much fuss (cf. Malmer 1993; Tilley 1993). Otherwise, sensible people started to add odd declarations in their acknowledgments, such as: ‘This article was written before Tilley’s book about Nämforsen was published, and nothing in it has changed the conclusion presented here.’ Part of these (over-) reactions might be explained by Chris’s mission to debunk hardcore positivists – declaring that the only objective fact about archaeology is that it is subjective. Another part of the crime was that his book offered alternative readings of the rock art in Nämforsen, which seem to have put some readers into an existential void. This innovative inference defied the modernistic mirage that promotes that science shall be written in singulars, with a capital S, and accurately aim for the truth. Suddenly the reader was offered a smörgåsbord of possible solutions of the riddle we call the past. Some found it outrageous. Swords were drawn to protect Nämforsen from ‘the intruder’ (e.g. Baudou 1997).

Looking even further back, or at the concurrent state-of-the-art of rock art research, it is easy to reveal how alternative readings of the same artworks have always been a part of this discourse. I suppose this is one of the allures of rock art. Without any connection and guidance of Indigenous voices, everybody can have their say. In more than one way, rock art acts like an archaeological Rorschach-test.³ Take five scholars and show them a rock art panel, or just a single image, and you end up with at least six explanations. It is inevitable. There is no filter between the pictures on the rocks and our thoughts. What you see is often what you get. ‘Here they engraved a boat because they had boats, but this boat reminds me of cultic activity from medieval France.’ ‘… and Here was an Elk too…’. Ambiguity has always been a part of rock art research, and always will be, so this could not have caused people’s discontent. I suspect that what in the end made Material Culture and Text such a distressing read for some scholars, was that Chris urged the reader to consider their situated beings and make archaeology matter. It is now well-attested that archaeologists have a penchant for emplacing themselves in the intricate process of describing what we see, what I used to refer to as the myopic-syndrome. An example: a few years ago now, I pondered over the simple question of who it was that had made all the stunning images we find on the rocks in northern Europe, a question also raised in this book. Few had actually spent time trying to answer this rather trivial question. The images were considered self-sufficient. Intriguingly, I found out that the answers offered by contemporary colleagues often mirrored their own situated beings (Goldhahn 2007: 94–8). A distinguished retired professor suggested that elderly people in the Bronze Age society made the engravings – Bronze Age Griots; people who had actually known previous generations of noteworthy heroes that had passed away. A professor and internationally leading scholar suggested it was traveling chiefs who travelled around Europe, gathering stories to tell about their journeys when they had returned home, who made rock art. The rock art specialist, who aimed to document all rock art panels in northern Bohuslän, suggested that special specialists made the rock art. Female colleagues wondered where had all the women gone? ‘Were they all men?!’ The Mirror Age. The engraved imageries act as a gigantic Rorschach-test.

The present book offers an alternative to such myopic readings because it unfolds together with a perspicuous self-reflective discourse. In the opening chapter, Chris describes his earlier rock art encounters leading up to when the present study came about and how these helped him think through images. It started with a book – Hallström’s monumental study about Nämforsen from 1960. It passed through Dalsland and Tisselskog, south-east Scania, Östergötland, and Vingen in Mid-Norway, before it landed at one of the first rock art panels to be documented in northern Europe – the famous ‘Cobbler’ from Backa in Brastad parish on the west coast of today’s Sweden.

The reader is invited to follow this journey in a very literary sense. We learn that the more time Chris has spent exploring the engraved imageries at a place or region, the more he has been intrigued by other phenomena than the ‘original meaning’ of the images. He has explored if and how we can decode the imageries so that we can embrace their ambiguity as something meaningful; how different rock art panels relate to and constitute each other for the observer; how the images create a choreography of movement, some which might be thought-out by the ‘artists,’ others that might have been created by the images recursive properties affording us to explore them in an envisaged way; how the canvas sometimes constitutes a part of the art; how the surrounding landscape is in symbiosis with the canvas and the motion of the artworks, and more.

Chris also invites the reader to digest how certain dominant discourses among concurrent research affect our preconceptions about the images he explores in the study from Disåsen in Backa. His most sincere criticism is directed to colleagues who cherry-pick certain images and divorce them from the people who made and viewed them; the landscape settings; the way the rock art panels unfold and relate to other panels in the vicinity; how the panels introduce you to the images in a certain way and reveal other properties of themselves; how a ‘divorced image’ effectively interplays with other features and images on a panel and, last but not least; how the image unfolds itself to the viewer.

The reader is in for a treat. This does not necessarily mean that I agree with all the interpretations advocated in the present study. For instance, in the final part of the book, Chris states that he wants to present some thoughts about the Backa engravings that ‘stand free’ from the suffocating research history of north European rock art. I recognize that feeling; to paraphrase Freud, we all seem to be discontent with the contemporary rock art discourse. In this case, this feeling seems a bit contradictory, not least since we often been told by Chris that all forms of research practices are entangled in different forms of power discourses (i.e. Tilley 1989). What are a research history and our constant referencing to our colleagues’ ‘tedious misinterpretations’ if not a struggle of power and control? Writing anything sensible about the past free from influences, or without implicit or explicit references to other academics works, past or present, seems to be an impeccable illusion.

That said, I think it is time we say a succinct farewell to ‘traditions’. In my studies of Bredarör on Kivik, the very ‘origin’ of rock art research in northern Europe (Goldhahn 2018a; 2020), I have been amazed over the fact that there are so few interpretations of this monument and its fascinating engravings (Goldhahn 2013), and the same might be said about the rock art from northern Bohuslän. All contemporary interpretations of the engravings from Bredarör were formulated before 1848. The many ensuing attempts to present ‘new’ and sometimes even ‘final’ solutions to apprehend the enigmatic imageries from the Bredarör cairn, or other related rock engravings, are only prolonged echoes of thoughts formulated before. Not even recent analyses of the recovered material from the 1931-campaign (Goldhahn 2013), or the unforeseen ‘discoveries’ of new images in the famous cist (cf. Goldhahn 2015; Toreld and Andersson 2015) or, just recently, left-over-finds of original slabs from the burial constructions (Wallebom 2020), has managed to add to pre-existing interpretations. Unexcitingly, all that these new data have brought on, so far, is the endless plea for more accurate documentation of the engravings (Bertilsson et al. 2015).

Following Kristeva (1986: 37), any text ‘is the absorption and transformation of another’. The texts we create are full of implicit and explicit references that constitute a ‘mosaic of quotations’. For instance, the profound impact Jarl’s and Chris’s research had on my own is not always shining through in my list of references. Sometimes, you have to read between the lines. To use an analogy to our own practice, a text can be equated to an intricate stratigraphy on an archaeological dig, a unique bricolage full of evident and concealed quotations from past and present generations thoughts, ballasted with their preconceptions, coloured by their interpretations, a configuration of century-old theses and anti-thesis, twists and turns, and more.

Originality is pretty rare, sometimes extinct. The refreshing and quite literal pictorial reading that Chris affords for the rock art in Backa in Brastad in this book, for example, can, in more than one way, be seen as a reverberation of Carl Georg Brunius’s factual readings of the rock art in Tanum that we find in his unpublished thesis from 1818 (cf. Brunius 1868). Almgren’s thesis from 1927, which Chris for good reasons tries to free himself from – not least the formers starry-eyed emphasis on Indo-European mythology – was formulated as an anti-thesis to Sven Nilsson, who thought to observe Semitic people in the form of Phoenician sunworshipers on the rocks (e.g. Nilsson 1868; 1872; 1875). Parades and cultic processions were essential for both. This was also a vital part of a different scholar’s readings of the engraved artworks during the 18th and 19th (Goldhahn 2020), as well as 20th and 21st centuries. There is no escape here.

To make things unambiguous, I am not a big fan of the modernistic striving to create ‘traditions’ so that the observer can stand outside the discourse she analyses as an elevated onlooker, like an illusionist, not in our quest to understand the present-past, or in defining and probing previous or concurrent research ‘paradigms’. Such traditions are nested and relational. According to my altered state of reality, there is no proper way to understand, apply, or criticize Kristiansen and Larsson’s thesis The Rise of Bronze Age Societies from 2005, without putting it in relation to Sven Nilsson’s thoughts about Bredarör on Kivik from the 1840s and, 1860s and 1870s. In turn, Nilsson was an ensuing progeny of Forssenius and Lagerbring’s thesis from 1780, which was a synthesis of Wessman’s thesis from 1758 and Brocman’s anti-thesis from 1762 (Goldhahn 2013; 2018a; 2020). Likewise, the interpretation of ‘Holy Weddings’ on the rocks in Bohuslän – sigh – was first conveyed by a priest in the early 1800s, who probably used this to moralize over sinful youngsters in his vicarage, a reading which still unfolds throughout different eras attempts to interpret these imageries. The book that you now hold in your hand adds another layer to this intricate stratigraphy.

Another reason for a more active engagement with the nested history of rock art research, to engage more closely with former generations of rock art scholars, their strives, failures and successes, is to try to avoid George Santayana’s famous saying that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Nilsson’s thesis about Phoenician colonies in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age, for instance, was met with wonder and awe to begin with, partly because it favoured a religious interpretation of the engravings. However, it failed to be validated archaeologically because Phoenician objects have never been found in Scandinavia (Goldhahn 2013: 119–58). The same criticism has recently been raised towards scholars who argue that the engravings should be understood as a reflection of Pan-European cosmopolitism, and Viking-Age-like-long-distance-trades/raids. As it turns out, there is very little in the archaeological record from northern Bohuslän that can actually sustain such grand narratives (Petersson and Toreld 2015). The success of such blunt recapitulations of century old grand narratives, to re-invent what has already been invented, rests on our short memories, which make us parochial. Without a dialogue with present-past scholars, such myopic reinventions will fail us in demanding more thorough archaeological analysis that starts with actual evidence and tries to contextualize this in ways so that we can humanize the past.

You need to be able to handle the Harris Matrix to be able to sort out the intricate mosaic of both implicit and explicit quotations. That said, instead of trying to stand outside any particular theoretical tradition or ontology, which will always be an attempt to recreate a modernistic myth about an objective observer, we ought to embrace these diverse perceptions of forms as our contemporary fellow travelers, engage and try to learn from present-past colleagues, and use them more actively in a way to clarify our situated beings. The present book affords an important contribution for such pursuit, so that we can start to think images through.

I learned this the hard way. For over a decennium, I have actively tried to change my wordings about the artworks we find in northernmost Europe. For example, take the notion of ‘rock carvings’. It is a blunt translation of the Swedish notion hällristning, a direct translation would read ‘panel carvings;’ an innocent notion which embodies a deep-time stratigraphy. Neither notions make any sense anywhere else in the world than in northernmost Europe. First, most of the engravings are pecked, so to call them ‘carvings’