all-embracing theory can hope to account for such a widespread, long-lasting, and varied phenomenon.

One can generalize from the experience of Paleolithic art that during the early decades of the twentieth century, attention focused on discovering and copying prehistoric art, interpreting it in fairly simple and literal terms—often distorting or selecting facts to fit a preselected pet theory derived from ethnography—and great effort was devoted to building up regional chronologies based on styles, techniques, and superimpositions. This was the period when searches became systematic, although accidental discoveries continued to be made and, indeed, are still being made.

In those early days, the study of rock art was akin to that of stone tools or any other artifacts in that it was based on stratigraphy (i.e., superimpositions) and typology (i.e., styles) with the primary aim of developing a classificatory framework. The regional stylistic sequences that were built up were equivalent to the geological and artifactual sequences of other fields. Interpretations were simplistic, drawn largely from the history of religion, and uncritically incorporated elements from a wide array of places, periods, and cultures.

During the second half of the century, attention was devoted to developing more complex (and no doubt more accurate) interpretations. Some of these were based on structuralism, most notably the interpretations of Leroi-Gourhan, and researchers such as fred mccarthy in Australia and Patricia Vinnicombe and Tim Maggs in southern Africa urged that the rock-art corpus should be recorded as objectively and comprehensively as possible and placed great emphasis on quantification.

However, counting and listing require enormous amounts of time and labor and do not reveal much about meaning—they merely provide the raw material on which hypotheses can be based (although they can lead to fascinating insights, as shown by current wide-ranging studies based on the tens of thousands of figures traced accurately by Harald Pager in the Brandberg mountains in what is now Namibia in southern Africa).

Most recently, therefore, there has been a move toward environmental and spatial studies, examining the art in its landscape, for one of the fundamental features of rock art is that it is located precisely where the artist chose to place it and much can still be learned from this placement. At the same time, greater efforts have been made to integrate rock art with contemporary archaeological data and cultural contexts (where its date can be at least estimated). Some researchers have even attempted a semiotic approach, treating rock art as conveying complex, symbolic messages. There has also been renewed interest in ethnographic information, with an avowed intention (not always successful) to avoid the simplistic and all-embracing explanations for which ethnography was misused in the past and with a renewed ability to tell new kinds of stories about the figures and scenes in the art. Currently, there are numerous attempts to “read” the art in terms of shamanism and trance, attempts that usually owe more to the predilections and wishful thinking of the interpreters than to an objective and respectful assessment of the ethnographic record.

As in archaeology itself, since the 1960s there has also been a desperate desire to find some new approach to the study of rock art, some fresh fashion to adopt, and every other discipline imaginable has been trawled for any useful titbits of theory or insight. So, in rapid succession we have passed through structural ism, processualism, poststructuralism, structural Marxism, and contextualism. Overall, there has been a diversification of approaches, which can only be healthy, and a new emphasis on the nonmaterial, the ideological, and the social aspects of prehistoric art. For example, Scandinavian ships are now seen by some researchers as ambiguous symbols of social interaction and unity, and it is thought that rock-art sites containing such symbols mark social boundaries or ownership of places and resources.

More serious, and far more important, has been the growing realization that indigenous people have rights that need to be respected. Just as it came as a profound shock to archaeologists and anthropologists in the late 1970s and 1980s to find that some indigenous people objected