As we have often remarked, rock art is a key expression of the human mind through time that is available to archaeology, and so the subject is inevitably a continuing thread in the pages of T&M. This issue is no exception. We have two papers approaching this rich subject area from considerably different angles. The first is “Bridging Realms…”, a major paper by J. David Lewis-Williams and Johannes H.D. Loubser. Lewis-Williams is, of course, a celebrated pioneer of the cognitive (neuropsychological) approach to rock art via his ethnographical study of San rock art in Southern Africa, and is probably best known to the general public through his many books, especially, perhaps, The Mind in the Cave (2002) and Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005). In the earlier part of his career, archaeologist Johannes (Jannie) Loubser, a member of this journal’s editorial panel and now based in the USA, also researched San rock art in South Africa, receiving his PhD from the University of Witwatersrand. In the present paper, these two authors focus on the rock art of two entirely separate societies, namely the southern African San, and Creek and Cherokee Indians of the southeast USA. They find a commonality between these societies in the existence of an emic view of rock surfaces being a membrane, an interface, between the human and spirit worlds – the spirit domain existing behind rock and cliff-face surfaces. The authors argue that ritual practitioners metaphorically bridged this interface using trance, a traffic indicated in the rock art, producing an “inter-realm construct”. The paper is a fascinating piece of cross-cultural scholarship.
The other paper revolving around the rock art topic takes us back to a much earlier age when humans felt the urge to make marks on rock surfaces – to the “painted caves” of the Palaeolithic era. In this clear and well-constructed paper, author Leslie Van Gelder takes a slightly sideways look, analysing not the rock art itself but grooved finger markings, “flutings”, found in some Palaeolithic caves, and asks if these time-frozen gestures reveal a kind of proto-writing, or at least some form of basic attempt at communication from the depths of human time.
Talking of depths, in “Language, Time-Consciousness and Image-Making in the Human Mind”, Rodney Sangster delves deep into the human mind, exploring the underlying structure of language and image-making and its role in the transformation from primary mentation to higher-order consciousness. He considers how the various forms, signs, of language themselves appear to structure meaning at what he calls “the less manifest, supra-rational level” of consciousness. He argues that this can be traced in universal mythic themes, in rock and tribal art, and in the neuropsychological imagery occasioned in various kinds of mind-altered states.
Being summertime, we include a trip to the coast this issue. Well, figuratively speaking at least. In “Coastal Cosmologies…”, Finnish authors Vesa-Pekka Herva and Timo Ylimaunu take us to the northern Baltic Sea, a region that has been undergoing geological uplift since the end of the last Ice Age with the retreat of the weight of ice that had compressed the land in coastal areas and islands. Focusing particularly on the islands, the authors try to plot how people’s ideas and perceptions of their landscapes related over time to the inevitable environmental changes from the Neolithic to the Early Modern eras.
Finally, Yitzhak Paz provides us with a report of exploratory excavations north of the ancient Khirbet el-Alia mound in the Ramat Bet Shemesh region of central Israel. Working from the physical remains that were uncovered, he attempts to catch a glimpse of the worldview of the Bronze Age occupants of the site, noting what appears to be the incorporation of pre-existing natural features, and evidence of social stratification.
The issue is rounded off with two major reviews by highly knowledgeable and perceptive reviewers – one review is of a British Museum exhibition and the other of a book highly relevant to the concerns of T&M.