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.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Swedish Rock Art Series
• 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