Dear Alan Philip, could you share some of those images with us? They would be most helpful.

Best regards, Lilliana

I've asked myself that question often. My feeling is that none of them apply. I think it is showing of decorative skills, education or narration. But I've been called a cave man before.

Dear Lode, I tend to agree with you. Not about you being a cave man... but about the ornamental and/or narrative intent of the images. I also wonder why humans are depicted in a very abstract manner and animals are painted in a more realistic way. 

Best regards, Lilliana

humans are difficult and need to ressemble. For telling a story the hunters are only sidekicks, the animals are the story or the subject.

Which means, dear Lode, that there is ho sense of heroism yet? That humans are not a part of the narrative? That catching an animal during a hunt does not make a hunter a more prestigious person in his community? Just asking...

Lilliana

Fascinating interchange...

Alan,

I'd say in hunter-gatherer subsistence systems one could argue that these meanings are all part of the same complex - see, for instance, the bison "cult" among many Plains and Southwestern groups (including Pueblos) in which the hunted animals is not just viewed as a source of food, but as a spiritual being whose "self-sacrifice" to the hunter is considered a live-giving gift. In the Mountain Southwest, rock-art depictions especially of deer and bighorn sheep may well represent a similar association.

Liliane,

maybe group dynamics didn't favour recognisable hunters? A hero stands out. But does it motivate others to cooperate? Do people really like heroes? Except as entertainment?

My mom once told me "nobody is waiting for a hero" to make clear my confrontations with teachers in matters I wasn't the victim but a bystander was no good idea. Unfortunately questioning unfairness always proved stronger than my will to turn around and mind my own business ;-)

So what does a football coach draw on a board? Detailed players? A general staff? detailed soldiers? No but detailed targets I bet they do.

There are likely many, many meanings in rock art depicting animals - from totems through hunting success of a particular game (your Coso big-horn sheep) to 'art for art's sake', as at Lascaux where its inhabitants didn't hunt the animals depicted.

It is a proper subject of cognitive archeology. The motivations are varied, depending on the behavioral and cognitive activity of their authors. Causes in the European paleolitico be a reflection of cognitive and social development of their authors.

They can see a work of Cognitive Archaeology Paleolithic symbolism at the following address.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Angel_Rivera_Arrizabalaga

True, motivations for depicting animals and/or humans are varied. Moreover, they entail and influence each other. Alan, I think all points on you list apply. Well, in fact, with depicting animals/humans either in 3D or on a surface your last item "oral tradition" is transformed into something of a permanent storage medium (the picture), where culturally important information can be related without the actual presence of the narrator. As to the why? Big question, indeed. I like Ellen Dissanayake's approach as to why art at all. (See her books on the subject: Homo Aesthetics (1992) and Art and Intimacy (2000) Depicting, that is "putting it in front of you" seems to be intimately linked to our thinking processes. It is our way of deep thinking, a quest for crucial insight into "the world and oneself in the world" - equally identifying with and distancing from the subject.

Oliver, you work on one of the most promising and important sites concerning prehistoric figurative depictions. The late Klaus Schmidt (he was one of my M.A. examiners) once told me that a considerable amount of the animals are showing ribs in addition to flashing their teeth  - as a speculative thought: they might be beings either from the Other World or somehow relating to death or much better: some kind of transition, spiritual or otherwise. That would make sense if a.) you look at the architectural and regional (high up overlooking a plain) peculiarities of this multi-layered megalithic site b.) when taking into account that the abstracted human-shaped pillars stand together in discernible groups! This suggests that there you deal with whole cycles of mythological stories. Moreover, Göbekli Tepe marks the magnificent closing phase of the hunter-gatherer life style in the near East. A very exiting site indeed.

Being a hunter is its own mind set, and something that non-hunters and city-dwellers may not understand. Nature and its forces are much more prevalent there. At times, shamanism enters the picture and complicates studies. Special places in the world have rock art done by people who are direct descendants of the artists, and many still have shamans. And it is in these special places where we can begin to study what depicted animals really mean. THEN we can attempt to understand earlier art.

Bryan, I totally agree with you that nothing matches first hand experience and also that our own city-dwelling, sedentary lifestyles distort our perceptions of the diagonally opposed hunter-gatherer mind set. (Alas! I want to add). Additionally, the places chosen for the figurative depictions play an absolutely crucial role for deeper understanding as to what the figurative depictions mean. ( I try to avoid the word art because our dealing with every thing artistic is a show case of culturally filtered, determined interpretation.) Yet, as we belong to the same species, even the city dweller may grasp a basic drift of the intended meaning as there seem to be hardwired figurative elements were all share in our imagination. I'd like to refer to the excellent paper of Wynn, Coolidge & Bright, 2009: Hohenstein-Stadel and the Evolution of human Conceptual Thought. Cambridge Arch. Journal 19, 73-83.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3866256&fileId=S0959774309000043

Howdy Alan, you are certainly asking tough questions, and if you don't know, I'm not sure how much  us amateur rock art folks can do! Obviously, the first point is that imagery does not mean the same thing in all contexts.  Like most things that hunter-gatherers do, rock art also is almost certainly particular to specific environments, and we should expect temporal differences even in similar locations. Other than the tremendous interest in Australian rock art, there has been ethnographic questioning of only  a few groups of H&Gs about either their own rock art or past examples in that in their current land use areas. John Marshall filmed a Ju/'hoansi informant interpreting a rock art panel as the story of a hunt. Hard to know how much that was influenced by the filming Marshall was doing or ≠Toma's role in it and his interest in hunting. Laurens van der Post & Jane Taylor popular book "Testament to the Bushnmen", 1984, recounts some older observations about Ju/'hoansi folks who had accounts of 19th century accounts of painting. Van der Post notes that human figures are much more common than animal images in art attributed to "bushmen". He cites several researchers who recorded rock art in Ju/'hoansi territory. Most of these early accounts  link the imagery to mythical stories (i.e., J. M.  Orpen questions to a guide eliciting info he and other researchers felt was purely related to myth). I personally think a lot of this "myth & ritual" is passing off our linguistic ineptitudes as informants concern with non-concrete, non-scientific concepts. In my time with Pumé hunter-gatherers in the savannas of Venezuela, It has often taken up to 24 months and my slowly growing competence in the language of this monolingual group to get answers volunteered that explain activities I've been asking about. Why do Pumé kill all raptors (I thought maybe it was because of competition for the small game-armadillos lizards-rbbits that they rely on for most of their hunting)? After asking over a 20 month period, someone turned to me, while scrambling some hawk eggs with an arrow after her husband climbed a tree and threw all the eggs out of a hawk nest during a hunting trip, and explained that "the Hawk people fly away and tell the Deer people we are here." I thought this was a cute story until I realized it was a naturalistic description of animal behavior, deer see somewhat poorly, but hear and smell acutely, and the hawk's alarm call would certainly startle them. They explained evapotranspiration during the dry season in accurate physics terms: "the wind drinks the water." The only things that are difficult to explain are things with complex causes, such as where will lightning strike and how can it be avoided? We cannot predict that well even with our technological abilities to image and track storms. I have a couple additional long-winded stories about lightning and anti-lightning "magic" devices that I think puts it into a scientific light as well  I personally think a lot of "myth" pseudo-explanations is our own laziness and potentially racism at not realizing that hunter-gatherers have very sophisticated knowledge about the natural world they live in and observe every day (as do agricultural and pastoral folks as well). The geological stability of Australia's  Central Desert seems associated with the geographic stability of much of the placement of rock art imagery, and its frequent association with water holes. Lew Binford contrasted this with his experiences with the Nunamuit in Alaska where he felt  rock art was identified with changing environmental conditions and human behavioral dynamics. I don't think he ever published this, but an example he used was that some rock art was associated with good river crossings. As rivers change their course, new crossings need to be identified. Crossings are named for the individual who identifies them, and rock art is more human focused and less ornamented with animals. He contrasted this with the stable locations and images with fixed names in Australian rock art he visited with the Alyawara. I have one other seminal study that should be well noted. Jennifer Galindo, an M.A. student of LuAnn Wandsnider's at the Univ of Nebraska, Lincoln did a fabulous thesis on rock art in N Australia that should have been a Ph.D dissertation. It is very hard to get a hold of. Iain Davidson "begged" a copy of mine, he could not find it anywhere in Australia. She spent over a year doing an ethnoarchaeological study of rock art distribution and imagery. She was an early competent  archaeological GPS technician and mapped rock art across a set of different clan territories. Her informants were no longer refreshing the rock art or making new rock art, but they used the same images in bark art for the tourist trade. So they were still very conversant in what the images represented. Adults also were still very knowledgable about the locations and boundaries of different clan territories. Jennifer compared images with their geographical and clan territory distributions. She recorded the design format of each rock art image (color(s); solid or outline; infilling style-i.e.,hatched; dots; "x-ray"; etc). In comparing the distributions of the images to the natural and clan geography, she found no associations between any terrestrial animals and any natural or clan areas. Fish had a slight association with streams, but that was not exclusive. No stylistic element of color, infilling, etc. patterned spatially. The ONLY spatial association was that anthropomorphs were distinct to particular clan territories, and were located along paths, so that if someone was unfamiliar with the area or too stupid to know whose territory they were entering, there was a big road sign spelling it out. Many Australian groups maintain detailed stewardship knowledge about areas they have special knowledge about, and that includes who goes in there and what they find. Most groups, at least in desert areas, must use multiple territories. Often bands are made up of folks with different "ethnicities" who together have access to several areas or have secondary-tertiary  abilities to request permission to forage in other locales.  Clan markers were important in Galindo's study. In talking with Jennifer about her results, it seemed the terrestrial animals are everywhere, and rock art with them reflects that distribution. Fish were mostly painted near water, but not always. No design or stylistic treatment had any pattern, these appeared to simply be idiosyncratic choices by the artist. Jennifer presented her findings at an SAA symposium on rock art, dominated by interpretations of penis and vulva images in anything long, lozenge shaped, or triangular. No one expressed any interest in what I thought was superb, hard-headed scientific inquiry, doing difficult ethnoarchaeology over one year, approaching a very intractable topic with exemplary creativity and rigor.  This doesn't answer your question Alan, but I hope it outlines some positive real world ways that scientific archaeology can sneak up on aspects of rock art with hypothesis, and not on the crutches of assumed mythological meaning (how could we ever get at such subjective "meaning" if it was the core of rock art imagery?). There are many aspects of creativity in rock art, but I think we have to start by evaluating what is knowledge that can be anchored to some real world hypothesis (like the zooarchaeology people have done very successfully with taphonomy-which applies to ALL aspects of the archeological record). Additionally, the archaeological record is an accretion of materials across many years, decades, centuries, or millenia. It is not stacked individual ethnographic moments, and almost never can it provide the view we have if we walk into a hunter-gatherer camp. The most visible archaeological records are temporal abstractions beyond the experience of any individual lifetime or short set of events. Interpretive approaches to rock art that hope to unlock their meaning seem unlikely to succeed. However, I think we can improve our understanding of how rock art may have functioned in some places. Alan, we have discussed some conversations I've had with Hopi informants to this effect as well. 

Animal depictions in rock art carry various meaning and purposes in different context. As the rt is flexible the meaning of the depictions is also flexible. Good answers are provided  by various discussants. Rock art is an important cultural window to the past revealing the challenges mankind faced, the struggles, the time passed, the achievements, world view , the philosophy, the mind of the past humanity. We can learn a lot from the rock art.

Well written, Rusty Greaves of Harvard: Rock art is one of the few fields where science and art MUST BOTH be learned to even attempt an answer to its meaning. We must learn some science to date it properly to keep it in context (see my Rock Art dating session), we must do some field ethnography where possible to see what the descendants of the artists think, and we must develop large databanks that many enthusiasts can contribute to and withdraw data from.

Wonderful responses all!!!!  Especially Rusty and Bryan.  Nice work scholars...