After Hallstrom: new directions in the study of northern rock-art. (News & Notes).

Saetersdal, Eva Walderhaug ; Forsberg, Lars ; Smith, Benjamin 等

A decade after the dissolution of the Iron Curtain, and as the boundaries of nation-states less define where research zones end, opportunities multiply for new configurations of regional research within Europe. A case in point is the later prehistoric rock-art of northern Europe, studied for a century through national frameworks within Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and -- most separate -- Russia. Common to those frameworks has been a strong division of the rock-art between a hunters' art with deer, whales and skin boats, and a farmers' art with sword-wielding warriors, bronze objects and great curved-prow boats. Echoing the Neolithic divisions across the 3500 km that separate the Arctic coast of Norway from the southern edge of Denmark, the hunters' art is more in the north, the farmers' more in the south, with a zone of overlap between.

Although that central division stands, varied Nordic regions show a finer-grained picture. A major novelty of the 1980s was the Alta rock-engravings in far northern Norway (Helskog 1987). The opening of close contacts between the Nordic lands and Russia also brings into prominence the rock-art of Karelia, equally part of the Baltic region but for long politically distanced. Intriguingly, a large and striking zone where no rock-art is known exists adjacent to zones rich in rock-art. This interior North Calotte region (FIGURE 1) is bounded on the south by Swedish Central Norrland and its rock-engravings (e.g. at Namforsen) and rock-paintings, on the southeast by many rock-paintings found in Finland during the last three decades. To the west is Norwegian Nordland with its singular polished rock-art and painted caves, and further north more rock-art, notably at Alta in Finnmark. Finally, to the east are the rock engravings of the Kola Peninsula and on Lake Onega. Is the interior North Calotte a genuinely vacant zone? If it is, why? More likely, it has rock-art, perhaps in quantity, and it will be here that the actual boundaries lie between the distinct regional sequences we now recognize.

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How to find it? This is a formidable landscape of dense boreal forest and peat mires, where mosses many centimetres deep have colonized the rock surfaces, covering engravings already worn and blurred by centuries of erosion. A starting-point will be the known sites, such as those published in Gustaf Hallstrom's classic studies of Namforsen and other long-known localities (1938; 1960). An inaugural. field study is promising in this respect. At Lake Annsjon, close by the Norway-Sweden border, two large figures of elk are known, classic in their subject and manner of depiction to the hunters' tradition; we now have two new areas of engraving on an adjacent surface with puzzling patterns of parallel and oblique lines. At Garde (FIGURE 2), we re-discover figures known to Hallstrom (1960: 49-51), and are more inclined to think them ancient than the modern marks of the timber-cutters, as he surmised. Both sites are on metamorphic rocks smoothed by river rapids, and the starting-point for survey in this empty quarter will be the strong rules that govern where rock-engravings and paintings are found in the landscape of adjacent zones.

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Namforsen has been known some three centuries (since Strom 1705), so our attitudes to it today are shaped by the attitudes of those times and since. As is also true of other fields within Scandinavian archaeology, a fine and long tradition of research has the unexpected consequence of constraining present-day research within long-standing frameworks, frameworks which, in capturing good truths, may also mask other divisions and juxtapositions. A new research zone is the opportunity of a fresh start in several aspects. One must be how we record rock-art, in which the 20th-century tradition of drawing figures as solid black marks on smooth white paper fatally omits the subtleties in how the carved figure reflects and is shaped by the natural form of the rock-surface in which it is cut. It is time to look afresh at the places in the landscape where the rock-art is found, and at its association with water and with rock surfaces where quartz outcrops. Can we go beyond, for instance, the long-remarked association of the rock-art sites with watery places (FIGURES 2 and 3) to an understanding of why watery places attracted rock-art here, an understanding related to the other singular ways in which northern and western Europeans treated watery places in later prehistory? Another focus will be the relationship between the modern Saami peoples, reindeer herders whose rich ethno-history has already been shown to have a striking congruence with elements in the Alta rock-art (Helskog 1987), the rock-art figures and the parallel archaeological traces whose material culture independently chronicles the life-ways and attitudes of hunting peoples.

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Acknowledgements. The project `Rock-art on the edge of Europe' is a co-operation between Nordland County, the universities of Tromso, Bergen, Umea and Oulu and provincial authorities of Trapani, Sicily, supported through the cultural programme of the North Calotte Council.

References

HALLSTROM, G. 1938. Monumental art of northern Europe from the Stone age 1: The Norwegian localities. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

1960. Monumental art of northern Sweden from the Stone age: Namforsen and other localities. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

HELSKOG, K. 1987. Selective depictions: a study of 3700 years of rock carvings and their relationship to the Sami drums, in Ian Hodder (ed.), Archaeology as long term history. 17-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

STROM, E,M.. 1705. Exercitium Academicum `de Angermannia'.

EVA WALDERHAUG SAETERSDAL, LARS FORSBERG, BENJAMIN SMITH & CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE *

* Saetersdal, Department of Culture, Nordland County, Prinsensgate 100, 8048 Bodo, Norway. ews@nfk.no Forsberg, Department of Archaeology, University of Bergen, Haakon Sheteligs plass 10, 5007 Bergen, Norway. lars.forsberg@bmu.uib.no Smith, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, PO WITS 2050, South Africa. 107bws@cosmos.wits.ac.za Chippindale, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, England. cc43@cam.ac.uk