**Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology**

## Oscar Moro Abadía Margaret W. Conkey Josephine McDonald *Editors*

# Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization

Rock Art in the 21st Century

## **Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology**

#### **Series Editor**

Jelmer Eerkens, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

#### **Editorial Board Members**

Canan Çakırlar, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands Fumie Iizuka, Missouri University Research Reactor, Columbia, MO, USA Krish Seetah, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Nuria Sugranes, Instituto de Evolución, Ecología Histórica y Ambiente, San Rafael, Mendoza, Argentina Shannon Tushingham, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA, USA Chris Wilson, Flinders University, Bedford Park, Australia

Archaeology stands alone among the sciences in its attempt to enlighten us about the entire record of humankind. To cover such a broad range of time and space, archaeologists must ensure that their fndings are integrated into broader spheres of scientifc knowledge. The IDCA series aims to highlight the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of contemporary archaeological research.

Topics the series has covered include:

For a copy of the proposal form, please contact Christi Lue (christi.lue@springer.com). Initial proposals can be sent to the Series Editor, Jelmer Eerkens (jweerkens@ucdavis.edu). Proposals should include:

We aim to make a frst decision within 1 month of submission. In case of a positive frst decision the work will be provisionally contracted: the fnal decision about publication will depend upon the result of the anonymous peer review of the complete manuscript. We aim to have the complete work peer-reviewed within 3 months of submission.

This book series is indexed in SCOPUS.

For more information, please contact the Series Editor at (jweerkens@ucdavis.edu).

Oscar Moro Abadía • Margaret W. Conkey Josephine McDonald Editors

## Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization

Rock Art in the 21st Century

*Editors* Oscar Moro Abadía Department of Archaeology Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, NL, Canada

Josephine McDonald Centre for Rock Art Research + Management University of Western Australia Perth, WA, Australia

Margaret W. Conkey Department of Anthropology and Archaeological Research Faculty University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA

This is an open access publication. This title is freely available in an open access edition with generous support from the Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

ISSN 1568-2722 ISSN 2730-6984 (electronic) Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology ISBN 978-3-031-54637-2 ISBN 978-3-031-54638-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54638-9

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Cover illustration: Engraved fsh in an elevated coastal part of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape

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#### **Contents**

**Part III Interdisciplinary Global Rock Art**

vi

#### **About the Editors**

**Oscar Moro Abadía** is a Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). He specializes in the study of Pleistocene images. In 2020, he co-edited, with Professor Manuel R. González Morales, a special issue on Pleistocene and Holocene arts for the *Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory*. In 2021, together with Martin Porr, he co-edited *Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches and Indigenous Knowledges* for Routledge. His research on Paleolithic art and the history of science has been published in *Cambridge Archaeological Journal*, *Journal of Archaeological Research*, *Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory*, *World Art, History of Human Sciences, History of Science*, *Journal of Anthropological Research*, *Journal of Social Archaeology*, and *Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.*

**Margaret W. Conkey** is the Class of 1960 Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. One key focus of her research has been the interpretations of European Paleolithic imagery, and she has carried out the Between the Caves project, a Paleolithic landscape survey in the Ariège region of France. More recently, she has been a co-director of excavations at Peyre Blanque, a Magdalenian open-air site. She has long been involved in the pioneering research on feminist and gender perspectives in archaeology. She has served as president of the Society for American Archaeology as well as for both the archaeology and feminist associations within the American Anthropological Association. Among her many awards, she was the recipient of the prestigious Thomas H. Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK) for her distinguished contributions to Anthropology.

**Josephine McDonald** is the Director of the Centre for Rock Art Research and Management at The University of Western Australia where she has held the Rio Tinto Chair in Rock Art Studies, funded by their Commonwealth Conservation Agreement for the Dampier Archipelago National Heritage Listed Place (Murujuga). She has researched rock art in Australia's fertile eastern states and its arid zone and the Great Basin, USA. Over the last decade she has collaborated with the Murujuga Aboriginal community and led various teams of multidisciplinary researchers, systematically documenting the rock art, excavating ancient settlements, and experimented with new dating techniques to try and understand the environmental context and age of this inscribed cultural landscape.

## **1 Deep-Time Images and the Challenges of Globalization**

Oscar Moro Abadía, Margaret W. Conkey, and Josephine McDonald

#### **Abstract**

In this collection of papers on globalization and rock art, we begin to examine how rock art research was historically shaped by a deep Eurocentric bias. We use the concept of deep time, following the recent focus of historians and other disciplines, where an appropriate scale of space and time is being explored to understand the human past (following McGrath and Jebb, Long history, deep time. Deepening histories of place. ANU Press, Canberra. https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN\_578874, 2015; Griffths, Deep time dreaming: uncovering ancient Australia. Black Inc., Carlton, 2018). A focus on the "deep time story", as Billy (Griffths, Deep time dreaming: uncovering ancient Australia. Black Inc., Carlton, p. 5, 2018) asserts, reminds us that history is but one way of thinking about the relationships between past and present. Rock art research has multiple lenses, rather than being a universal science or all-knowing truth. Deeply engrained Eurocentric biases that drove the earliest research efforts into deep time art and its makers, has shifted to a more global perspective on rock art and the people who made it, by those who are involved in its research, and by those for whom it has multiple signifcances. The proliferation of rock art research in colonized parts of the world, particularly the USA, Australia and Africa, continues to call into question this Eurocentrism.

M. W. Conkey

J. McDonald

This shift in focus has been fueled, in part, by globalization, which has resulted in many benefts for rock art researchers, including the expansion of inquiry into new territories and the rapid sharing of developments in new methods for surveying, recording and dating rock images. Globalization has also generated new challenges and tensions. There are still many countries and territories that are excluded from these discussions, and Western hegemony and patrimony as promoted by institutions such as UNESCO, often collide with the interests of nationalism and local communities. The chapters in this volume explore these tensions and many suggest strategies to promote more critical attitudes toward globalization.

#### **Keywords**

Globalization · Deep-time images · Rock art · Cave art · Absolute dating methods · Eurocentrism

#### **1.1 Introduction**

This volume explores many facets of globalization in rock art research. While the origins of 'globalization' can be traced back to the 1940s, this buzzword became popular in the 1990s as "it captured the increasingly interdependent nature of social life on our planet" (Steger 2013: 1). Thirty years later, there are thousands of books and papers on this oft-contested term. That said, most defnitions of globalization share multiple elements. 'Globalization' refers to the progressive incorporation of many countries into a world economy defned by the massive fow of goods, services, capital and labor (Stiglitz 2007: 4). It is generally perceived "as primarily an economic phenomenon mediated by cuttingedge information and communication technologies" (Steger 2013: xi). Globalization also refers to "the international fow of ideas and knowledges, the sharing of cultures, global civil society, and the global environment movement" (Stiglitz

O. Moro Abadía (\*)

Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Department of Anthropology and Archaeological Research Faculty, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
O. Moro Abadía et al. (eds.), *Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization*, Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54638-9\_1

2007: 4). In this idealized view, globalization denotes a connectivity in which "as more people become more connected across greater distances, they create a new world society in which they do more similar things, affect each other's lives more deeply" (Lechner 2009: xiii). Even the champions of globalization seem to agree that "the evidence is overwhelming that it has failed to live up to this potential" (Stiglitz 2007: 5). The past decade has witnessed an increasing discontent with what is generally perceived as "an inevitable techno-economic juggernaut spreading the logic of capitalism and Western values by eradicating local traditions and national cultures" (Steger 2013: 1).

Rock art researchers use the terms 'globalization' and 'global' to suggest that we can now recognize the many worldwide facets of rock art (e.g., Lorblanchet and Bahn 2017; David 2017; David and McNiven 2018; Moro Abadía and González Morales 2020). As we argue in Sect. 1.2 of this introduction, this somewhat obvious realization has taken so long partly because the history of rock art research has been marked by colonial views and resultant prejudices. In this context, while various rock art traditions (such as those in America, Australia, and South Africa) developed independently of, and simultaneously with, the tradition in Europe, the latter was considered the most valuable for many years. This was due to the privileged position of Europe in world archaeology. And while the focus continued, there was an efforescence around the new world of new practices (e.g. Loendorf et al. 2006; Taçon et al. 2022), and, with the turn of the twenty-frst century, bringing changes through the impact of globalization in archaeology. As we examine in Sect. 1.3 of this introduction, new techniques for prospecting, recording, and, especially being able to infer the age of rock art images (e.g., using techniques such as accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and Uranium Series dating) have largely demonstrated that rock art is a foundational human practice found on almost every continent. These technical developments are synchronic with the global expansion of science and the internationalization of research. This, combined with the impacts of the Internet and social media, has generated an unprecedented fux of information about rock art images. That said, globalization remains a challenge for many engaged in rock art research and management. As we see in Sect. 1.4, tensions between 'the global' and the 'local' arise. The so-called 'globalization' of rock art research remains largely in the English-speaking Global North with huge areas − Central and South America, Africa, Asia − still excluded from the conversation. Moreover, there is a tension between traditional modes of preservation (anchored in the Western ideal that rock art is a 'universal' form of heritage and should be preserved as such), and alternative frameworks of management that are more community-oriented (i.e., grounded in the idea that rock images belong to specifc groups of people that should take care of them, preferably by using/engaging with them). Finally, we review in this introduction how the chapters in this book contribute to thinking about rock art globally. These papers foster critical thinking on globalization as well as seek to expand the discussion beyond the normative European focus. Importantly, this corpus calls into question traditional divides to explore the many dimensions of worldwide imageries.

#### **1.2 Eurocentrism: A Long-Standing Bias in Rock Art Research**

In 1860 Modesto Cubillas lost his dog while hunting near the cave of Altamira in Northern Spain. The dog "had climbed into a cave and found itself unable to come out. [He] opened up a hole and found a large cavern" (Bednarik 2013: 59). Cubillas mentioned his fnding to Marquis Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, "a local gentleman and [the] landowner, [who] frst visited the cave in 1875. Sautuola noticed some black painted signs on the wall but thought little of them" (Bahn and Vertut 1997: 17). Then, in 1878, Sautuola travelled to the World Exposition in Paris where "he was particularly attracted to an exhibit of prehistoric tools and small objects of art that had been found in France" (Curtis 2008: 48). He decided to excavate near Altamira, accompanied by his 9-year old daughter Maria. At some point, "Maria wandered off to play deeper in the cave. Suddenly, from a low side chamber, the marquis heard a cry: "Toros! Toros!" (Bulls! Bulls!). Sautuola hurried over and María pointed to a polychrome (multi-colored) bison, one of numerous animal paintings on the rock […] María (had) made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century" (Fagan 2018: 90). Sautuola published a booklet suggesting that the paintings were from prehistoric times (de Sautuola 1880). The scientifc establishment rejected Sautuola's discovery until towards the turn of the twentieth century when several caves (La Mouthe, Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume) with convincing contexts of antiquity were discovered in France. This story of debate and disbelief ended in 1902, with the publication of a paper by the well-known prehistorian of the time, Émile Cartailhac, in which he recognized the prehistoric antiquity of Altamira − resulting in possibly the most famous early rock art retraction (Cartailhac 1902).

Almost invariably, rock art and art history books celebrate this story as the frst signifcant episode of the history of rock art research (e.g., Bahn and Vertut 1997; Lewis-Williams 2002; White 2003; Moro Abadía et al. 2013; David 2017): a narrative manifest in the origins of this highly Eurocentric discipline. In reality, many rock images had already been 'discovered' across the globe long before Altamira (e.g., Phillip 1789). And we should keep in mind that in rock art research and archaeology the concept of 'discovery' is, in itself, highly problematic. In places such as North America, South Africa, and Australia, rock art imagery is not just 'from the past', but forms part of current living and on-going traditions. In this sense, it is false to claim that these images were 'discovered' in the nineteenth century. More accurately, they were just reported by Western people, as part of a worldwide trend of learned societies and museums increasing anthropological understandings of cultural groups across the world and making signifcant collections of their material culture. Antiquarian interests substantiated the West's quest to understand its own deep antiquity. And the recording of people in 'exotic' places was encouraged by the learned societies of Great Britain and France, described by Thomas (2011:15) as an 'ethnomania' that drove the 'indefatigable' collection of new and interesting facts (Thomas 2011:62), resulting in the eventual emergence of an anthropological knowledge and the arrangement of collections in museums. Hicks (2013) has argued that this was central to the development of anthropology's four-feld approach prevalent in North America.

Many rock images across the globe were published before 1902. In North America, scholars such as Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson (yes, the third president of the United States) commented on rock images in the eighteenth century. The frst synthesis of American rock art was published by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a geologist appointed as federal agent to the Chippewa people of the Lake Superior region. Schoolcraft married a woman who was part Ojibwa and he contributed to dismantling the myth of the Moundbuilders (Whitley and Clottes 2005). In his *Historical and statistical information respecting the history, condition and prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States* (frst published in 1847, more than 30 years before Sautuola's booklet), he reproduced many rock images and suggested that they were a form of "picture-writing" (Schoolcraft 1851–1857: 333). Garrick Mallery published his frst book devoted to North American rock art in 1894. In this book, Mallery developed Schoolcraft's idea and suggested that rock images were "a mode of expressing thoughts or noting facts by marks which at frst were confned to the portrayal of natural or artifcial objects" (Mallery 1894: 25). It is important to note that Mallery's impressive account had no parallel in Europe at least until 1906, when Cartailhac and Breuil published *La Caverne d'Altamira* (Cartailhac and Breuil 1906).

In Africa, travelers and explorers reported rock images long before the beginnings of the twentieth century. For instance, British geologist Georges William Stow frst came to South Africa in 1843. In the 1860s and 1870s, he made copies of rock images in the south-eastern Free State and the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa (Lewis-Williams and Challis 2011: 34). In 1875, Stow "sent many of these copies to Cape Town, where Bleek and Lloyd showed them to /Xam San people, who came from the central parts of the subcontinent" (Lewis-Williams and Challis 2010: 2–3). Lucy Lloyd also received the manuscript of *The Native Races of South Africa* that contained images of many rock paintings from across the country. The manuscript was edited by archivists George McCall Theal and published in 1905 (Stow and Theal 1905). After Stow passed away in 1882, Wilhem Bleek's daughter, Dorothea, kept his collection of rock art copies and published a commented version in 1930 under the title of *Rock-paintings in South Africa* (Stow and Bleek 1930).

People frst commented on Australian rock art over 115 years before the 'offcial' recognition of Altamira in 1902. Governor Arthur Phillip, who set up the penal colony in Sydney Harbour in 1788, was one of the frst to comment on the numerous drawings and carvings in the vicinity of the settlement,

In all these excursions of Governor Phillip, and in the neighborhood of Botany Bay and Port Jackson, the fgures of animals, of shields, and weapons, and even of men, have been carved upon the rocks, roughly indeed, but suffciently well to ascertain very fully what was the object intended. Fish were often represented, and in one place the form of a large lizard was sketched out with tolerable accuracy. On the top of one of the hills, the fgure of a man in the attitude usually assumed by them when they begin to dance, was executed in a still superior style. That the arts of imitation and amusement, should thus in any degree precede those of necessity, seems an exception to the rules laid down by theory for the progress of invention, But perhaps it may better be considered as a proof that the climate is never so severe as to make the provision of covering or shelter a matter of absolute necessity (Phillip 1789: 126).

Painter George Angas (1847) documented the production of engraved art around the harbor by known and named individuals, and ethnographers began to document rock art as part of the long-term and widespread evidence for Aboriginal Australia's cultural practices (e.g., Mathews 1893, 1895). Surveyor W.D. Campbell (1899) also published the numerous open engraving sites of the Sydney districts, recorded very accurately from horseback as he surveyed cadastral and other land tenure details. Signifcantly, also in 1899, Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen published *The Native Tribes in Australia*, a book that included a chapter on rock paintings (Spencer and Gillen 1899, 614–618). Spencer and Gillen described several ceremonies among the Arrernte people of Central Australia. They explained that, while every totemic group had its own ceremony (and these ceremonies were all different), "the important point is that one and all have for the sole object the purpose of increasing the number of the animals or plants after which the totem is called" (Spencer and Gillen 1899, 169). This book greatly infuenced a number of early twentieth century French rock art researchers (including Salomon Reinach and Henri Breuil) but it is rarely mentioned as one of the monuments of early rock art research. During the early 1900s rock art documentation continued across the continent with the professionalization of specialist academic felds by people with varying backgrounds: for example, the Frobenius expeditions to the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Australia (Kuba and Porr 2022) and focused recordings by D.S. Davidson and Fred McCarthy across much of the continent (see McDonald 2022; Taçon et al. 2022).

As these examples illustrate, during early stages of rock art research, European imagery was privileged and the primary audience for its outputs were Western/ European intellectual traditions. Rock art research outside Europe remained largely irrelevant for European audiences during the frst half of twentieth century, at which time, the French prehistorian (and priest), the Abbé Henri Breuil, was considered by Oxford and Cambridge to be "the world's leading authority on Paleolithic art" (Bahn 1998: 62). Breuil not only discovered several caves with imagery, but also was recognized as among the frst to promote the interpretation of rock images in terms of hunting magic. Breuil's focus on European cave art (until Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967) overshadowed rock art research occurring in places other than Europe. However, the period from 1900 to 1950 was a time of prolifc research activity in many parts of the globe. In North America, signifcant works were published during this period, especially in California and the Great Basin. In 1929, Julian Steward published a major synthesis on the petroglyphs of California and Nevada (Steward 1929). One year later, Anna Gayton examined the connections between rock art and shamanism at the sites of the Yokuts and Western Mono in the California southern Sierra Nevada (Gayton 1930). While these works were certainly not exempt from the prevailing ethnocentrism (Steward, for instance, declared that no knowledge about the meaning of the petroglyphs could be obtained "from Indians living at present", 1929: 224), they merit recognition. Equally, there were signifcant early works on African rock art. We have already mentioned the publication of Stow's *Rock-paintings in South Africa* in 1930; but at the same time, German anthropologist Frobenius devoted three volumes to African rock art (Frobenius and Obermaier 1925; Frobenius 1931, 1937). Frobenius was among the frst to suggest a shamanistic interpretation of rock art in South Africa (Kuba and Porr 2022), despite many suggesting that little could be said of "the motives which prompted the execution of the [South African] paintings or engravings" (Burkitt 1928: 156). Western scholars such as Alex Willcox, were persuaded that "Paleolithic man and his modern representative the Bushman remained, in their capacity for abstract thinking, always young children […] they achieved a degree of adaptation to their environments in which conceptual thinking was not necessary. Civilized man has taken another path" (Willcox O. Moro Abadía et al.

1956: 85). The 1940s also witnessed some important developments in Australian rock art research. For instance, the 1948 American–Australian Scientifc Expedition to Arnhem Land set the foundations of later rock art research, while Charles Mountford made signifcant contributions to the ethnography of Australian rock art (Clarke et al. 2022).

If Breuil eclipsed several non-European scholars during the frst half of the twentieth century, Leroi-Gourhan equally overshadowed the work of many researchers in North America, Africa and Australia during the 1960s and 1970s. Leroi-Gourhan is often credited for a structuralist approach in rock art research. In short, he proposed that, far from being randomly distributed, rock art representations composed structured symbolic systems. Additionally, he rejected the use of ethnographic analogies in rock art research. Subsequent authors called into question Leroi-Gourhan's theoretical approach (e.g., Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967), yet his predominance, enhanced by his comprehensive publications, published in many different languages (e.g., 1965), remained unchallenged until the end of the twentieth century despite his own "retreat" from some of his earlier interpretations.

During the 1960s and 1970s, many scholars engaged with Indigenous cosmologies that have set the groundwork for our current approaches. For instance, Peter Ucko played a major role in the development of Australian rock art research. In particular, "he championed Aboriginal peoples' rights to be recognised as the owners and managers of their own heritage, as well as providing the mechanisms to increase the discourse around rock art research and archaeological practice" (McDonald 2022: 58). Moreover, as Director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS), he invited European specialists to visit and funded their conducting research on a variety of Australian sites. Similarly, David Lewis-Williams was pivotal for the development of modern approaches to deep-time images in South Africa (Lewis-Williams 1972; Lewis-Williams and Biesele 1978). He promoted a greater emphasis on San ethnography, developed an approach somewhat infuenced by structuralism, and suggested that "the paintings and the myths perform a similar function in depicting and elucidating varied relationships between man and nature […] both the paintings and the myths, then, perform similar functions; they arise from the same needs and drives" (Lewis-Williams 1972: 63; although see Lewis-Williams 2012).

As this brief review illustrates, the development of non-European rock art has been relatively overlooked in the history and development of European rock art research. This is partly because Western archaeology has been shaped by a 'profound Eurocentric bias' that privileges the European record (McBrearty and Brooks 2000: 453), but there are other reasons that explain the perceived 'superiority' of European rock art. It was once argued that the extent and richness of the Franco-Cantabrian cave art made European Upper-Paleolithic imagery a unique phenomenon in terms of scale and magnitude. While this is true to a certain extent (enhanced, in part, by preservation factors and dedicated research), multiple regions of Australia, North America, and South Africa also host an impressive number of representations and styles with a deep-time record rivaling that of Europe (e.g. David et al. 2017; Finch et al. 2021; Mulvaney et al. 2023; Mulvaney 2015; Veth et al. 2018; Vinnicombe 1976). European cave art is also renowned for its 'realistic' painting style (e.g., the iconic representations of such sites as Altamira and Niaux). This 'naturalism' (i.e., the mode of representation that sought to imitate/copy nature as exactly and accurately as possible) in art history has marked Western perceptions of rock art (Moro Abadía et al. 2013). This 'realism' is not exclusive to the European record, however, nor does it represent "the" pinnacle of artistic abilities and aesthetics – except of course, to a western aesthetic.

Further rationale for the primacy of Europe in rock art research has been that, until recently, European cave art was thought to be signifcantly older than any other rock art tradition in the world. This belief was partly a product of the extraordinary concentration of preserved, accessible Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe and well-supported researchers, and partly a result of the limitations of chronometric dating methods available before the 1990s, when the AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) dating method allowed for smaller sample sizes, enabling better chronological control without extensive damage to rock art motifs. For more than a century, the prestige of European cave art was in part predicated on it being the oldest art by anatomically-modern humans made on Earth. While French scholars continue to develop innovative approaches to Upper Paleolithic rock art (Fritz et al. 2017), including pigment paint recipes (Walter and Cardinali 2013); technical and technological studies (Fritz 2014); intensive dating programmes (Quiles et al. 2016); c*haîne opératoire* and implications of this for gender studies (e.g., Fritz et al. 2016); other understandings of deep time art production (e.g. Fritz and Tosello 2015); as well as the spectacular atlas for Chauvet (Delannoy and Geneste 2020); and the replicative productions of the imagery from Chauvet, Cosquer and Lascaux; the fact remains that a more global focus of our knowledge base has emerged during the past 20 years.

#### **1.3 Globalization and Rock Art Research**

At the end of the twentieth century, a number of parallel processes converged to challenge the dominance of European cave art. A globalized world emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall (in 1989) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in 1991) as founded on a multiculturalist paradigm that accommodates the ethnically-and culturally-diverse societies produced by the global movement of people, capital and goods. Critical views of Eurocentrism fourished in this multicultural framework. In the 1990s, academia witnessed the rise of postcolonial studies. This feld examined "the various institutions of European colonialism, the discursive operation of empire, the subtleties of subject construction in colonial discourse and the resistance of those subjects, and, most importantly perhaps, the differing responses to such incursions and their contemporary colonial legacies in both preand post- independence nations and communities" (Ashcroff et al. 1998: 187). Under the infuence of Edward Said (1978) and other literary critics, postcolonial authors claimed that the political independence of most colonies had not translated into freedom from colonialist values that persisted "along with political, economic and cultural models… after independence" (Ashcroff et al. 1998: 64). Over the past 20 years, the postcolonial project has evolved into new forms of critique. While postcolonial studies attacked the effects of Western imperialism upon non-Western countries, the target shifted towards the colonial structures of settler countries. In the United States of America, Canada, Australia and South Africa, there has been an increasing demand for the deconstruction of Western ideologies – offering "a different perspective to human and civil rights-based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one" (Tuck and Wayne Yang 2012: 36). Postcolonialism and decolonization have had an impact in many of the social sciences. In archaeology, calls for decolonization "have become frequent, loud, and global" (Lippert et al. 2020: 7). Archaeologists are now urged to challenge the asymmetries of power that dominate the production of archaeological narratives. They have been asked to contest the link between Eurocentrism and "the structures of Western colonialism, which erase contemporary Native presence, introduce irreconcilable ruptures between present and past, and are essential to a framework of archaeological objectivity in empirical observation" (Schneider and Hayes 2020: 133).

It is thus not unexpected that the privileged position of European cave art has been increasingly called into question. In fact, it is not exaggeration to state that, effectively since Leroi-Gourhan's works in the 1970s and 1980s, the center of rock art research has somewhat shifted from Europe to other regions, such as Australia, North America, and South Africa. This process is as much (if not more) infuenced by recent technological developments in scientifc methods in the feld as with the proliferation and acceptance of non-Eurocentric attitudes or post-colonial/ decolonizing frameworks (but see, e.g., Brady and Kearney 2016). While these new methods are not without problems (see Sauvet's chapter in this volume) the increased accuracy and range of new chronometricdating techniques has been fundamental in dismantling the pervasive belief in the European origins of all rock art, as well as the notion that Paleolithic art was (almost) exclusive to Northern Spain and Southern France (see Ruiz-Redondo's chapter in this volume). This process began in the 1990s when Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dating was frst applied in the European caves of Altamira, El Castillo, Niaux, and Gargas (Valladas et al. 1991; Clottes et al. 1992; Moure Romanillo et al. 1996). At this time the technique was also applied in southern Africa (Brandt and Carder 1987) and Australia (McDonald et al. 1990). The French results demonstrated that Leroi-Gourhan's stylistic/ chronological system was fawed in fundamental ways and, in particular, that rock art had not evolved in a linear fashion from simple to complex throughout the Paleolithic (Clottes et al. 1995). Moreover, radiocarbon dates soon indicated that what we could consider to be human symbolic behavior− previously thought to have emerged in Europe at the beginnings of the Upper Paleolithic−had appeared signifcantly earlier in Africa. The radiocarbon dating of two pieces of ochre bearing what are taken to be symbolic engravings from Blombos cave to about 75,000 years ago (Henshilwood et al. 2002; Henshilwood et al. 2018) stimulated the search for early traces of what might be considered to be symbolism all across Africa. The 'abstract' imagery in Blombos Cave promoted the idea of an early emergence of 'drawing' in Africa. Subsequent archaeological research has demonstrated that personal ornamentation existed in Africa during the Middle Stone Age with such materials found from sites from the North [such as the Grotte des Pigeons in Morocco (Bouzouggar et al. 2007), and Oued Djebbana in Algeria, (Vanhaeren et al. 2006, and the South (such as at Sibudu and Blombos Cave in South Africa (d'Errico et al. 2008, 2015)]. Similarly, shell beads, as a marker of symbolic practices, have been discovered in many places across the globe, including Skhul in Israel (Vanhaeren et al. 2006), Jerimalai in Timor-Leste (Langley and O'Connor 2016; Langley et al. 2016) and from numerous Australian sites (Balme and Morse 2006; Balme et al. 2018).

And if radiocarbon dating has made it evident that these indicators of symbolism did not originate in Europe, uranium-series dating has demolished the idea that the earliest cave art is exclusive to France and Spain (see Brum, Oktaviana's and Aubert's chapter in this volume). Using this method on coralloid speleothems from cave walls, archaeologists have dated human hand stencils (to ca. 39,900 years ago) and two babirusa ('pig-deer') to ca. 35,400 years ago in Borneo, indicating that 'humans were producing rock art by ~40 kyr ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world' (Aubert et al. 2014). More recently, this same team of archaeologists have dated the carbonate deposits covering two red stencils and a fgurative animal painting in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh (Borneo). The hand stencils have yielded a minimum date of 37,200 years ago, and the fgurative painting depicting a purported hunting scene to 40,000 years ago (Aubert et al. 2018a, b) confrm that fgurative art was being produced in island southeast Asia at the same time as Chauvet Cave in France (see also Quiles et al. 2016).

These technical developments have challenged and reframed many conceptions of rock art. But a full dismantling of Eurocentrism has also required the socio-political reconfguration of rock art research. European scholars no longer dominate the discipline with their privileged access to the main European sites and in setting the tone of theoretical debate. Over the past two decades, scientifc research has diversifed (in France and globally) and the times in which one or two scholars (*'les mandarins'*, in the French parlance) controlled entire areas of inquiry are happily over. Today, many different specialists (from many different backgrounds) study rock art and praxis has greatly benefted from multidisciplinarity as well as cultural diversity amongst its scientists. Moreover, we have witnessed a decentralization of research and the reconceptualization of what is central – and what is more ephemeral – research. Franco-Cantabrian rock art was at the forefront of twentieth century research while non-European traditions were considered peripheral (at least from the viewpoint of European scholars). However, with the rise of national research agendas in a plethora of new rock art regions, the global research milieu has evolved towards multiple centers leading research innovation and methodological predominance. The Australasian case is the most obvious. As we have shown, the genesis of professional Australian rock art research can be traced back to the nineteenth century. However, the development of new dating techniques has garnered international attention, at sites such as Nawarla Gabarnmang (David et al. 2013) and various locales in Sulawesi (Aubert et al. 2014) and Borneo (Aubert et al. 2018a, b). There are now numerous known early art sites which are the fruits of intensive regional rock art projects in Arnhem Land (David et al. 2017) and the Kimberley (e.g., Finch et al. 2020; Finch et al. 2021; Green et al. 2021; Veth et al. 2018) and a national research agenda focusing on frst peopling of Sahul through the southern arc of dispersal (e.g., Crabtree et al. 2021). The fact that some of these sites contain the oldest rock art on Earth has enhanced this worldwide recognition.

The rise of multiple unrelated rock art 'centers' has had an interpretive impact. Rock images have been traditionally understood according to models that were very much in the Western intellectual tradition. For instance, cave paintings have been considered in representational terms, i.e., as representations that carry meanings (for one critique of representationalism, see Jones 2021). Similarly, rock images have been often conceptualized with reference to art history dichotomies, such as fgurative/abstract, realistic/non-realistic, real/ imaginary, etc. Traditional conceptualizations are now being challenged in multiple ways (see, for instance, Jones and Cochrane 2018). Within the Western tradition, philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Charles Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, Manuel de Landa, and others are inspiring *more than representational* approaches (such as assemblage theory, ontology, postanthropocentrism, and Peircean semiotics) that are having an impact in rock art research (see, for instance, Wallis 2009, 2013; Jones 2017; Troncoso et al. 2020). Further, in places such as Australia and North America, Indigenous knowledges are generating many new avenues of research for deep-time images. For instance, engagement with Indigenous ontologies is expanding traditional conceptualization of images beyond representationalism (Jones 2017; Tapper et al. 2020). And the same can be said about recent research on Indigenous landscapes and animism (e.g., Creese 2011, 2017; Porr 2018; Zawadzka 2019). While some of these approaches can be traced back to at least the early 2000s (e.g., David 2002), it has been in the last 20 years that they are having a worldwide impact in rock art studies due to the emergence of places such as Australia and United States as new more globally recognized research foci.

The onset of a new global order has coincided temporally with a worldwide reorganization of rock art research, with the Internet playing a principal role. To a certain extent, rock art studies have always had an international dimension. For instance, European scholars like Breuil and Frobenius extensively engaged with African rock art, while French researchers such as Leroi-Gourhan researched sites from Northern Spain. However, this 'beyond-the-borders' dimension was restricted to a small number of privileged individuals and places. During the twentieth century, communication among scholars from different countries was restricted to sporadic conferences (and letters). In this setting, rock art research remained locally – and nationally – oriented. This began to change towards the end of the twentieth century. For instance, in 1995, the French Ministry of Culture launched an international competition to choose the team that would undertake the scientifc study of the Chauvet paintings and its pristine cave environment. While the two potential team leaders were French both proposed teams that would include several international specialists (Balter 1996). Clottes, upon having been selected to lead the research, established a formal international scientifc advisory committee that met regularly to discuss on-going research as well as the auxiliary projects such as the creation of a replica and the nomination of the site for UNESCO World Heritage status. International recognition became an important factor in scientifc research. Additionally, core publications such as Rock Art Research and the International Newsletter On Rock Art (INORA) played an important role in this process. That said, it was the emergence of the internet in the 1990's that strongly modifed scientifc research. The World Wide Web has fueled the constitution of new international networks, increasing equitable access and circulation of information to unprecedented levels. Some publishing companies with specialized scientifc content have made thousands of papers and books available online and are experimenting with more open access. While there is nothing philanthropic about this (for-proft journal publishers are academically restricted to Western countries and fnancially unsustainable for many universities), and indeed there is still deep inequity in access between the different continents, it is equally true that more and more scholars have access to academic literature (especially with the development of open repositories. A large comprehensive data base of rock art publications was developed (https:// musnaz.org/rock\_art\_studies\_db/). The digital revolution has also engendered new formats for deep-time imagery. Since the turn of the new millennium, we have witnessed an 'explosion' of digital rock art research projects, including the virtual replicas that allow 'visits' of renowned caves such as Lascaux. (https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/fr/visitergrottelascaux/salle-taureaux), Cosquer (http://grottecosquer. fr/visite.html), Font-de-Gaume (http://font-de-gaume. monuments-nationaux.fr/fr/), Chauvet (https://archeologie. culture.gouv.fr/chauvet/en) and Altamira (https://www.culturaydeporte.gob.es/mnaltamira/cueva-altamira/recorridovirtual.html) all of these being in Europe. The *Musée de la Civilisation*'s virtual exhibition of rock art in Canada (https:// imagesdanslapierre.mcq.org/en/) is an outside-of-Europe example, but still in the Global North.

#### **1.4 The Pitfalls of Globalization**

Most of the globalization effects discussed so far, broadly speaking, can be characterized as 'positive'. For instance, Eurocentrism has been effectively challenged in multiple ways that have brought other corpuses of rock art into the wider understandings. Moreover, among these 'positive' effects, we should mention the internationalization of research, the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges to our interpretive frameworks along with the increasing coproduction of rock art research with Indigenous groups, and the worldwide circulation of information related to rock art sites. That said, globalization is certainly not without pitfalls. While the circulation of information has exponentially increased, access to this information remains inequitably restricted to a privileged number of people and countries. Similarly, the great progress in technological advances in science has accelerated many of the processes involved in rock art research. However, as Isabelle Stengers (2018) has pointed out in relation to science in general, it is far from clear that this acceleration is necessarily producing better science. In addition to these issues (that are common to many sciences), we examine in this section some challenges that are more specifc to rock art research. First, globalization is still developing ways of thinking that are embedded in preglobalized styles of theorizing and practicing research. Second, globalization has been mainly limited to the Global North and, therefore, huge areas remain excluded from the conversation. Related to this point, it is important to keep in mind that globalization is a Western project that involves a number of homogenizing and universalizing processes that necessarily generate tensions and resistance.

Globalization has fueled criticism on some of the most obvious biases of traditional rock art research. However, the ways in which we think about rock images (especially in places like Europe) are sometimes anchored in theorizing styles that originated in a pre-globalized world and are not *necessarily* adequate for the current context. For instance, much rock art research has been driven by 'origins research', a style of theorizing that assumes that "both our biological beginnings and the inception of cultural complexity were attained during our early prehistory" (Gamble and Gittins 2004: 97). This has resulted in "a search for an unproblematic center- a point of origins which allows unequivocal meaning to be possible" (Gamble and Gittins 2004: 106; see also Conkey with Williams 1991; Wobst and Keene 1983). The pursuit of *the* origins has been particularly pertinent in rock art research. The authentication of rock art initiated a 'gold rush' for scholars seeking the 'beginnings of art' (Bataille 1955) in the caves of France and Spain. This search continued during the twentieth century in Europe given the assumption that rock art had originated during the so-called 'Upper Paleolithic revolution'. The search is now global, as noted above, with the deep time dates from Sulawesi and Lubang Jeriji Saléh. Carbonate crusts overlying pigment motifs in three Spanish caves (La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales) at ca. 65,000 years ago has pushed this chronology still deeper – and brought into play the possibility of Neanderthal authorship (Hoffmann et al. 2018). While these dates have been called into question (Aubert et al. 2018a, b; White et al. 2020), they have reignited the debate as to whether symbolic behavior is a necessary hallmark of modern humans as well as what constitutes "symbolic behavior". The race to locate the 'oldest' art on Earth is fueled by multiple academic and non-academic factors. For example, scholars working with very old art have easier pathways to prestigious journals (such as *Science* and *Nature*), academic funding, as they beneft from 'the reward system in science' (Merton 1957: 642). This is directly related to the popularity of 'origins research' among the public and the mass media (see, for instance, the proliferation of labels such as the 'origins of language', the 'origins of modern humans', the 'origins of society', etc.).

No matter how fascinating the search for the 'origins' is (and while we understand that scholars need recognition and support by funding organizations, public institutions, etc.), this orientation has spurned pernicious effects (see Conkey's chapter in this volume). The focus on the 'origins' of art refects a prejudice that has oriented rock art studies for centuries, i.e., the idea that the older the rock image, the more important it is. This is obvious, for instance, when one examines academic (and popular) perceptions of Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic images. Paleolithic imagery carries an aura of exclusivity and gets more academic and media attention than any other 'prehistoric' representations (see John Robb's chapter in this volume). As he explains, when you Google 'rock art prehistoric Europe' you get a smaller than representative set of images (mainly Paleolithic cave paintings from Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira). The privileged position of Paleolithic imagery is rooted in its deep antiquity and its purported connections with the origins of western ancestors. However, the fact remains that the bison on the ceiling of Altamira or the horses at Lascaux *are not more important* than a Mi'kmaw image in eastern Canada or a San painting in Southern Africa. The European preference for Upper Paleolithic art is certainly not the fault of globalization, but this bias becomes increasingly untenable in a globalized context of international rock art research.

There is another problematic outcome of globalization that impacts rock art research. While we have celebrated the inclusion of more countries and territories in the global rock art conversation, this globalization is still embedded in a socio-economic and political reality. The term 'Global North' is used to refer to the nations of the world that are characterized by greater economic and industrial development and includes Europe, North America and Australia. The 'Global South', on the other hand, refers to less industrialized, 'developing countries' in Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America. Not surprisingly, the full benefts of globalization of rock art research have largely been restricted to the Global North. While Europe's centrality has been challenged, overall, countries from the Global North continue to reinforce their hegemony in the feld. Huge areas of exclusion remain across the Global South. South America is illustrative of this point: Western specialists are largely unaware of rock art from this continent. This results from multiple factors, including the marginal position of South America in the context of world archaeology (relative to North America, despite having some 'older' occupation dates, e.g., Lahaye et al. 2013) along with the assumed 'young' age of its rock art. Yet South America, with a rich and burgeoning intellectual tradition includes an impressive number of rock art places. In Brazil, for instance, regions such as Piauí, Minas Gerais, and Mato Grosso are home of the sites of Serra da Capivara (Pessis and Guidon 2007), Cidade de Pedra (Paillet 2006, Vilhena Vialou 2006), Santa Elina (d'Errico and Vialou 2007), and others. In Argentina, sites such as Cueva de las Manos (Aschero 2018; Aschero and Schneier 2021), Los Toldos (Carden et al. 2018), and Piedra Museo (Carden 2022) has made the Provincia de Santa Cruz one of the richest depositories of rock art in America. In the Colombian Amazon, archaeologists have documented thousands of rock paintings at Serranía de la Lindosa and propose a chronology starting 12,000 years ago (Morcote-Ríos et al. 2021; Iriarte et al. 2022). This concentration of images, together with the hundreds of pictographs reported at Chiribiquete National Park (Castaño-Uribe and Van der Hammen 2005), make this area amongst the richest rock art regions in the world. A signifcant number of these sites have been dated to the late Pleistocene/early Holocene transition (Podestá and Strecker 2014). These examples illustrate the pressing need to incorporate South American and continental Africa and Asia into the global conversations about rock art.

Globalization continues to promote a 'Western' hegemony of rock art research at multiple levels. As many authors point out, English is the language of globalization, and has become the *lingua franca* of science (Tardy 2004; Ferguson et al. 2011; Bennett 2013; Suzina 2020). Examples are innumerable: English is the language of communication among scientists from different countries, English-speaking publishing companies control the academic publication market, the most prestigious journals are in English, academic promotion in non-English speaking countries is mainly based on the number of publications in English-speaking journals, international meetings are held in English, etc. This continues to have several consequences in our feld. We are witnessing a linguistic impoverishment of rock art studies. Languages that were important during the twentieth century (German, Spanish and, especially, French) are becoming progressively less relevant in international discussions about deep-time images. In this setting, English functions as "an additional barrier to achieving more equitable participation and a diversity of perspectives" (Suzina 2020: 171). Moreover, since languages are not just systems of symbols, but they express different worldviews, the English hegemony has important epistemological and ontological consequences. Scholars from many different places and origins are forced to translate their views and perspectives into those theorizing styles and Western interpretative frameworks that are dominant in the English-speaking world. And it is important to remember that other-than-English speaking scholars have made signifcant contributions to rock art research. For instance, the so-called structuralist authors (Leroi-Gourhan, Laming-Emperaire) were relevant to rock art research in the 1960s and they published almost exclusively in French. More recently, the engagement with different Indigenous ontologies has greatly invigorated the theoretical debate (even if English is still the language of the discussion).

The 'colonialism' of rock art research introduces additional frictions. Many of concepts and ideas in the feld arise from Enlightenment Western thought. The notion of heritage (*patrimoine*, in French) originated after the French Revolution to designate those monuments, artwork and archaeological sites of an outstanding cultural, artistic and historic value to the French state. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Monuments Acts were passed in virtually every European country, including Britain (1882) and France (1887), and preservation became a burning issue in Italy and Germany (Swenson 2011: 140). The idea of cultural heritage, which initially referred to the historic and cultural patrimony of the different Western nations, expanded after World War II to incorporate several monuments considered of universal importance. In this setting, the creation of UNESCO in 1946 marked the beginnings of a global movement for the preservation of cultural heritage all around the world. The campaign launched by this organization in 1960 to relocate the Temples of Abu Simbel in Egypt (in danger of being swamped by the Nile after the building of the Aswan Dam) was the frst in a series of similar initiatives to preserve the 'world's' heritage. And from the 1950s, several voices called for the preservation of natural heritage, i.e., those natural sites and features considered of a universal value from a geological, biological or environmental viewpoint. As a result of these developments, in 1972 UNESCO adopted the *Convention concerning the protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage* seeking to guarantee the preservation of monuments, buildings and archaeological sites as well as those natural sites of outstanding universal value. At this time, UNESCO's General Conference in Paris established the World Heritage Committee, whose main function was to elaborate a list of threatened cultural and natural sites to promote corrective action. The frst World Heritage Sites were announced in 1978 and, since then, more than eleven hundred sites have been inscribed on the World Heritage List (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/). Rock art sites have been an important part of the list from the very beginning. Since the inscription of the cave art from the Vézère Valley (France) and the rock paintings from Valcamonica (Italy) in 1979, numerous other rock art sites have been added to the list, including Kakadu National Park in Australia (inscribed in 1981, rock art/cultural values added in 1987), Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria (in 1982), Altamira in Spain (in 1985), Alta in Norway (in 1985), Serra de Capivara in Brazil (in 1992), Chauvet in France (2014), Chiribiquete National Park in Colombia (added in 2018) as well as many caves across Northern Spain (see Palacio- Pérez's chapter in this volume).

These efforts to preserve rock art around the world are laudable and praiseworthy but they are also problematic. In fact, the idea of World Heritage (as well as UNESCO itself) crystallized in the years immediately after World War II in a context marked by an increasing commitment to peace and international solidarity (Meskell and Brumann 2015: 24). In this setting, UNESCO's initial approach to heritage developed out of the notion of 'outstanding universal value', i.e., the idea that certain cultural (and/or natural) places are so exceptional that they transcend national or cultural boundaries to become part of humanity's heritage (Jokilehto 2008; Labadi 2013). Since the 1970s, however, many commentators have questioned UNESCO's universalism. They have argued that, under a façade of humanitarianism and good intentions, universalism – or as they frame it, 'patrimony' – imposes largely European values that risks diminishing local cultural difference (Eriksen 2001; Meskell and Brumann 2015). The UNESCO response to these critiques has been to shift from "the initial project of constructing cultural unity of a global level [and] been replaced by a celebration of the virtues of cultural diversity" (Stoczkowski 2009: 11). In this context, UNESCO has sought to promote a more inclusive approach as well as stakeholder collaborations with different local communities, and more recently acknowledge the primary rights of Indigenous groups to speak for their heritage (ICOMOS GA2023, Scientifc Symposium, held in Sydney). That said, the tensions between the universal and the local are particularly critical in the case of rock art sites – as they are for the nature /culture divide – which many Indigenous groups fnd a perplexing way to compartmentalize the real world. The idea that rock art sites or broader heritage estates belong to an abstract humanity's universal heritage (which requires them to be placed under the protection of intergovernmental Western organizations) is contradictory with the belief systems (increasingly prevalent in settler countries) that rock art sites belong to the ancestors of different Indigenous communities – and indeed are part of broader cultural (i.e. often natural) landscapes. Additionally, UNESCO's World Heritage is inevitably linked to the Western idea of nation-state. As de Cesari has pointed out, "there is no World Heritage without nation-state sovereignty, and it is nation-states (and experts) that are constituted as the proper actors on the World Heritage stage" (de Cesari 2010: 309). Only state parties (i.e.,countries that have adhered to the World Heritage Convention) can introduce nominations to the World Heritage Committee. This means that while communities and ethnic groups can initiate the nomination process (see Stevens and McDonald's and Palacio-Pérez's chapters in this volume), this is subsumed into a broader and often complex process involving multiple layers of government. The selection process remains in the hands of the States Parties, making them "the key actors, thus leaving all key processes at a country level in the hands of national elites" (Askew 2010: 22). Moreover, once a site has been inscribed in the list, "the World Heritage Committee has both the right and the duty to monitor its state of conservation, relying again on the expert services of ICOMOS, IUCN, ICCROM, and the [World Heritage] Center" (Meskell and Brumann 2015: 26). These interfaces illustrate the tension between the global and the local and remain at the core of current debates about the appropriate management and preservation of rock art sites.

#### O. Moro Abadía et al.

#### **1.5 Organization and Relevance of This Volume**

Globalization is a multi-faceted process that has profoundly impacted the ongoing praxis of rock art research. The ways in which rock art scholars organize, undertake, and publish their research has signifcantly evolved in the past 20 years, changing their role(s) as experts, their relationships with different groups of people, and the ways in which they present their results to the public. If we had to summarize in one word what has happened to rock art research during the past 20 years, it would be intensifcation. Rock art projects across the globe have multiplied, as have the number of practitioners; international collaborations have expanded; the methods for surveying, locating, examining and quantifying the age of rock art sites have exponentially increased in number and quality; and information about rock art sites can now circulate at unprecedented levels. Overall, this intensifcation has benefted rock art studies, and these are in many countries considered mainstream archaeological endeavours (Conkey 2005). There are vibrant funding streams in a number of countries, e.g., Australia's ARC funding has provided millions of dollars to major rock art projects funded through a number of universities (McDonald 2022) while ERC funding in Europe has funded major rock art research projects such as the Levantine focused LArcHer project led by Ines Domingo Sanz; and the multidisciplinary ARTSOUNDSCAPES: led by Margarita Dỉaz Andreu – https://ia.ub.edu/projects-and-contracts).

But it has also fueled new (as well as, old) tensions and problems. This explains the passionate reactions that globalization engenders. For some, globalization has greatly helped the entire world to embrace rock art research. For others, it has merely continued to promote the global spread of Western (and English-speaking) values. Notwithstanding these different reactions, both adversaries and advocates of globalization acknowledge the speed with which changes have occurred. And in this fast-moving world, there is often little time to think critically about these processes (see Conkey's chapter in this volume). The risk of an age in which science continues to improve our ability to know many things about deep-time images encourages "method-idolatry": an overdependence on methods in the absence of critical thought and theorized outcomes. Similarly, the acknowledgement and celebration of Indigenous knowledges can only occur if given appropriate space: in current academia there is a shortage of time to critically examine and meaningfully engage with these knowledges, when 'key performance indicators' and 'research impacts' – the modern drivers of intellectual discourse – engender constant pressure to publish – or perish.

In this setting, our hope is that this volume serves to promote critical refection on the many impacts of globalization in rock art research. We present these offerings in fve sections. Section One − *Recentering rock art* − examines the worldwide reorganization of rock art research and the emergence of new centers beyond Western Europe. Aitor Ruiz-Redondo examines how Paleolithic art research has globally expanded beyond the Franco-Cantabrian region. Adam Brumm, Adhi Agus Oktaviana, and Maxime Aubert focus on the emergence of Indonesia and Australia as one of the centers of rock art research in the twenty-frst century. Andrés Troncoso examines South American rock art with reference to Stenger's idea of 'cosmopolitics' (2005). Peter Veth, Sam Harper, and Martin Porr reframe parallels in rock art representation from two distant areas: Europe and Kimberley in Australia.

In this comparative vein, chapters in Section Two −*Comparative views on global art* − examine analogies and differences between disparate geographical areas. Oscar Moro Abadía and Amy Chase call into question the traditional eurocentric divide between European and Indigenous rock art. Danae Fiore, Bryn Tapper, Dagmara Zawadzka, and Agustín Acevedo highlight important analogies between the rock art research of the two distinct poles of the American continent: Southern Argentina and Eastern Canada. Elizabeth Vellicky and her multinational coauthors develop an Ochre Experience Model that is applicable across national boundaries along with several innovative methods. Using a similar transnational perspective, George Sauvet examines some of the pros and cons of the various chronometric dating techniques and challenges the on-going race to discover the oldest art in the world.

In recent years, rock art studies have become transnational (as illustrated by various chapters in this volume) and, equally important, interdisciplinary. Section Three −*Interdisciplinary global rock art* − offers several innovative and inspirational perspectives on rock art written by specialists in other disciplines. The multidisciplinary team of Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Bruno David, and Kim Genuite combines geomorphological and archaeological methods to offer an innovative model for reconstructing rock art landscapes. Whitney Davis, an art historian, ironically refects on the obsession of archaeologists and art historians to fnd the earliest dated rock images in the world, providing an important critical approach to some popular ideas in rock art research. Art historian John Onians provides informative and salient neuroscientifc observations about rock art research. He seeks to call into question various ideas about rock images that are common to the felds of archaeology, anthropology, and art history. In a different vein, another art historian, Rémi Labrusse, similarly examines the reception of rock art among contemporary artists from a historical viewpoint. His work is important to understand the different ways in which deep-time images have inspired modern imageries.

Section Four −*Rock art management: Tensions of Local versus global* − draws attention to the conficts inherent in the preservation and management of rock art research in a globalized context. Eduardo Palacio-Pérez examines the process of nomination of several Spanish Cantabrian caves to the UNESCO World Heritage list. He illustrates how, in Europe, the management of rock art is shaped by the tension between a number of apparently antagonistic goals, such as preservation and touristic exploitation. In colonized countries, the tensions are of a different kind. In Australia, local Aboriginal communities, settler national institutions, and international agencies often have different (and sometimes contradictory) views on the management of rock art sites. The chapter by Amy Stevens and Jo McDonald on the nomination of the Murujuga cultural landscape onto the World Heritage List illustrates these frictions. Additionally, prevalent narratives within each of these local, national and transnational groups may be problematic. For instance, as Silvia Tomášková shows in her chapter about South Africa rock art, the widespread insistence on the ancient roots of Indigenous communities in a place may sometimes deprive these peoples of a relevant role in global history. Moreover, globalization has also generated new challenges for the preservation of rock art images. As Paul Taçon's chapter shows, graffti and vandalism at rock art sites has increased alarmingly during recent years.

The Fifth Section examines *Rock art and the challenges of the Global now*. John Robb analyzes the impact of digitalization in rock art studies. His focus is on how rock representations are subsequently transformed into a myriad of images that circulate in an increasing number of media and formats. The proliferation of digital images has engendered new challenges in our globalized world. For instance, Jamie Hampson and Sam Challis examine how Indigenous rock art motifs from North America, Northern Australia, and Southern Africa are often re-imagined and appropriated for commercial and economic reasons. Taking a different perspective on this, Laura Mayer and Martin Porr refect on the many processes involved in the creation, management and exploitation of 3D replicas of renowned caves, such as Lascaux and Chauvet. We conclude this section with Meg Conkey's examination of the benefts of 'slow science' for rock art research. In the age of relentless acceleration, Conkey's chapter is the perfect closure for a book that, frst and foremost, seeks to provoke refection about the many dimensions of globalization in rock art research.

**Acknowledgements** We are grateful to have had this opportunity to work with so many of our global colleagues in the production of this volume. Our special thanks go to the many anonymous reviewers that commented on the initial version of the chapters including in this book. We are grateful to our authors and the Springer editors for their patience and constant support with this project.

#### **References Cited**

the Pleistocene to Late Holocene at Jerimalai, Lene Hara, and Matja Kuru 1 and 2. *PLoS One* 11 (8): e0161071.

and early peopling of the Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene: New evidence from La Serranía La Lindosa. *Quaternary International* 578: 5–19.

———. 2018. *Another science is possible. A manifesto for slow science*. [Translated by Stephen Muecke]. Cambridge: Polity Press.

———. 2013. Exorcising 'spirits': Approaching 'shamans' and rock art animically. In *Handbook of contemporary animism*, ed. Graham Harvey, 307–324. Durham: Acumen.

**Oscar Moro Abadía** is a Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). He specializes in the study of Pleistocene images. In 2020, he co-edited, with Professor Manuel R. González Morales, a special issue on Pleistocene and Holocene arts for the *Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory*. In 2021, together with Martin Porr, he co-edited *Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches and Indigenous Knowledges for Routledge*. His research on Paleolithic art and the history of science has been published in *Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Journal of Archaeological Research, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, World Art, History of Human Sciences, History of Science, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science*.

**Margaret W. Conkey** is the Class of 1960 Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. One key focus of her research has been the interpretations of European Paleolithic imagery, and she has carried out the Between the Caves project, a Paleolithic landscape survey in the Ariège region of France. More recently, she has been a co-director of excavations at Peyre Blanque, a Magdalenian open-air site. She has long been involved in the pioneering research on feminist and gender perspectives in archaeology. She has served as president of the Society for American Archaeology as well as for both the archaeology and feminist associations within the American Anthropological Association. Among her many awards, she was the recipient of the prestigious Thomas H. Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK) for her distinguished contributions to Anthropology.

**Josephine McDonald** is the Director of the Centre for Rock Art Research and Management at The University of Western Australia where she has held the Rio Tinto Chair in Rock Art Studies, funded by their Commonwealth Conservation Agreement for the Dampier Archipelago National Heritage Listed Place (Murujuga). She has researched rock art in Australia's fertile eastern states and its arid zone and the Great Basin, USA. Over the last decade she has collaborated with the Murujuga Aboriginal community and led various teams of multidisciplinary researchers, systematically documenting the rock art, excavating ancient settlements, and experimented with new dating techniques to try and understand the environmental context and age of this inscribed cultural landscape.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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**Part I**

**Recentering Rock Art**

## **2 'Out of Franco-Cantabria': The Globalization of Pleistocene Rock Art**

Aitor Ruiz-Redondo

#### **Abstract**

Since the second half of the twentieth century, globalization has transformed archaeology into a 'geoculture' (using Wallerstein's words) defned by the increasing circulation of ideas within a worldwide scientifc community. This change has not only affected the ways in which new paradigms and methods are transmitted, but it has also signifcantly broadened the geographical boundaries of archaeological research. The example of Palaeolithic rock art can be used to illustrate the various dimensions of this transformation. In Europe, Pleistocene cave art was considered a phenomenon with a 'core' frmly embedded in the Franco-Cantabrian region and a 'periphery' which included some neighbouring areas, such as Southern Spain and Italy. Despite some discoveries in Russia (1957) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1973), this reductionist view remained unchallenged until the beginning of the twenty-frst century. Non-European sites were often disregarded and reduced to the status of 'outliers' in relation to the central core area, resulting in the limitation, rather than invigoration, of research in these regions. However, the new millennium has witnessed a signifcant increase in the number of European countries with welldated Paleolithic cave art sites, including the United Kingdom and Romania, among others. Nevertheless, the greatest shifts in the feld of rock art studies globally have emerged during the last decade with: (1) the discovery of Paleolithic rock art in locations very distant from the traditional European 'core' (e.g., Australia and Indonesia), and (2) the development of systematic archaeological rock art surveys in areas outside of the 'periphery' (e.g., Southeast Europe). Today, it is evident that Paleolithic rock art is a widespread global phenomenon. Despite this, a vast majority of teams and specialists are still focused

A. Ruiz-Redondo (\*)

University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
on the Franco-Cantabrian region, and they seldomly develop research in 'new' territories. Hence, globalization has led to an increasing awareness of the 'Franco-Cantabrian bias,' but has archaeological research changed accordingly?

#### **Keywords**

Upper Paleolithic · Rock art · Eastern Europe · Southeastern Asia · Australia

#### **2.1 '***Ex occidente lux'***: Southwestern Europe as the Spiritual Reservoir of Paleolithic Societies**

The emergence of Paleolithic art and symbolism is considered a major milestone in human evolution (e.g. Mellars 1989; Zilhão 2007). This is related to the fact that art has been traditionally regarded as one of the frst expressions of symbolic and cognitive thought in human history (Mellars 1989; Mithen 1996; d'Errico 2003). The development of Paleolithic cave art and symbolism has often been considered a phenomenon with a 'core' frmly settled in the Franco-Cantabrian region and a 'periphery' which includes some neighbouring areas, such as central and southern Spain and Italy. A number of scholars from the frst half of the twentieth century claimed that Franco-Cantabrian cave art was 'superior' to 'savage arts' (e.g., Breuil 1906, 135). Among these scholars, Breuil considered Levantine rock art to have stemmed from Paleolithic art (Breuil and Lantier 1951), linking it to an African tradition of – also Pleistocene – rock art (Breuil 1965). This conception changed drastically in the late 1950s and the 1960s. A. Laming-Emperaire, frst, and A. Leroi-Gourhan, later, highlighted the European 'nature' of Paleolithic art. Leroi-Gourhan, for instance, restricted Paleolithic cave art to France, Spain, and Italy (Laming-Emperaire 1962, 162; Leroi-Gourhan 1965, 204). Despite a

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2024 19 O. Moro Abadía et al. (eds.), *Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization*, Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54638-9\_2

few discoveries located outside of this area (see Sect. 2.2), this conception of Paleolithic rock art as a geographicallyrestricted phenomenon was widely accepted until the early twenty-frst century (Gamble 1984, 1991; Mithen 1991; Barton et al. 1994; Braudel 1998; Mellars 2006). Two main factors explain this fact. First, until the late twentieth century, research, and especially research in the social sciences, was grounded on Eurocentric biases, and rock art research was not an exception. Second, the focus on Franco-Cantabrian rock art was (and still is) fuelled by the impressive extent and richness of Paleolithic images in this part of the world. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this limited geographical distribution. For instance, M. Jochim (1983, 1987) developed an ecological interpretation of Paleolithic art, based on the consideration of southwestern Europe as a *refugium* for human groups from 25,000 BP onwards. This would have drastically increased the population of this area, resulting in an intensifed use of rituals. According to this hypothesis, decorated caves would have acted as territorial markers and ritual places. The main problem with Jochim's argument is that he assumed that Europe was the only area that met all the requirements for the appearance of cave art (i.e. dense population, increasing sedentism and territoriality), something that is far from evident. Similarly, Paul Mellars (1985, 2006) linked the origins of cave art to the abundance of resources in Southwest Europe during the Upper Paleolithic (UP hereafter). According to Mellars, this led to human groups to become more socially and culturally complex, facilitating the creation of cave art in the region. Steven Mithen (1991) suggested that cave art would have functioned as a means of information exchange between hunters stalking animals. This cooperation would have been triggered by the overexploitation of game, resulting in the dense population of southwestern Europe during the UP. Once again the emergence of cave art is intimately linked to the particular conditions of the Franco-Cantabrian region. The 'information exchange approach' also stressed that "the appear[ance] of parietal art in the Late Pleistocene Europe resulted from the closing of social networks under conditions of social population density" (Barton et al. 1994, 199). Additionally, it is interesting to note that most of the abovementioned works take for granted that UP rock art was a Western-European phenomenon and they tried to provide an explanation for this *fact*. In this setting, it is legitimate to wonder whether recent claims about Neandertal rock art (that are based on limited archaeological evidence, please see Hoffmann et al. 2018) are not the last attempt to save the privileged position of Europe in rock art research. In any case, evidence for Paleolithic rock art outside of Southwest Europe has existed for over 60 years now and the number of known sites has increased considerably during the last 20 years. Wherever and whenever modern humans frst created rock art, it is now clear that rock images are something of a global phenomenon.

#### **2.2 First Discoveries Beyond the 'Cynosure'**

More than 50 years after the recognition of Altamira (Cartailhac 1902) and 80 years after its discovery (de Sautuola and Marcelino. 1880), cave art was still considered to be almost exclusive to Spain, France, and a few sites in Italy. However, in 1959, one discovery changed the geography of cave art. Interestingly, the fnd did not occur in the margins of southwestern Europe (as one would have been expected), but a few thousand kilometres away in the Ural Mountains in Russia. While working at the Pribelsky branch of the State Natural Bashkir Reserve, zoologist A.V. Ryumin found a number of Paleolithic paintings in Kapova cave. More specifcally, he reported the discovery of many zoomorphic fgures: "Cave bear, wolf, fox, bison, antelope, cave-lion, horses, a mammoth, and [a] sabertoothed tiger" (as cited in Bader 1963, 27). He was convinced of the Paleolithic age of the artwork, and his discovery attracted the attention of several Soviet prehistorians who visited the cave. When examining the artwork, they realized that most were "tricks of nature; the light and shadow of the primordial cave had played upon Ryumin's zoological imagination" (Kunichika 2018, 118). At the same time, they inferred that a few of the images (in particular those from the main panel in the Chamber of Paintings) were likely UP paintings. The government of the Soviet Union sponsored research at the site, and O.N. Bader was designated to direct a number of archaeological campaigns (1960–1978) seeking to document the rock images and examine the cave's archaeological deposits. These led to the discovery of more than ffty paintings in the middle and upper levels of the caves, which were then cleaned of modern graffti and calcite layers. The excavations revealed additional evidence of human presence in the cave during the UP (Zhitenev 2018). Based on the presence of extinct Pleistocene species among the represented fauna (woolly mammoth and rhinoceros), the close spatial relationship between the archaeological contexts and the paintings, as well as the strength of the formal analogies with Paleolithic cave paintings from Southwest Europe, Bader consistently argued for the Paleolithic age of the artwork (Bader 1963). Thus, the infuence of some early works on cave art that had been translated into Russian (including those of Piette, Breuil, and Reinach) and the role of Western archaeologists (Bader presented his frst works on the cave at the IV UISPP world conference in Moscow in 1962) played an important role in the authentication of Kapova's art. Although the UP age of the painting was never called into question, the discovery of Kapova had a little impact in the work of Western archaeologists. For instance, in two seminal books on the study of cave art published during the 1960s, Laming-Emperaire (1962) did not mention Kapova, and Leroi-Gourhan (1965) only briefy referred to the site. Interestingly, the site *is* mentioned by historian Fernand Braudel in *Memory and the Mediterranean* (a posthumous publication): "[Recent discoveries] in a cave at Kapovaya (sic) in the Urals, seem to indicate that they [cave paintings] cover the same territory as the Venuses of the Gravettian era" (Braudel 1998, 31). Nevertheless, he did not question the eminent place of the Franco-Cantabrian province in cave art: "France and Spain are nevertheless (but why?) the unchallenged centres of an art which is thought to date from the Aurignac to the Magdalenian eras" (Braudel 1998, 31).

In 1974, local people from the town of Stolac (Bosnia and Herzegovina) discovered some lithic artefacts in the nearby rock shelter of Badanj. Đ. Basler, an archaeologist at the Zemaljski Museum of Sarajevo, reported this discovery, recognized the potential of the site and began excavations (Basler 1976, 1979). The site is a large, open rock shelter on a slope 30 meters above the base of a steep canyon. The frst excavations revealed an extremely rich and complex site, and archaeologists recovered more than 20,000 lithic remains dating from the end of the Pleistocene (Late Epigravettian) during the frst campaign. The fnds also included hundreds of personal ornaments and dozens of engraved bone fragments, both rare elements in Paleolithic sites of the Balkan Peninsula (see Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2020a). This frst campaign also revealed an even more exceptional discovery: a large, engraved boulder. The carvings are located on the upper face, whose surface dimensions are ~4 × 2.7 m, and the maximum height of the boulder is 2.3 m. Hundreds of deeply engraved features were found on the boulder, and since a great part of it was covered by undisturbed UP layers, the Palaeolithic age of the discovery is undisputed (Basler 1976, 1979). Đ. Basler presented his fndings at a conference organized by D. de Sonneville-Bordes in Bordeaux (France, May 1977):

The image seems to be typical of the Paleolithic. Given that this part of the cave was covered with deposits from the end of the Palaeolithic, it is also possible to estimate, in a quite precise way, its chronology. One part of the wall is covered by nonfgurative engravings, and, in the other part […] we have found a horse representation and some symbols characteristic of this period (Basler 1979, 346).

Basler was very clear regarding the context of the discovery and the fact that the engravings were covered by UP layers. During our recent work at the site, we have confrmed that the archaeological deposits are undisturbed after the frst 3-5 cm below the surface (Ruiz-Redondo et al., forthcoming). Although archaeologists have long assumed the presence of a horse depiction among the engravings, we have found no evidence to support such an interpretation (Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2020a). Nevertheless, Basler concluded his presentation with a signifcant remark: "It is beyond question that we need to wait for new discoveries from the west coast of the Balkan peninsula" (Basler 1979, 354). Those discoveries did not appear as quickly as Basler would have hoped, and many years passed without any further Paleolithic rock art fnds in the area.

In 1978, some members of the speleological club at the University of Bucharest noticed a number of red dots painted on the walls of Cuciulat cave (Romania) while carrying out a frst mapping of the cavity. A year later, M. Cârciumaru, from the Romanian Institute of Archaeology, visited the site to evaluate the paintings and attempted to contextualize them. He confrmed the anthropic origin of the paintings, all of them made in red and depicting mostly non-fgurative motifs, with the exception of a horse and a possible feline (Cârciumaru and Bitiri 1983; Cârciumaru 1988). Cârciumaru was persuaded of the Paleolithic age of the stylistic because of the resemblance between the horse and other UP paintings. In particular, he compared this fgure to the horses in Kapova cave: "The most pertinent stylistic similarities were drawn with the Kapovaia Cave paintings in the Urals and analogies with them, determined by the manner of execution and depiction of animal fgures, colour and way of painting" (Cârciumaru and Nițu 2018, 94). J. Kozłowski shared this opinion and even suggested a chronology for Cuciulat's rock art: "The analogy between the Kapovaya horses and the ones from Cuciulat cave allow us to assign a chronology for the latter of circa 15–14 ka BP*.*" (Kozlowski 1992, 89).

Despite these statements, the dating of the paintings remains a complex issue. Since direct dating of the art is not possible, our best chance to determine the age of parietal art is to reconstruct its 'internal archaeological context' ('IAC' – for a defnition and compilation of cases see Medina-Alcaide et al. 2018, and references within). When this is not possible, stylistic analogies may also be helpful, but only if there are a number of them available for comparison, and the art style clearly points to the same chronological framework (Fortea et al. 2004). Unfortunately, the site of Cuciulat does not currently meet any of these criteria. The front portion of the cave, which was the most likely area to have been inhabited by prehistoric humans, was destroyed by quarrying activities at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to local people, it consisted of a large chamber at the entrance, seemingly suitable for occupation by UP groups (Cârciumaru 1988; Cârciumaru and Nițu 2018).  Traversing the limestone pile allowed for access to a fossil gallery, which then led to the area where the paintings are located. No Paleolithic remains were found in the cave. Additionally, stylistic analyses can be applied only to the horse fgure, as the supposed feline is poorly defned, and the geometric signs consist mainly of stains and red dots, which were common motifs throughout the Paleolithic. Consequently, the comparison between Cuciulat and Kapova is not without problems. Although the general proportions of Cuciulat's horse may evoke that of Kapova's horses, the latter consist of perfectly defned outlines (in some cases even highlighted in black colorant) that are only partially flled with pigment (Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2020b). Moreover, a landslide prevented access to the cave, resulting in no new information since the 1980s. Despite these concerns about its chronology, Cuciulat's paintings demonstrate the biases prevalent in cave art research: Instead of being examined in a serious way, these paintings, along with Kapova and Badanj, were typically overlooked by Western specialists.

#### **2.3 Europe Becomes Larger: Systematic Research in Eastern Europe and the British 'Exception'**

After their discovery, research continued at the sites of Kapova and Badanj, more extensively in the former and sporadically in the latter (from 1986–87, led by Z. Kujundžić and R. Whallon). At the Russian site of Kapova, after a succession of campaigns led by O.N. Bader (1960–78), V.E. Shchelinsky completed a comprehensive study of the cave (Shchelinsky 1987, 1990a, b, 1993, 1997, 2001; Ščelinskij and Širokov 1999). He found an UP cultural layer in the so-called 'Chamber of Signs', containing a signifcant number of limestone blocks (including one bearing an image of a mammoth), along with lithics, faunal remains, stains and pieces of ochre, decayed tree remains, a bone tool, a ceramic cup, more than 150 personal ornaments (made from shells, serpentinite, and other materials). It is not surprising, then, that the next Paleolithic cave art discovery outside of southwestern Europe was made in the southern Urals. In 1980, V.T. Petrin, S.E. Chairkin, and V.N. Shirokov discovered red and black paintings in Igniatievkaya cave, relatively close to Kapova (~250 kilometers away). The site was studied from 1980 to 1986 by V.T. Petrin, and in 1995 by V.E. Shchelinsky and V.N. Shirokov (Petrin 1997; Ščelinskij and Širokov 1999). These scholars recorded over ffty motifs that they identifed as Paleolithic due to their iconography, style, and resemblance to Kapova paintings. The archaeological excavation undertaken in the main chamber of the cave revealed remains of ancient human occupations. Three charcoal samples from an archaeological layer yielded late Pleistocene dates of ~18–11 ka cal BP (Ščelinskij and Širokov 1999), which may potentially overlap at ~16 ka cal BP when calibrated (Bronk Ramsey 2017; Reimer et al. 2020). Three direct radiocarbon analyses were later performed on two charcoal lines and a black mammoth depiction (Steelman et al. 2002). The results obtained were incongruous and the ages returned were all post-Pleistocene (the oldest ~8.3–8 ka cal BP). The authors of the study rejected the possibility of modern carbon contamination. However, a number of species among the fauna represented in the cave art were extinct in the area well before the end of the Pleistocene; I have recently verifed the paintings *in situ* and there are clear depictions of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, and even a Bactrian camel. Furthermore, the graphic conventions of the fgurative paintings show many analogies with those found at Kapova, and the direct dates obtained from Igniatievskaya cave paintings do not ft within the chronological frame of human occupations identifed in the same site. The authors propose several possibilities to explain these discrepancies (Steelman et al. 2002, 348): (1) the image does not depict a 'mammoth'; (2) the species existed in the area for over 4000 years longer than previously expected; (3) the depiction was not that of a living mammoth; or (4) the charcoal was from a younger (more recent) overpainting of an older image. Concerning the frst option, a positive identifcation of the species can be ascertained from the clarity and detail of the image. The second and third hypotheses cannot explain the discrepancy in radiocarbon ages between the artwork and the prehistoric occupation of the site; they also do not account for stylistic similarities with UP cave art from other sites. As such, the fourth hypothesis seems to be the most reasonable, although I would not exclude the possibility of carbon contamination, especially considering the amount of modern graffti that can be found on the walls of the caves. More recently, a new study has analysed the calcite layers overlying and underlying a number of the paintings in the cave (Dublyansky et al. 2021). The 230Th dates obtained on the fowstone that formed above and below the red and black paintings in Ignatievskaya cave situate the chronology of the artistic activity between ca. 78 ka and ca. 10 ka. A number of authors have called into question the reliability of the method in its application to thin calcite layers covering cave paintings (see, for instance, White et al. 2020). That said, the iconography (Pleistocene fauna) and the style of the artwork are compatible with a Pleistocene chronology.

More recently, archaeologists have reported cave art at the site of Serpievskaya 2, located just ~15 km from Igniatievskaya cave (Shirokov and Petrin 2013). In this case, archaeologists have reported a dozen of red paintings and some engravings, most of them non-fgurative motifs (with the possible exception of two zoomorphic fgures). Although the site has not been studied as extensively as the previous two sites in the Urals, the Palaeolithic antiquity of these artworks seem to be justifed *a priori*, based on technical and somewhat iconographic grounds, especially when considering some relevant analogies with Igniatievskaya's paintings. Nevertheless, the evidence is currently too scarce to make a strong case for the Pleistocene age of the paintings, and further research at the site is necessary to establish its chronology.

From 2008 to the present, the research at these three sites has entered into a new phase. Over the past decade, V.S. Zhitenev (Lomonosov Moscow State University) has led the 'Southern Urals archaeological expedition' which undertakes the archaeological investigations of decorated caves. Due to its archaeological relevance, efforts have mainly been concentrated in Kapova. As a result, knowledge surrounding this site has increased notably in the last decade. Several works have been published, including new data regarding the archaeological context of the UP human occupations inside the cave (Zhitenev 2016, 2018), a number of radiocarbon and U-series dates (Zhitenev et al. 2015; Dublyansky et al. 2016, 2018), new pigment composition analyses (Pakhunov and Zhitenev 2015), and a comprehensive study of the rock art (Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2020b). It is expected that similar research at Igniatievskaya and Serpievskaya 2 will be undertaken in the coming years.

In September 2009, a team of speleologists announced the discovery of a number of possible Palaeolithic drawings at the cave of Coliboaia (Romania). The speleologists and the local authorities contacted Jean Clottes for an international expert assessment. Together with other French collaborators, Clottes visited the cave in May 2010, confrming the UP age of the motifs based on stylistic and iconographic criteria (e.g., some drawings clearly represent Pleistocene fauna). Several animal fgures were reported, including horses, bison, rhinoceros, and the possible head of a bear (Clottes et al. 2012), all of them drawn in charcoal. Four samples were taken for radiocarbon dating, three from the IAC of the art, and one taken directly from a horse fgure. Based on the result of radiocarbon dating, archaeologists suggested a very early chronology that could correspond to (A) two periods of decoration separated by 4000 years (~37–35 and ~ 33–30 ka cal BP), or (B) a single period of decoration from 35–33 ka cal BP. The second scenario would imply that three of the samples underestimated the age of the drawings due to modern carbon contamination (Gély et al. 2018). Whatever the case, the members of the team that studied Coliboaia were confdent that the drawings are Aurignacian in origin. However, the lack of typical Aurignacian archaeological material from within the cave has led some scholars to question the proposed chronology (Cârciumaru et al. 2019). Instead, Cârciumaru and his collaborators have suggested a Gravettian chronology for the drawings. New research and, eventually, independent evaluations could help to resolve the dating issue in the future. Regardless of the precise chronology, it seems clear that Coliboaia's art is from the UP and, therefore, this place is important to understand the dissemination of Paleolithic parietal art across Europe.

Coliboaia is not far from the Balkan Peninsula, an extensive area that probably played an important role in the arrival of Anatomically Modern Humans (hereafter AMH) into Europe but that has been rarely examined in terms of Paleolithic art. Being aware of this situation and the archaeological potential of the area, I decided to assemble a team to survey potential rock art sites in Southeast Europe. Our work began in Serbia in 2012. During that frst stage of the project, we surveyed twenty-nine cave sites. In Selačka 3, we found two red fngerprints which, based on stylistic criteria, may be Paleolithic in nature (Ruiz-Redondo 2014; Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2018); this argument is strengthened by the presence of Early Upper Paleolithic industry at the site (Kuhn et al. 2014). Although we looked for further evidence that could help to establish a more precise chronology for the red paintings, our efforts were unsuccessful (Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2020a). Despite the limited impact of the discovery, this fnd reinforced our conviction that the Balkan Peninsula had great potential for establishing the scope and geographic dissemination of UP art. For this reason, a few years later, we enlarged the team and expanded the territory to be surveyed, which then included Croatia (33 sites), Bosnia and Herzegovina (5 sites), Montenegro (5 sites), Bulgaria (1 site), and a number of additional sites in Serbia (18 sites). These sites constituted the core of two consecutive research projects: BALKARTS (funded by the Programme IdEx University of Bordeaux) and PALAEOARTEAST (funded by the British Academy). In this context, we studied the paintings of Romualdova pećina (Istria, Croatia) in 2017. D. Komšo discovered the site during a visit in 2010. While he was the frst to suggest a possible Palaeolithic chronology for the paintings, he was unable to elaborate on its initial assessment. For this reason, we decided to include the site in our project. As a result, we were able to document a minimum of 44 graphic units (that include at least four fgurative depictions) that, based on a number of iconographic and stylistic criteria as well as the examination of the IAC, are from the UP (Ruiz-Redondo et al. 2019). This is the frst site containing UP fgurative art discovered in Southeast Europe and, therefore, this research marked a milestone in the study of European cave art, flling a regional gap in the knowledge and contributing to a better understanding of the connection between UP Eastern and Western European symbolic traditions. The discovery of Romualdova pećina also demonstrated the potential of this area for Paleolithic art studies. As such, our current research continues to focus on this territory, and our future plans include intensifying research at a number of key sites (e.g., Badanj, Romualdova), as well as expanding the survey to nearby countries such as Greece and Bulgaria.

On the other side of Europe, three scholars (P. Bahn, P. Pettitt, and S. Ripoll) undertook a number of surveys in the United Kingdom in 2003, aiming to discover Paleolithic cave art. Fortunately, they started their search at Creswell Crags, where they discovered a series of engravings in the cave of Church Hole (Bahn et al. 2003). The discovery of the engravings of Church Hole represented the frst convincing evidence for the existence of UP rock art in the British Isles. Among the engravings, archaeologists documented several fgurative motifs, particularly animal fgures. The Paleolithic antiquity of the art was initially based on stylistic grounds (Bahn et al. 2003), and was later supported by radiometric dating (Pike et al. 2005). Both methods situated the engravings at the end of the Pleistocene, associated to the regional Late Upper Paleolithic (~15–13 ka cal BP). The discovery of Church Hole's cave art signifcantly expanded the known territory of cave art in Europe, opening the door to further explorations. Unfortunately, no other convincing evidence from the UK has been reported so far.

#### **2.4 Beyond Europe**

The geography of Paleolithic rock art research has expanded beyond Europe in recent decades (Fig. 2.1). Due to its proximity to the European 'cynosure,' it is worthwhile to frst mention the discovery of the Qurta engravings in Egypt. The motifs, distributed among three sites, display a wide variety of animal fgures,

In total there are at least about 160 individual images. The rock art of Qurta consists mainly of naturalistically drawn animal fgures.  In addition, there are also (at least) 7 highly stylised representations of human fgures (shown with pronounced buttocks, but no other bodily features) (Huyge et al. 2007, 1).

Although archaeologists have not established a precise chronology for this rock art, depictions show a number of similarities with the Magdalenian art from Western Europe. Building on this stylistic foundation, the scientifc team linked Qurta's engravings to the Ballanan-Silsilian culture, a Late Paleolithic culture dated to about 15,000 years. While this possibility cannot be ruled out, stronger evidence must be provided to support a Late Pleistocene chronology of these engravings.

On the other side of the world, a number of archaeologists suggested a very old chronology for some Australian picto-

Igniatievskaya, 7) Serpievskaya 2, 8) Qurta, 9) East Kalimantan caves (>4 sites), 10) Leang Timpuseng & Leang Bulu' Sipong 4, 11) Kimberley rock-shelters (>4 sites), and 12) Nawarla Gabarnmang

grams (Chaloupka 1993). For instance, Chippindale and Taçon (1998) developed a number of ingenious indirect dating methods (based on style, superimposition, the introduction/extinction dates of some taxa depicted, and the IAC) to estimate the chronological sequence of Arnhem Land rock art. They set their 'Old Period' at ~50–30 ka cal BP, coinciding with the frst human occupation of the region. The frst direct radiocarbon dates of Australian rock art were published in the 1990s. Two samples taken from a painted motif in the Sydney region yielded two results: ~34 ka cal BP and ~ 7 ka cal BP (McDonald et al. 1990). Considering the signifcant discrepancy of these results and the fact that the samples seem to belong to a single 'drawing event' (McDonald 2000), it is impossible to determine which of the results, if either, are accurate. Indirect dating has been extensively tested in Australian rock art (for a compilation see David et al. 2013a). This has especially focused on the use of both optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of mud-dauber wasp nests overlying or underlying parietal motifs. In Kimberley (northern Australia), some of these nests overlying an anthropomorphic fgure and a hand stencil yielded OSL dates of 16,400 ± 1800 and 17,500 ± 1800 years, which should be considered minimum dates for the paintings (Roberts et al. 1997). A recent investigation surrounding the 'Irregular Infll Animal Period' from Kimberley offered an extensive series of radiocarbon dates on wasp nests related to the rock art (Finch et al. 2021). Based on these results, Finch and his collaborators estimated a timespan for this phase beginning around 17.2 ka cal BP (at minimum) and lasting until at least 15.1 ka cal BP (or possibly as late as 13.1 ka cal BP). In Arnhem Land, a slab with a charcoal painting was found in a stratifed context at Nawarla Gabarnmang. The fragment came from the collapse of the ceiling, which still contains other paintings, and archaeologists have established that the slab was decorated prior to its fall. The rock slab was found lying between two sediment layers dating to ~13 ka and ~ 45 ka cal BP. Moreover, using the radiocarbon method, archaeologists have been able to date the ash that had adhered to the painted stone's posterior to about 28,000 cal BP (David et al. 2013b). Given that the ash remains must have adhered to the slab after its fall, this latter date should be taken as a *terminus ante quem* for the art. The chronological evidence from these sites seems to indicate that Paleolithic art had developed in Australia at least 28,000 years ago, but the origin of image-making is most likely older, especially since this art is connected to the recently discovered Pleistocene cave art on the neighbouring islands of Sulawesi and Borneo.

In 2014, Maxime Aubert and others published a set of U-series dating results of calcium carbonate deposits directly associated with rock art motifs on Sulawesi (Indonesia). A number of them, coming from different archaeological sites in the Maros-Pangkep karsts, are from the late Pleistocene (Aubert et al. 2014). For instance, at Leang Timpuseng, a fgurative depiction of a suid was dated to at least 35.4 ka cal BP; 2). Similarly, at Leang Barugayya 2, a painting of an unidentifed suid-like animal has a minimum age of 35.7 ka cal BP. Finally, twelve hand stencils from various sites also yielded minimum ages of between 39.9 and 17.4 ka cal BP. In 2018, a team led by Aubert published several U-series dating results associated with a number of paintings from different cave sites on Borneo (Aubert et al. 2018b). The paintings are from the Pleistocene, including a hand stencil dating back at least 40,000 years. A year later, the team published the 'Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art' (Aubert et al. 2019), also from a cave site in Sulawesi. This assessment is questionable on several grounds. First, it is purely speculative that the depictions in the purported scene are engaging in any sort of hunting activity. Second, it is far from clear whether the so-called 'therianthropes' are 'anthropomorphic', or even if they are part-human, partanimal representations. Furthermore, even accepting the authors' interpretation regarding these images, the contemporaneity between the 'hunted animal' and the 'hunters' is not conclusive, and only the former has been indirectly dated by U-series. Regardless of whether or not this depiction represents a hunting scene, the dating results for the panel demonstrate beyond doubt the existence of Pleistocene art in Indonesia. Finally, recent indirect dates (U-series on calcium carbonate deposits) were provided for additional cave paintings in Sulawesi, dating some of its art back to possibly ~44 ka cal BP (Brumm et al. 2021).

Despite the many problems and challenges of using U-series analysis for dating rock art (see Plagnes et al. 2003; Aubert et al. 2018a; Pearce and Bonneau 2018; Slimak et al. 2018; White et al. 2020), the results seem reliable considering: (1) The increasing number of coherent UP dates in the area; (2) that several of these results show a coherent stratigraphy within the calcite deposits; and (3) the fact that at least two of the rock art sites have revealed *in situ* archaeological evidence for UP pigment processing (Brumm et al. 2017, 2018) and portable art (Langley et al. 2020). In short, the Indonesian archipelago is now strongly positioned as one of the most relevant emergent areas for Pleistocene rock art research.

#### **2.5 Conclusion: Global Research for a Global Phenomenon?**

Globalization is having an impact on our research and knowledge of Paleolithic art. In the past three decades, we have witnessed an expansion of the geographical scope of this phenomenon – an expansion that, as it has happened with the process of globalization that started in the 1950s (Mazlish 2011), has signifcantly increased during the twenty-frst century. In the case of Pleistocene art, international collaborations and a more effcient dissemination of scientifc knowledge has greatly contributed to this shift. This is not something necessarily new. For instance, as we have seen in this paper, the authentication of Kapova's paintings was possible because the work of early French prehistorians was translated into Russian at the time. This allowed Bader to exchange his impressions with other specialists from around the globe at the IV UISPP conference held in Moscow in 1962. Some decades later, the twenty-frst century has witnessed a proliferation of Pleistocene rock art discoveries in places other than the Franco-Cantabrian area. For instance, we have now confrmed the existence of UP cave art across Europe from England to the southern Urals. Moreover, Australia and Indonesia have emerged as new centres for research in Pleistocene symbolism. As a result of these developments, the 'oldest' art of humankind can be currently found in several parts of the globe.

The question is whether we can still speak of 'Paleolithic art' as a single unitarian phenomenon. We need to take into consideration a number of issues. To begin, the geographical distance between the discoveries in Asia/Oceania and the traditional European sites is evident. However, the presence of patterns and themes common to both territories (style of zoomorphic fgures, hand stencils, pictorial techniques) somewhat link these distant regions. In the current state of the art, our knowledge is still too fragmentary to assess whether Pleistocene art(s) had multiple independent origins or emerged from a common source, either in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Oceania, or any other area (Levant?). Nevertheless, the fact that we are discussing this issue represents a signifcant step forward with respect to what happened only ten years ago, when most scholars simply took for granted that rock art had originated in Western Europe.

But are all these new territories ready to reach their full potential for developing rock art research? Australia, due to its long research tradition as well as the numerous resources that this country dedicates to the study of rock art, is certainly ready to face the new challenges of Pleistocene rock art. For instance, research teams from this country are leading different projects in other areas, such as Indonesia. However, in Eastern Europe, the number of sites, projects and specialists is still clearly insuffcient, and many rock art researchers working in the area come from other countries and places. In recent years, some of us have tried to establish a solid network of collaboration, but the fact remains that, in Eastern Europe, rock art research is still far (quantitatively speaking) from the investigations into UP art in Western Europe. An example can illustrate this point. While we undertook the BALKARTS project (a single team with nine project members for an archaeological survey in four countries), about 50 projects on UP rock art were undertaken in Western each year. Considering that Franco-Cantabrian art was discovered about 140 years ago and has a wide array of dedicated resources in comparison with other areas, we can only expect that the difference between the amount of information/data originated in Western Europe and other areas will increase in future years. Additionally, while it is true that the global picture has changed, the fact remains that most countries have not yet yielded any evidence concerning UP art and there are very few teams working in these countries. Hence, although the discovery of Pleistocene rock art in several countries represents a step forward for the body of knowledge surrounding this phenomenon, there are still signifcant differences between countries and regions. In this setting, we can conclude that if Palaeolithic rock art has become a global phenomenon, its investigation is still far from achieving the same reach.

**Acknowledgements** I am grateful to Oscar Moro Abadía, Margaret W. Conkey, and Jo McDonald for their invitation to participate in this volume. The BALKARTS project was funded by the French State within the framework of the 'Investments for the future' Programme IdEx University of Bordeaux (ANR-10-IDEX-03-02), and the PALAEOARTEAST project received its principal fnancial support from the British Academy, through a Newton International Fellowship (NIF\ R1\180205). I heartily thank all the collaborating specialists and the student participants for their dedication to these risky, but – I believe – rewarding projects. Many thanks to Amy Chase, Bryn Tapper, and the editors for correcting the English of the text. Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have notably improved this paper. All errors or oversights are mine alone. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Eduardo Palacio-Pérez for generously sharing his vast knowledge about Paleolithic art research and literature, helping me to explore the origins of the 'Franco-Cantabrian bias.'

#### **References**

Lamb, and Ray Whear. 2013b. A 28,000 Year Old Excavated Painted Rock from Nawarla Gabarnmang, Northern Australia. *Journal of Archaeological Science* 40 (5): 2493–2501. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.08.015.

tion curve (0–55 Cal KBP). *Radiocarbon* 62 (4): 725–757. https:// doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2020.41.

**Aitor Ruiz-Redondo** is a senior lecturer in Prehistory at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and vice-president of the UISPP 'Prehistoric Art' world commission. He obtained his PhD in Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Cantabria (Spain) with a thesis about Palaeolithic graphic behaviour in South-western Europe. He later undertook postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Bordeaux (France), Southampton (UK), and Zaragoza (Spain), where his research has mainly been dedicated to the study of Upper Palaeolithic societies of Eastern Europe. He has led international research projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Spain, and the UAE, and he has been team member of others in Bulgaria, Lebanon, and Russia. His team has made several contributions to the feld of Palaeolithic rock art, including the study and dating of the oldest fgurative cave paintings in Europe and the discovery of frst Pleistocene cave art in South-eastern Europe. He is author of numerous papers about the subject, and his research has appeared in several high-ranked scientifc journals *such as Journal of Human Evolution, Quaternary Science Reviews, Antiquity, Journal of World Prehistory, Journal of Archaeological Science, and Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.*

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### **3 Some Implications of Pleistocene Figurative Rock Art in Indonesia and Australia**

Adam Brumm, Adhi Agus Oktaviana, and Maxime Aubert

#### **Abstract**

Until recent years, most western scholars had overlooked the existence of rock art in Indonesia or viewed it as being of limited antiquity and of largely regional-interest only. In 2014, however, an Indonesian-Australian team announced the results of a program of Uranium-series (U-series) dating of rock art in Maros-Pangkep, Sulawesi, including a surprisingly early antiquity of at least 39.9 ka for a hand stencil and 35.4 ka for a fgurative animal painting. U-series dating more recently has yielded minimum ages for fgurative animal painting of 40 ka in Kalimantan and 45.5 ka in Maros-Pangkep, with the latter presently constituting the world's oldest dated example of representational art. Indonesia's previously little-known rock art has been propelled to the global stage. Here, we examine how scholars are grappling with the implications of 'ice age art' in Indonesia and its integration, for the frst time, into models of early human artistic culture in other parts of the world. In particular, we discuss the seemingly close stylistic parallels between Late Pleistocene fgura-

A. Brumm (\*)

Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffth University, Nathan, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. A. Oktaviana BRIN Arkeologi, Bahasa dan Sastra, Pusat Riset Arkeometri, Jakarta, Indonesia

Griffth Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffth University, Gold Coast, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Aubert Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffth University, Nathan, Australia

Griffth Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffth University, Gold Coast, Australia

Archaeology, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
tive animal art in Indonesia and early representational depictions of animals in the Arnhem Land and Kimberley regions of northern Australia. We consider scenarios that could explain these similarities, including the idea that a single fgurative rock art style spread into Australia from Wallacea during the early movements of our species in the region.

#### **Keywords**

Sulawesi · Indonesia · Rock art · Late Pleistocene · Figurative art · Animal painting · Wallacea

#### **3.1 Introduction**

The presence of rock art in Indonesia was frst reported by a western observer in 1678 (Tan 2014), long before the celebrated discovery of the animal images at Altamira in 1878 that would culminate in the scientifc recognition of the existence of Palaeolithic rock art (Bahn and Vertut 1997). Despite this long pedigree, until recently relatively little systematic feld research had been undertaken by western researchers into the nature and distribution of rock art in Indonesia and wider Southeast Asia, collectively described just a decade ago as 'one of the least understood regions of the world in terms of its rock art heritage' (Taçon and Tan 2012, 207). Most work in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries (e.g., Thailand) had been done by local scholars and was published in domestic, non-English language journals that are not easily accessible to western scholars (Tan 2014). It is therefore not surprising that, until recently, most global rock art syntheses published by western scholars have failed to include more than a feeting reference to the rock art of Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

In 2014, however, a team of Indonesian-Australian scientists reported Late Pleistocene ages for rock art in limestone caves and shelters in the tower karst region of Maros-

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2024 31 O. Moro Abadía et al. (eds.), *Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization*, Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54638-9\_3

Pangkep, South Sulawesi (Fig. 3.1). Using Uranium-series disequilibrium (U-series) analysis of associated calcite deposits (coralloid speleothems — 'cave popcorn'), Aubert et al. (2014) inferred a minimum age of 39.9 ka for a hand stencil in the limestone cave of Leang Timpuseng. These researchers also showed that a fgurative painting of a pig on the same panel was created at least 35.4 ka. This 2014 paper was followed by another U-series rock art dating study focused on the limestone karst area of Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat in East Kalimantan, Borneo (Fig. 3.1). Here, Aubert et al. (2018) obtained a minimum age of 40 ka for a fgurative painting of an indeterminate animal. These studies were followed by two U-series rock art dating papers reporting: (1) a large naturalistic painting of a suid at Leang Tedongnge (Maros-Pangkep) with a minimum age of 45.5 ka (Brumm et al. 2021a); and (2) a multifgured hunting scene created at least 43.9 ka at Leang Bulu' Sipong 4 in the same karst area (Aubert et al. 2019).

These U-series dating breakthroughs in Sulawesi and Kalimantan have considerably raised the international profle of rock art in Southeast Asia. Subsequently, the rock art of Indonesia is, for the frst time, undergoing a process of academic 'globalization' in the sense that authorities are beginning to consider the role that this formerly poorly understood corpus of parietal imagery may have had in the development of ancient artistic cultures in other parts of the world. For example, some scholars have posited that the Pleistocene rock art of Indonesia is strikingly similar to that of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. According to Derek Hodgson, 'the [fgurative animal] depictions of the Sulawasi[sic] artists display a number of similarities with those from Europe [and] the observable differences seem marginal' (Hodgson and Watson 2015, 784). This same neuroscientist and rock art authority has also argued that the Pleistocene animal art of Sulawesi and Europe is markedly similar in that it is characterised

**Fig. 3.1** Map of Island Southeast Asia and northern Australia. Dated Late Pleistocene rock art is reported from the limestone karst regions of Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat in northeastern Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) — at the very eastern extent of the Sunda landmass — and the Maros-Pangkep district in the south of Sulawesi — the largest island in Wallacea, the biogeographically-distinct zone of oceanic islands situated between Sunda and Sahul. Similar rock art has also been found in

the Bone karsts to the east of Maros-Pangkep, as well as in the northern Australian rock art provinces of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. It has been proposed that modern human seafarers followed the so-called 'northern route' (indicated by grey dotted lines) from Borneo to West Papua during the initial colonisation of Sahul. Base map prepared by M. Kottermair and A. Jalandoni