INTRODUCTION

In recent years it has been argued that the term ‘rock art’ is rather misleading since it concentrates more on the visual images than on the rock itself (Bradley and colleagues 2002: 109). It is clear that the importance of the rock as a significant factor in the creation of images has been ignored far too often. The plausibility of the suggestion that the rock attracted prehistoric people's attention and possessed natural features that could be incorporated into the images has thus been neglected. As a response to this, a refreshing approach to rock art studies has evolved with a more in-depth theorisation of images’ relation to the natural surroundings. This has not only included the rock art's location in the landscape, and its present natural setting, but in particular how natural features in or associated with rock surfaces were incorporated into prehistoric peoples’ cosmology, religion and beliefs and seem to have formed a background for the shaping and making of images. This has also been reflected in recent documentation procedures.

At many sites it is obvious that the character of the rock surface, with its many veins, cracks and other features, was perceived in a manner that inspired the artists to make certain images. The examples presented have been numerous and the approaches and explanations have taken on several related aspects (Chippindale & Nash 2004). Amongst other things, it has been argued that rock art has been engraved, pecked or painted as if the surface was a representation – a microscape – or a metaphor for the more natural or cultural landscape in which people were living (ibid., and examples in Savvatev 1983). Surfaces have also been understood as being both in the world and in the underworld (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1990). From this perspective, images have been perceived as semi-present, or latent, in the surfaces of rock panels and only fully exposed by additional engraved, pecked or painted lines. Supported by informed methods on rock art and ethnographic examples referring to a cosmos that is divided into at least three levels, an upper, middle and lower sphere (Helskog 1999; Jordan 2003), surfaces of rock have been argued to represent what can be understood as a membrane that separates the ‘real’ world from an inner world (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1990).