rock art studies in northernmost europe, 2000 - Joakim Goldhahn

he argues that the panels should be understood as a microlandscape
where different mythological (and/or maybe
historical?) events were depicted. The specific panels were
then chosen for a specific purpose, to re-tell and re-create
different mythological stories and events (Helskog 2004;
Helskog and Høgtun 2004). By adopting a traditional
documentation which presents the altered surface as black
areas against a white and supposed objective background
(art/canvas?), the intricate and deliberate dialogue between
the texture of the panel and the altered surfaces will be
forever lost (Fig. 2.6). The outcome of this process is that
the presented interpretation loses part of its credibility, not
least since the texture of the panel is excluded: different
cracks (read creeks, streams, rivers, fjords and ravines),
hollows (dales, gorges and valleys), ponds of water
(swamps, lagoons, lakes and seas), smoother surfaces
(meadows, paddocks, pastures, and plains) and different
knolls and other raised areas on the panels (hills, summits
and mountains), etc. (cf. Figs 2.6 and 2.7).
Similarly, this author has argued that we ought to give
up the fruitless utopia of finding any “secure and objective”
ways to present the past in general, and any rock art
2. Rock Art Studies in Northernmost Europe, 2000–2004 27
Fig. 2.7. Bergbukten VIIA in Alta (after Helskog and Høgtun 2004).
documentation in particular. Instead we ought to try to
present “subjective interpretive documents” that allow our
colleagues to see how and why we reached our conclusions
and interpretations (Goldhahn 2005b). Documentation
cannot be separated from interpretation; it is a dialectic
and hermeneutic process, and it is time to make this more
explicit in our praxis.
The history of rock art research
From the discussion above it is clear that the history of rock
art research is a vital and active part of our understanding
of the phenomenon we wish to explore (e.g. Baudou 2004),
but there are very few studies indeed that try to explore this
truism in a more explicit way (Goldhahn 2005e). Earlier
interpretations are of course integrated in different research
histories, and sometimes they can be thoroughly conducted
and guide the reader to a more systematic understanding of
the rock art areas and traditions that are discussed (Mandt
1991; Wahlgren 2000, 2002; Sognnes 2001a; Bengtsson
2004a; Kaul 2004a; Lindgren 2004; Nordenborg Myhre
2004). But it is a silent fact that we still lack any more