Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization: Rock Art in the 21st Century (Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology)

This open access volume explores the impact of globalization on the contemporary study of deep-time art. The volume explores how early rock art research’s Eurocentric biases have shifted with broadened global horizons to facilitate new conversations and discourses in new post-colonial realities.  The book uses seven main themes to explore theoretical, methodological, ethical, and practical developments that are orienting the study of Pleistocene and Holocene arts in the age of globalization. Compiling studies as diverse as genetics, visualization, with the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated archaeological techniques, means that vast quantities of materials and techniques are now incorporated into the analysis of the world’s visual cultures. 

Deep-Time Images in the Age of Globalization aims to promote critical reflection on the multitude of positive – and negative – impacts that globalization has wrought in rock art research. The volume brings new theoretical frameworks as well as engagement with indigenous knowledge and perspectives from art history. It highlights technical, methodological and interpretive developments, and showcases rock art characteristics from previously unknown (in the global north) geographic areas. This book provides comparative approaches on rock art globally and scrutinises the impacts of globalization on research, preservation, and management of deep-time art. This book will appeal to archaeologists, social scientists and art historians working in the field as well as lovers of rock art. 

Oscar Moro Abadía is a Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). He specializes in the study of Pleistocene art. 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.