Advances in Rock Art Studies

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of the journal Arts titled Advances in Rock Art Studies. The rationale for the edition is as follows:

Rock art studies in most parts of the world were limited to descriptive, typological or crude analogical approaches until the 1980s. An ‘ethnographic turn’ at that point resulted in detailed analyses of directly-relevant anthropological records, especially for hunter-gatherer rock art. These allowed for the rejection of certain widespread interpretations (e.g., that all images of animals resulted from an undescribed form of ‘hunting magic’), and greatly refined other simplistic theories. One of these was the general category of putatively shamanistic rock art, long considered a one-size-fits-all, global model that explained everything, and therefore nothing. Ethnographic analyses instead demonstrated that shamanistic rock art exhibited a wide variety of local forms, with the resulting art made by a range of social groups, in different types of rituals, for a variety of functions and purposes, and with variable relationships to myth and ritual. Parallel studies of the neuropsychological effects of visionary experiences provided an independent analytical method and body of evidence to bolster these interpretations. One important outcome of this work was a demonstration of the ability to rigorously reconstruct symbolic meaning from the archaeological record.

The ethnographic turn had a clear, and very significant, global intellectual impact: it moved rock art studies from a marginal, fringe archaeological sub-discipline to a serious topic of study, worthy of theoretically informed debate and discussion. Research on rock art has grown dramatically since that date: the first organized rock art symposium at the Society for American Archaeology meetings, e.g., was held in 1987; five such sessions were offered in 2023. This sub-disciplinary growth and proliferation of research has resulted in a wide-range of new analytical, interpretive and theoretical approaches, far beyond shamanistic studies alone, which have contributed to a much more sophisticated level understanding of this global phenomenon in all its forms and variety. It is the intent of this Special Issue to capture the diversity of current rock art research, further emphasizing its central importance to archaeological research more widely. 

Dr. David Whitley
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• rock art
• analytical and interpretive approaches
• archaeological theory