World Rock Art

Dear Colleagues,

The corpus of hundreds of millions of rock art motifs surviving in the world today represents the principal source of information chronicling the cognitive evolution of humanity. It records the world views, concerns, beliefs and communication systems of mostly pre-literate peoples, from the Middle Pleistocene up to the most recent past. It is the largest body available for study that documents the development of the hominin ability of storing memory traces or cultural information external to the brain, as exograms, which is the primary difference between humans and other animals. It precedes systems of writing by up to hundreds of millennia, and it is the main repository of cultural information about nearly all of human history. It amounts to humanity’s longest record of cultural rather than technological evidence. In recent years the study of this immense resource has become an increasingly sophisticated scientific field, supplanting traditional approaches of simplistic interpretation and ethnocentric construal. This Special Issue of Arts is dedicated to assembling a collection of scholarly articles that will serve as a benchmark for current research and priorities in rock art research. Contributions are invited on any topic demonstrating the present knowledge state of the discipline, from any continent and from the perspective of any related field. In particular this collection is hoped to illustrate the great diversity of world rock art, which reflects the cultural diversity of humanity, and from which ultimately all recent arts derive.

Prof. Robert G. Bednarik
Collection 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 collection 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) has been waived for publication in this Collection. 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.