Visual Culture, Heritage and Identity: Using Rock Art to Reconnect Past and Present

Andrzej Rozwadowski · Jamie Hampson

Jun 2021 · Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

About this eBook

Visual Culture, Heritage and Identity: Using Rock Art to Reconnect Past and Present sets out a fresh perspective on rock art by considering how ancient images function in the present. In recent decades, archaeological approaches to rock paintings and engravings have significantly advanced our understanding of rock art in regional and global terms. On the other hand, however, little research has been done on contemporary uses of rock art. How does ancient rock art heritage influence contemporary cultural phenomena? And how do past images function in the present, especially in contemporary art and other media? In the past, archaeologists usually concentrated more on reconstructing the semantic and social contexts of the ancient images. This volume, on the other hand, focuses on how this ancient heritage is recognised and reified in the modern world, and how this art stimulates contemporary processes of cultural identity-making. The authors, who are based all over the world, off er attractive and compelling case studies situated in diverse cultural and geographical contexts.

About the author

Andrzej Rozwadowski is Associate Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where he also completed his PhD. He is also an honorary Research Fellow of the Rock Art Research Institute of Wits in Johannesburg and has been involved in rock art research since the 1990s. ;

Jamie Hampson is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Department at the University of Exeter. He has a PhD and MPhil in archaeology from the University of Cambridge. He has written more than forty articles on Indigenous rock art and heritage.