Rock Art and Sacred Spaces: Recent Approaches to the Study of Ritual Landscapes

Landscape features can have varying degrees of sacredness. Both prehistoric and historic peoples lived, as many nonwestern still do today, within ritual landscapes in which natural features such as caves, springs, and isolated cliffs often represented sacred places imbued with spiritual power. Sacredness also resided in the built environment with rock art sites and burial places created by earlier peoples incorporated within the cosmologies of later peoples. Networks of natural and constructed places gave human lives meaning by linking them to present and past activities across the landscape. These two aspects were not separate but intertwined with rock art sites, for example, serving as tangible links to the world of the ancestors to later peoples. The researchers in this symposia use in depth regional studies as well as innovative methodologies such as GIS and LIDAR to examine the relationship of rock art to other natural and constructed sacred landforms within a global landscape perspective.