This is the fifth volume in the series Rock Art Studies: News of the World. Like the previous editions, it covers rock art research and management across the globe over a five-year period, in this case the years 2010 to 2014 inclusive.

Like previous series entries, this volume covers rock art research and management all over the world over a 5-year period, in this case 2015-19. Contributions once again show the wide variety of approaches that have been taken in different parts of the world and reflect the expansion and diversification of perspectives and research questions.

This is the third in the five-yearly series of surveys of what is happening in rock art studies around the world. As always, the texts reflect something of the great differences in approach and emphasis that exist in different regions. The volume presents examples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World. During the period in question, 1999 to 2004, there have been few major events, although in the field of Pleistocene art many new discoveries have been made, and a new country added to the select list of those with Ice Age cave art. Some regions such as North Africa and the former USSR have seen a tremendous amount of activity, focusing not only on recording but also on chronology, and the conservation of sites. With the global increase of tourism, the management of rock art sites that are accessible to the public is a theme of ever-growing importance.

Rock art is one of the most visible and geographically widespread of cultural expressions, and it spans much of the period of our species' existence. Rock art also provides rare and often unique insights into the minds and visually creative capacities of our ancestors and how selected rock outcrops with distinctive images were used to construct symbolic landscapes and shape worldviews. Equally important, rock art is often central to the expression of and engagement with spiritual entities and forces, and in all these dimensions it signals the diversity of cultural practices, across place and through time. Over the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied ancient arts on rock surfaces, both out in the open and within caves and rock shelters, and social anthropologists have revealed how people today use art in their daily lives. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art showcases examples of such research from around the world and across a broad range of cultural contexts, giving a sense of the art's regional variability, its antiquity, and how it is meaningful to people in the recent past and today - including how we have ourselves tended to make sense of the art of others, replete with our own preconceptions. It reviews past, present, and emerging theoretical approaches to rock art investigation and presents new, cutting-edge methods of rock art analysis for the student and professional researcher alike.

An Engraved Landscape is a contextual analysis of a substantial new corpus of engravings from the Wadi al-Ajal, situated in the Central Saharan region of south west Libya. The wadi is renowned as the heartland of the Garamantian civilization, which emerged from local mobile Pastoral communities in the 1st millennium BC, and dominated trans-Saharan trade and politics for over a thousand years. Extensive archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations in recent years have provided detailed insight into the later prehistory and protohistory of the wadi and surrounding areas. However, prior to the fieldwork detailed in this work, only a handful of carvings had been recorded in the wadi. This work is based on systematic survey, conducted between 2004 and 2009, which recorded around 2,500 previously unknown or unpublished engraved and inscribed rock surfaces. All forms of engraving, whether figurative or surface markings, were viewed as significant residues of human interaction with the rock surface and were recorded. The resulting database provides an opportunity to analyze the engravings in relation to their changing physical and cultural contexts, and the discussion offers a fresh interpretation of Saharan rock art based on this substantial new evidence. An Engraved Landscape also captures in detail a unique heritage resource that is currently inaccessible and threatened. This record of the fragile engravings provides an important source of information for researchers and students.

A consideration of the rock art of the Mälaren bay region exploring the potential efficacy of petroglyphs as physical devices through organization, design, and articulation. The Bronze Age (1700–500 BCE) petroglyphs of southern Scandinavia comprise a unique tradition of rock art in northern Eurasia. Despite a limited repertoire of motifs such as cupmarks, boats, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, podomorphs and circles, it shows great variability in design, elaboration and articulation. This book is a study of the Mälaren region in southern-central Sweden that includes one of the most prominent rock art clusters of southwest Uppland as well as the hinterland of Södermanland county. The rock art in this region is studied on three scales: regional, local and particular. This allows for comparisons between dense and small sites, an exploration of how the Bronze Age rock art tradition developed over time in the area, and equally how the design and articulation of certain motifs relate to contemporary settlements, waterways and varying environmental settings. Patterns and structures in the distribution and articulation of the petroglyphs show that the different motifs are not only visual expressions but very much material enactments. The motifs often physically relate to each other, the flows of water, and the microtopography and mineral contents of the rocks. The study is therefore not as much about rock art as images and symbols as it is about the ecology of rock art – the web of social and physical relations in which it was enacted and employed. From this perspective, the petroglyphs are seen as petrofacts, that is something akin to tools or devices articulated in various ways to affect humans, other-than-humans and the animacies of the coastal milieus where they were made.

Devoted to providing a wide-ranging survey of new developments in rock art studies from all over the world.

Derived from a session at the European Association of Archaeologists 4th annual meeting at Gothenburg in 1998. These eight papers address the various and varied theoretical perspectives on social representation in rock art. Existing theories are challenged and new ideas presented in this study of contemporary rock art research.