re-enchanting rock art landscapes: animic ontologies, non-human agency and rhizomic personhood....

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E-Print text.indd 1E-Print text.indd 1 22/01/2008 18:13:5422/01/2008 18:13:54

Time and Mind Volume 2—Issue 1—March 2009, pp. 47–70

Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture

Volume 2—Issue 1March 2009pp. 47–70DOI 10.2752/175169709X374272

Reprints available directly from the publishers

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© Berg 2009

Re-enchanting Rock Art Landscapes: Animic Ontologies, Nonhuman Agency and Rhizomic PersonhoodRobert J. Wallis

Dr Robert J. Wallis is Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Director of the MA in Art History at Richmond University, London, and a Research Fellow in Archaeology at the University of Southampton. His recent books include Shamans/neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies, and Contemporary Pagans (Routledge 2003), Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights: Pagan Engagements with Archaeological Monuments (Sussex Academic Press 2007, with Jenny Blain), and Historical Dictionary of Shamanism (Scarecrow Press 2007, with Graham Harvey). He is currently coediting the volume Antiquarians and Archaists and working on a monograph examining the discursive interface between art and shamanism. [email protected]

AbstractRecent theorizing of animism as a relational epistemology evinces how many indigenous communities perceive landscapes as alive with “people,” only some of whom are human, and that these agents are perceived to exist prior to human engagement. Shrines, temples, groves, and other “sacred” sites in the landscape, including some rock-art sites, may not mark places of cultural inscription per se (culture is of course instantiated at such sites, but not necessarily a priori), but pre-given places perceived as inhabited with other-than-human agencies (e.g. helpers, deities, ancestors), and where relationships between humans and nonhumans are negotiated. Engagements with rocks, rock art and the wider landscape (filled with nonhumans) may involve other-than-human people dialoguing with humans, rather than a straightforward (one-way) inscription of meaning in which rock art is a

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48 Re-enchanting Rock Art Landscapes Robert J. Wallis


passive “cultural marker” and landscape an inert tabula rasa. Thinking through “animic” ontologies facilitates an approach to rock-art landscapes which disrupts the perceived ascendancy of human personhood, including that of “the artist,” and considers sensitively the agency of rock art, other-than-human people (and humans), and landscape in rhizomic networks of relationality—the efficacy of which is explored with examples from later prehistoric Britain.

Keywords: Rock art, landscape, relationality, animic ontologies, rhizomic personhood

IntroductionThe exploration of rock art and landscape has crystallized over the last twenty years and offered important interpretative insights, moving “beyond the rock face” (e.g. Deacon 1988; Cooney 1990; Wallis 1995; Bradley 1997; Nash 2000; Nash and Chippindale 2002; Chippindale and Nash 2004; Mazel et al. 2007). Particular attention has been paid to the points at which the art is situated in the landscape, and rock-art sites in relation to other locales, taking account of intervisibility and the relationship between rock-art positions, local terrain, natural features and archaeological monuments (e.g. Van Hoek 1997; Helskog 1999; Beckensall 1999, 2002; Wallis 2002; Sharpe 2007; Bradley and Phillips 2008). This work has pushed interpretative analysis in much-needed new directions, but “landscape” (as with “art” and other Western categories) is not an “unproblematic given” (Smith and Blundell 2004: 259; see also Johnson 2007). A persistent trend in approaches to rock-art

landscapes, and in landscape archaeology writ large, is the interpretation of “landscape” as a “natural” tabula rasa which is passive and inert prior to human intervention. Landscape or “space” is held to become meaningful as active “place” only as a result of the inscription of human culture. Archaeologists deal primarily with inactive, inanimate, “dead” material culture (stones, bones, ceramics, and so on), from a closed, distant past, and the active deployment of this passive materiality by humans (employing a “higher consciousness” held to be idiosyncratic to the human “mind”), so drawing a distinction between nature (landscape) and culture (rock art), might seem straightforward.

Certain indigenous epistemological judgments present altogether different understandings of landscape and what it is to have (human and other) personhood, a body and agency, and these contrast radically with those of modern archaeologists whose consistently rationalist, humanist, and materialist approaches owe much to the idiosyncrasies of eighteenth-century enlightenment thought (cf. Yates 1993; Thomas 2002). “Animic”1 ontologies conceive of certain material (culture or otherwise) as “alive” or more accurately with agency and personhood, a priori (to human cultural activation), and offer an effective disruption to the modern Western distinction between animate/inanimate, subject/object, what or who has agency, and conception of landscapes as straightforwardly encultured through rock art (and other human agency). In this paper I propose a reframing of the interpretation of certain rock-art landscapes, citing examples from later prehistoric Britain in passing, in order to think through the recent theorizing of

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Robert J. Wallis Re-enchanting Rock Art Landscapes 49


animic ontologies in anthropology and the study of religion, to offer an approach to rock art and landscape more generally (with implications for materiality, personhood, and agency), as constituted in rhizomic networks of relationality.

Broadening the Frame: from Rock Face to LandscapeThe situating of archaeological data in landscape context is a well-established field (e.g. Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Bowden 1999; Ucko and Layton 1999; Johnson 2007; Thomas and David 2008) to which scholars of rock art have contributed (e.g. Deacon 1988; Bradley et al 1994; Waddington 1998; Van Hoek 2001; Nash and Chippindale 2002; Chippindale and Nash 2004). While this research has been creative and important in broadening the frame of interpretation from rock face to landscape, much of this research focuses on human agency and holds to an implicit culture/nature dichotomy. A rock-art site, it is commonly suggested, “establishes a place from space … A place requires that basic human response—experience” (Nash and Chippindale 2002: 2), and rock art indicates that a “space” in the landscape becomes “place” (Sharpe 2007: 158). For “space” to be significant, to become “place,” it must become cultural in some way; place is to space as culture is to nature and this dichotomy is enduring to the extent that it might be assumed to be straightforward—it is, nevertheless, discursively constructed. I agree with Nash and Chippindale (2002: 4) that “landscape forms only part of a passive discussion” in much rock-art scholarship, yet proposing that “[w]hat has been ignored is the human interaction with the monument” (Nash and Chippindale 2002: 5) is to

consider only one element of a much bigger picture, arguably involving a diversity of agents including nonhumans. Their position, reflected in the title to the paper, “Images of enculturing landscapes,” does not move beyond the active rock art (culture)/passive landscape (nature) dichotomy.

When this position is challenged, human culture is presumed implicitly to be the preeminent agent: Diaz-Andreu (2002)2 considers the sacredness of landscape prior to the production of rock art, and problematizes the sacred-secular divide, but the nature of agency here is once again one-dimensional, with active human agents affecting a neutral, inanimate landscape (see also papers in Nash 2000); the title of the paper—“Marking the Landscape,” reinforces this human-oriented equation (and the notion of rock art as “signing the land” [Bradley 1997; also Beckensall 1999: 7] is similarly problematic). The examination of points at which art is situated in the landscape have been crucial to interpretation (e.g. Deacon 1988; Cooney 1990; Bradley et al. 1994; Bradley 1997) and the idea of intervisibility or “view-sheds” (Sharpe 2007: 161) between rock-art locales and possible juxtaposition of rock-art sites with paths through the landscape (e.g. Bradley 1997: 214; 1999) has also gained currency, conceiving of humans as moving through the landscape, past significant panels of rock art, making connections between them through vision and memory—the impression is, again, of active cultural elements (humans, paths, rock art), particularly conceived through vision (see Thomas 1993; also Smith and Blundell 2004), affecting passive natural elements (the landscape, the rock “canvas”).

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Important work in anthropology, geography, and archaeology has problematized our Western conception of landscape (e.g. Basso 1984, 1996; Ingold 1992, 1993, 2000; Cruikshank 2005), including the problem of inscription, with rock-art studies (e.g. Bradley 1991; papers in Chippindale and Nash 2004), moderating a “functionalist bias” (Bradley et al 1994: 387) and a dualistic, Cartesian, rational materialist and humanist prerogative (Tilley 1999). A semiotic interpretation of rock-art landscapes is well established, particularly in the work of Tilley (e.g. 1991, 1994, 2004a).3 Approaching rock art as a visual text or language,4 whether “socio-cultural” or “ritual-symbolic” (Nash 2002: 187), or otherwise, as a “cultural map” (Nash 2002: 189), read within a narrative of landscape, nonetheless objectifies rock art as enculturing the landscape and attempts to contain fluid meaning and non-Western aesthetic codes within a structured grammar conceived of by modern archaeologists. Moving on from this approach, Helskog (2004) discusses rock art at Alta (Arctic Norway) as embedded in a landscape which was considered alive with “spirits,” but I am uncomfortable with the use of this term which must stand in dualistic relation to “matter,” a modern distinction. This approach, alongside other literature (e.g. Arsenault 2004a, 2004b; Robinson 2004) including that on shamanism and rock art (e.g. Whitley 1992; Ouzman 1998; Demattè 2004) elsewhere, while engaging sensitively with native ontologies, tends to characterize humans as agents, landscape as a resource, and rock art as an enculturing device, with “spirits” in the landscape rather than dialogue with nonhumans marking a human imposition. I am more interested in theorizing

animacy, and in Taçon and Ouzman’s notion of the rock itself as not “a neutral support for imagery” but “an active, a living and sometimes a dangerous entity” (Taçon and Ouzman 2004: 39), with rock art not a two-dimensional object or representation but “a thing in itself ” (ibid.: 51).

My argument is that to assume natural landscapes become active and meaningful only through such human engagement as rock art is inadequate. The imposition that “Landscape is characterised by a duality between nature and culture” (Sognnes 2002: 196), and “landscape can be considered a cultural process” (ibid.) is problematic. Similarly, the ideas that to “become a sacred landscape, a selected locale must be transformed by a cultural group” and that rock art can “reveal how humans experience a natural landscape which thus becomes a cultural landscape” (Arsenault 2004a: 73), can and should be disrupted. In his work on the Bronze Age landscape of Leskernick (Bodmin Moor, Cornwall), Tilley addresses the problem of a dualistic, Cartesian view of landscape, advancing instead an embodied approach, arguing that “[w]e do not live in an environment. Such a position immediately posits our separation. Rather we have an environment and we are a part of it and it is a part of us … We are … immersed” (Tilley 1999: 322; see also Ingold 2000). The embodied ontological path steered here (see also Tilley 2004b) is fascinating, but such a normative phenomenological approach is constituted within a Western frame, has been argued to risk “uncritical immersion” (Smith and Blundell 2004: 249) of the a priori (humanist) embodied human subject, and remains inscriptive.

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One useful way to proceed is to consider a more complex understanding of the social, embedded in landscape. Jones (2007a, 2007c) revises a Cartesian and Lockean “computational model of the human mind” (Jones 2007c: 7) to consider mind, body and world as “fields of interaction” (Jones 2007c: 10, drawing on Ingold’s [1993] concept of the “taskscape”), modifying the notion of inscription as inscriptive practice. He conceives of rock art as reinforcing generative connections or entanglement between place and memory through processes of indexation, citation and “nesting,” with rock art “creating place but also … creating cohesive relationships between different kinds of places in landscapes” (Jones 2007c: 4). In this process of “presencing” (Jones 2007c: 222), the social dynamic or “relational field” (Jones 2007c: 194) proposed between rock art, place, and human remembrance is compelling, but I am uncomfortable with the ideas of presencing, indexation, citation, and so on remaining the inscription of human practice alone. Jones’s primary interest is in the way “things [such as rock art] may constitute one means by which social relations between people are conducted” (Jones 2001: 218), sidestepping the “ontological distinction between people and things” (ibid.). But addressing seriously the animic intentionality of “things” raises the question of how agency and relationality are constituted, and where the boundaries of “the social” lie.

Animism presents an unsettling challenge in some quarters. For Tilley, “things may be said to be persons not in the ridiculous sense that a pot or a tree may be said to have a mind or intention like a person but because they affect us … Things are sensible

while not being sentient” (Tilley 1999: 324 and 319; Tilley 2004b). This reluctance to step beyond a rational materialist standpoint positions indigenous animic ontologies as incorrect; material objects are dynamic (“participate”) only insofar as they “affect us,” thus making animism a projection and so safe for Western thought. Recent theorizing in anthropology and the study of religion, by contrast, disrupts the simplistic view of animism as projected anthropomorphism and the perceived ascendancy of human personhood, with value for approaching rock art and landscape as actively constituted as nonhuman relational agents.

An Expanded Frame: from Mistaken Beliefs to Relational PersonhoodIn anthropology’s formative years, Edward Tylor proposed that indigenous people were mistaken for believing that inanimate objects were enlivened by “spirits” and he argued that this “animism” marks the origin of religion. Such a view is a misreading of indigenous cognition, however, representative of a dominant, positivist discourse. Povinelli (1995), drawing on Baudrillard, notes indeed that “subaltern perspectives on . . . the nature of human-environment interactions are subordinate to the dominant perspective not only because they are popularly imagined as preceding it in social evolutionary time but also because they are represented as beliefs rather than as methods for ascertaining truth” (Povinelli 1995: 505–6). Contra Tylor, indigenous communities are not the key to the religions of the past, nor are they frozen in time; they are dynamic and creative agents of their own “survivance,” (Vizenor 1994) historically and in the present, with

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sophisticated ways of knowing. Scholars including Bird-David (1993, 1999), Viveiros de Castro (1992, 1998, 1999), Howell (1984, 1989), Ingold (2000, 2006), Fausto (2004), and Harvey (2005) have reconsidered animism as far more sophisticated than Victorian anthropologists and subsequent historians of religion allowed. The Ojibwe’s Algonkian language, for instance, classifies persons and personal actions differently to objects and impersonal events, due to a grammatical “animate” and “inanimate” gender distinction (Hallowell 1960). The Ojibwe’s preferred self-definition, Anishinaabeg, identifies them as “human persons” and they speak of a wide range of “other-than-human persons,” including tree persons, stone persons, bird persons, and fish persons. Animism is a “relational ontology” according to which the world is filled with people, only some of whom are human; for human people there are other-than-human people and for tree people there are other-than-tree people—a relational understanding of personhood that Viveiros de Castro terms indigenous “perspectivism.” On a daily basis, animists come into contact with a range of people, necessitating due respect and etiquette, or “proper social comportment” (Cruikshank 2005: 259), in order to maintain harmonious relations. All too often, however, human people transgress with improper behavior, offending other-than-humans, and relationships must be repaired (usually by ritual specialists), achieved by engaging with other-than-human people in various ways, including at significant places in the landscape where moral lessons are learned (cf. Basso 1984, 1996).

While animism is, of course, discursively constructed, presenting indigeneity through

an imperfect Western idiom (filtered through nonindigenous language), the theorizing of a “new animism” does problematize the baggage of modern Western thought (Cartesian and Enlightenment rationalism and humanism) and, in aligning more closely with indigenous understandings, may facilitate a more sensitive and nuanced approach to rock-art landscapes. Discussions of indigeneity (e.g. Arsenault 2004a, 2004b; Robinson 2004; O’Regan 2008), including landscape as animate (e.g. Whitley 1992, 2000, 2008; Arsenault and Zawadska 2008), and relationality (see Dowson 2007; Jones 2007c), in recent rock-art scholarship are therefore exciting. My specific task is to think through animic relationality in order to approach the entanglement of rock art, landscape, and “persons.”

Living Landscapes: Thinking through Rock Art AnimicallyIndicative of human engagement with landscape in a very tangible way, rock art might be viewed as inscribing human meaning onto the landscape, but for animists landscape is not a passive, natural blank-slate-in-waiting for active, enculturing rock art. Lived-in-landscape is not a singular entity, contained by the gridlines of a map or reproduced in pixelated three dimensions by sterile virtual imaging, nor is it merely “inhabited” (Ingold’s [2000] “dwelling” is more appropriate) by humans. A rigid division between culture and nature often positions humans as separate from the rest of the natural world, even at the top of the evolutionary schema, viewing nature merely as an exploitable resource, but this understanding is thwarted by an animist relational ontology (Harvey 2005): “the

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landscape” is conceived of as “living,” filled with other-than-human persons who are extant prior to human engagement and who dwell at “pre-given places” (Cruikshank 2005: 15). As a result, the nature of community is potentially reframed. Avoiding generic assumptions of “culture” and the culture-historic process, social archaeology emphasizes the minutiae of relationships between humans. But rather than restricting “the social” to humans (e.g. Kirk 2006), we might usefully widen our net: instead of delineating between culture and nature, indigenous peoples often mark a different distinction, between human persons and nonhuman persons, and respectful relations with all “persons” within this wider community of life are crucial (Harvey 2005). “Social relations,” therefore, involve all persons, the nature of embodiment is extended (with distinctions between different embodied beings), and materiality is reconceived in terms which side-step animate/inanimate and subject/object distinctions. For instance, animals (more accurately animal-persons), so often assumed by archaeologists to be a passive resource, are considered by Dowson (2007) as agents crucial to our understanding of Southern African rock art, including its production. My interests look further, to non-animal-persons and less tangible nonhumans, and beyond the rock-art panel to landscape context.

In the following discussion, I cite examples of rock art and rock-art landscapes in later prehistoric Britain (though I do not offer case studies as such). An animic approach to the Neolithic and Bronze Age engages with the idea that communities in the Neolithic were far more mobile than previously thought, and that the notion of immediate subscription

to agriculture and sedentism is simplistic, indicating that hunter-gatherer modes of subsistence and concomitant ontologies of at least the late Mesolithic persisted well into the Neolithic (and perhaps into the Bronze Age). Furthermore, the view that animism is restricted to hunter-gatherers, as the earliest form of religion evident in the earliest mode of subsistence, is outmoded. Animism, like rock art, is not exclusive to hunter-gatherers (see e.g. Kirk’s discussion [2006: 337] of the agriculturalist Dogon), and animism and shamanism do not precede “totemism” in an evolutionary way, functioning simultaneously among the Anishinaabeg, for instance (see Harvey 2005). Relationality is widespread (see examples in Jones 2007c: 30) and the specific perception of the environment as filled with people, only some of whom are human, is not uncommon (see Harvey 2005). Animism operates as a potentially informative etic term, then, but animic ontologies are diverse; the key is separating the difference from the analogy. In sum, my argument might be read as a general corrective or “foil” (Robinson 2004: 94), which decenters the human subject and reframes our approach to rock-art landscapes at the macroscale (I do not deal with issues of patterning and regionalization) by thinking through the broad theme of animism in an exploratory rather than definitive account, mentioning various examples in passing.

Reenchanting Cup-and-ring: Open-air Rock Art at Ilkley Moor (Yorkshire, England) and the Kilmartin Valley (Argyll, Scotland) Art “in the landscape” or “open-air” rock art (Evans 2004) in Britain, executed on

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exposed glacial pavements, boulders, and standing stones, dates to a period spanning the early Neolithic to early Bronze Age (e.g. Bradley 1997: 57–66; Evans 2004), a longevity enfolding the peak of passage-tomb art in the late third millennium BCE. Excavations (e.g. Edwards and Bradley 1999; Waddington 2004; Waddington et al. 2005; Jones 2007a; Jones and O’Connor 2007) at sites are beginning to tighten this chronology and push interpretation forward. In this paper it would be unrealistic to grapple with all British open-air rock art,5 across time, or even the complexity of the evidence at a particular site. Rather, I offer an approach which may yield insights in a general sense, interweaving references to examples on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, England (e.g. Ikley Archaeology Group 1986; Bradley 1997), and in the Kilmartin Valley, Argyll, Scotland (e.g. Morris 1977; Beckensall 1999; RCAHMS 1999 [1988]; Evans 2004; Jones 2007c).6

The act of engraving rock art, and the engravings themselves, might in one sense indicate respect for a place. Sharpe suggests such rocks (in Cumbria, northwest England) “may have been associated with spirits or ancestors even prior to the addition of the carvings. Indeed this may have been the source of their original significance and have inspired the initial development of ‘place-value’” (Sharpe 2007: 158). I agree that the art may index a “sacred” place, but it does more than this. Jones (2007c) extends the idea of a simple “index” to a more complex “indexicality,” with rock art at one location citing imagery, ideas, and memories instantiated elsewhere, in complex chains of iteration and reiteration. Robinson suggests (for certain Californian rock artists) that “the creation of designs was a way to acknowledge

and activate power” (Robinson 2004: 99). What is “power,” however, is not abstract but constituted, embedded in the active participation of persons, and power can, according to animists, be held and performed by humans and nonhumans. Intentionality is key: as Povinelli points out (with an Aboriginal Australian case), “[w]hile the mythic actions of some dreamtime ancestors were concentrated at certain now-sacred sites, the land is more generally permeated by signs of their present-day intentionality and agency” (Povinelli 1995: 509). Landscape and rock art do not depend on human inscription for agency but can be understood animically as intentional themselves.

In animic ontologies, what is place and what is space is blurred, and in certain instances no such distinction exists: at a general level, all space is place, all is “sacred,” and in the Early Neolithic at least, understanding may have posited a variety of animate substances (Kirk 2006: 338; also see papers in Boivin and Owoc 2004). But animism is diversely constituted and should not be seen as necessarily animating all things without discrimination: not everything is animate all of the time, with some places held to be more significant or “sacred” (vibrant with nonhuman life and inhabited by distinctive nonhuman personalities) than others because human attention is narrow, focused on certain locations some of the time rather than all locations all of the time. (Such also extends to “objects.”) The production of rock art happens in landscapes which are intrinsically “sacred” due to the life abundant within them—life which is not restricted to biological status—with rock art indexing specific pre-given places (which are more alive than others). Rock-art

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locales may be indicators of places where other-than-human presences dwell(ed), agencies perceived to be extant prior to human engagement. Rather than imposing meaning in the form of nonhumans onto the landscape in a psychological projection or attributed anthropomorphism, this represents a complex web of relations in which nonhumans not only exist, but “their nonhumanness is a necessary part of the performativity of the story” (Povinelli 1995: 510; see also Basso 1984). According to indigenous animists, other-than-human people have their own communities, lives, stories, and contributions to the world, in spite of human presence.

A biography of a rock-art site (undergoing constant change) might begin with artist-producers executing rock-art images which may be derived from communication with/the negotiated assistance of other-than-human agents. This assistance is therefore located spatially, associated with a particular place, a place which (in this instance) becomes a rock-art site. At Kilmartin, the selective choice of naturally cracked rock surfaces over available smooth surfaces (Jones 2007c: 209–13) may indicate that the obvious choice for image-making was advised as inappropriate by other-than-human people. And at Ilkley Moor, the Badger Stone (Figure 1) might mark one example of a locus of nonhuman agency, notable for impressive views from the site and tracks running past it. It is important to consider the subtleties of landscape context, however, in that intervisibility between sites and trackways juxtaposed to them may be less significant in contexts where rock art occurs at less striking, even hardly noticed locations (cf. Bradley et al.

1994: 381). Rock-art images may act as offerings to honor the place/the other-than-human people dwelling there. (The two are necessarily entangled.7) The art therefore marks an offering of respect and thanks as much as the “artwork” of a particular “artist” and the imagery is necessarily sociopolitically embedded: in this narrative its production and consumption involved the negotiation of harmony between humans and between humans and nonhumans. As a result, the preeminence of the artist and indeed the autonomous “individual” is disrupted because the art is embedded in a much wider and more significant range of relations than are associated with the single artist/individual alone.

After the initial production of rock art, human people continue to visit the site for various reasons, probably involving the maintenance of day-to-day social actions and relations (from storytelling to hunting). These relations encompass the web of interactions between human people and other-than-human people as much as those between humans. One reason for this ongoing engagement might be to honor the place of origin of the artist’s visionary experience, derived from dialogue with other-than-human agencies. The emphasis may have been on the meaning and implications of the vision rather than on the art itself, although rock art was, likely, actively deployed in exegesis. Nonhuman persons are often tied to places, individuals, and kinship groups, so such exegesis may have taken various forms in order to reproduce personal-, place-, and communal-relations, and to reproduce harmony between persons. Honorific practices may have involved sacrifices of fluids including water,

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blood, milk, beer, or mead poured into cup marks which, while “animate,” are further enlivened by the fluids which darken the rock and run down the surface of the rock face, from cup to cup, along grooves and around rings. Where these offerings interface with and enter naturally occurring features such as cracks and fissures, the offering moves across the surface divide (or perhaps “membrane” [Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1990] of

the rock surface), from upside/outside to downside/otherside; that is, from the human to the nonhuman world. This movement across may have been viewed as a mark of the offering being accepted by those it was intended for. There is evidence for such ritual offerings, perhaps of food (certainly food-containing vessels), and in some instances fragments of quartz: at the site of Torbhlaren at Kilmartin, significant numbers of quartz fragments were intentionally deposited in cracks and fissures, and at the base of rock-art panels (Jones 2007a).8 Such fragments had life histories which echo the human life cycle (Jones 2007c: 220): once coming from megaliths and/or quarry sites, an expanded meaning of the cultural biography of these objects is contributed by a concept of animic personhood. Use and reuse evinces a redeployment of nonhuman presence from one significant place (megalith, quarry) to another (rock-art panel), as part of honorific practices. Animic biographies might also be imagined for other “deposits;” at Ilkley, for instance, sherds of Grooved Ware pottery deposited at rock-art sites (Bradley 1997: 60, 64).

Rock-art Persons as Intentional AgentsIn a narrative in which nonhuman agency is as prominent as if not more so than human agency, the “artist” is simply a medium/mediator of the imagery, and furthermore, other-than-human people may have been perceived as the originators of the images. Ethnographic instances where the production of rock art is associated with nonhuman agency are not uncommon: for the Numic and many other Native American communities, these are rock

Fig 1 Rock art on the Badger Stone (Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, England): this may have been a significant locale for the mediation of human and nonhuman relations in later prehistory (photograph by the author)

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people (e.g. Whitley 1992, 2000, 2008), and Dreaming beings are made visually explicit in Australian rock art (e.g. David 2002, Taçon and Ouzman 2004) with rock-art images of Wandjinas representing Wandjina beings visually, and also these images are themselves Wandjinas, active agents in the making and maintenance of Dreaming landscapes. As such, “Dreamings listen, smell, talk, or, more generally, intentionally act and react to the presence of humans nearby” (Povinelli 1995: 505). In this light, humble cup marks and cup-and-ring markings, often viewed as unimpressive in scholarship (particularly when compared to figurative motifs), become significant players in the cosmology of later prehistoric cognition in Britain.

Wandjina figures are interesting for not being “preserved” in some instances, but renewed and kept “alive” by Aboriginal custodians today in a (controversial) process of repainting (e.g. Mowaljarlai et al. 1988; Mowaljarlai and Watchman 1989; Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993). Valuable in ways other

than the dealer-critic system of Western art commerce which allots fiscal worth and authenticity to objects and preserves for posterity, this rock art is not frozen in a temporal “frame” but continually reworked. Reuse, such as the layered superpositioning of motifs at Achnabreck (Bradley 1997: 64-5) (Fig 2) in the Kilmartin Valley (see also Jones 2001) is an important element at many rock-art sites in Britain and Ireland (see also Evans and Dowson 2003). The layering of motifs attests to the reworking of panels over time, and may indicate that they were curated—cleaned, repecked or reengraved (perhaps even painted and repainted) over long periods of time. These practices may suggest ongoing efforts to respect and maintain the well-being of nonhumans dwelling at pre-given places and so reproduce continuity in meaning and harmony in the flow of life force between all people as is essential in animic systems. Reuse in other instances indicates citation of earlier meaning, changing meaning over time and shifts in sociopolitical

Fig 2 Layered motifs at Achnabreck (Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland) are suggestive of the reworking of the panel over time, perhaps indicating long periods of curation in an effort to respect and help maintain the well-being of the nonhumans dwelling therein, and reproduce the flow of life force essential to animic systems (photograph by the author).

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relations. This is particularly evident in the relationship between open-air art and that in architectural settings (see e.g. Bradley 1997; Evans 2004; Jones 2007c), such as the incorporation of extant rock art on a possible menhir into the tombs of Nether Largie (Bradley 1997: 58) and Ri Cruin (Fig 3), in the Kilmartin Valley. At Nether Largie, re-use and changing meaning might be interpreted as a shift from accessibility (in the landscape) in the Neolithic to increased privacy (regulating access to the tomb interior) in the Later Neolithic and early Bronze Age, part of a wider change in animic citation (see Wallis forthcoming 2009).

Both the maintenance of rock-art sites and their weathering can be considered as crucial processes in their biographies. Contrary to the preservation ethos of heritage management (e.g. Blain and Wallis 2007), the inevitability of site weathering may be important to understanding its prehistoric context. While some images are visible to the naked eye, careful analysis of rock-art panels and rock surfaces once covered with rock art is required in order to find now badly eroded motifs. A notable example is the engraving of axe heads and a dagger (Fig 4) on megaliths at Stonehenge9 (e.g. Bradley 1998): laser analysis has added two previously unknown axe motifs to those visible to the naked eye (see Goskar et al. 200310). The erosion of these motifs is a loss to modern science but in prehistory this may have been expected, even desired. Certain ethnographic instances demonstrate that rock-art and other archaeological sites are avoided by humans because of the nonhuman agencies dwelling there which, with dangerous consequences, may be angered by human presence. Pueblo and

Navajo lore in the Southwest USA, for instance, insists that Ancient Pueblo (Anasazi) archaeology is avoided lest the “Ancient Ones” bring bad luck, particularly sickness: the sites are meant to decay (Wallis 2003).

Fig 3 Faint shapes of axe heads on the cist end-slab of Ri Cruin (Kilmartin Valley, Argyll, Scotland), perhaps derived from an earlier menhir. The reuse of rock and rock art in such instances may indicate a shift from accessibility (in the landscape) in the Neolithic to increased privacy (regulating access to the tomb interior) in the Later Neolithic and early Bronze Age, with a shift in relations between human-persons as well as human-persons and other-than-human persons (photo: Paul Devereux).

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In an extension of this approach, panels of exposed rock in British rock art often cover a much larger surface than initially realized due to the incursion of lichen, moss, weeds, turf, and detritus. This process may be as much a part of the site’s biography as newly executed and clearly visible motifs. An immediate response in a contemporary setting is to lift the turf so that the art can be viewed, but perhaps during the life history of these sites, the slow covering of the art by turf and debris was not seen as a challenge to conservation. Perhaps whole panels of rock art were, at points in their biography, not meant to be viewed by humans but by nonhumans living below the surface, viewing the imagery from “the other side.” Such weathering might also have been viewed as an acceptance of the rock-art offering by

other-than-humans. Perhaps once used in the negotiation of human and nonhuman relations, mediated by specialists able to “see as others do,” hidden art might no longer have been considered as part of the human realm but appropriated into the nonhuman world. Memory becomes significant because over time humans may have forgotten about sites with hidden rock art, or perhaps the knowledge was only held by ritual specialists who needed to remember pre-given places in the performance and maintenance of cultural lore. When uncovered, by accident or design, over short or long periods of occlusion, creative remembrance may have involved the participation of other-than-humans once again, with rock art accessioned into folklore; associated with fairies, elves, “little people” and other nonhuman agents (see Smith 1878; Crook 1998 for evidence of this at Ilkley). Here again the hand of the original human artist is subsumed, even removed entirely, with the production of rock art associated with nonhuman agents and situated in another time, place, or realm.

Non-human Agency and “Rhizomic Personhood”An animic approach broadens the frame of the interpretation of rock-art landscape into an expanded field of human persons and other-than-human persons, and reconsiders who or what has agency. Gell’s exploration of art’s agentic role in the relationship between art object, artist, spectator(s), and others involved in the web of relations at issue, or “art nexus” (e.g. Gell 1992, 1998), is therefore relevant. Applying Gell’s theory to rock art, Jones’s interest is in the “mediatory and constitutive force of objects on society”

Fig 4 Engraving of a dagger and axe head at Stonehenge (stone 53, comprising one of the trilithons). Laser analysis has revealed further axe motifs on this and other stones now invisible to the naked eye. The erosion of motifs is a loss to modern science but in prehistory this may have been expected, even desired (photo: Paul Devereux).

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(Jones 2007c: 4), how “objects are used to mediate for people” (Jones ibid.: 5) and are “indexes of human agency and intentionality” (ibid.: 20–1): “people and objects are engaged in the process of remembering. This is not to say that objects experience, contain, or store memory; it is simply that objects provide the ground for humans to experience memory” (ibid.: 2, original emphasis). For Jones and Gell, humans are located as the ultimate arbiters of agency. A relationally engaged approach, however, rethinks how agency and personhood are constituted. Agency in animic systems is not restricted to human people (cf. Fowler 2002: 57–8) but is afforded to the captivating “object,” without neglecting other (e.g. human) agents, though potentially diminishing some of their control within a wider “field of relationships” (Ingold and Kurttila 2000: 194). Many Aboriginal Australians, for instance, “do not assume that transformation, appropriation, or intentionality are attributes that reside either uniquely or most fully in the human realm. Rather, humans are simply one node in a field of possible intentionality and appropriation” (Povinelli 1995: 513). Rock sites, their art, and associated non-human people, may, I argue, be viewed as intentional agents in the creation and negotiation of their own meaning.

Animic conceptions of personhood tend to be fluid and embrace a variety of human and nonhuman people engaged in ongoing relationships in which the boundaries between one thing and another are diffused. Western modernity arrests this permeability, “creating closure around the person” (Thomas 2002: 34). Mauss commented that the “person” may exceed the individual human body (Mauss 1985 [1938]), but his

approach, since followed by scholars on agency (e.g. Gell), rested on the fundamental assumption of the a priori agency of humans in the network of persons and artifact extensions. The attention arguably afforded to nonhumans in the rock-art landscapes of prehistoric Britain indicates that they were perceived to hold significant power: not as passive psychological investments—mistaken animistic beliefs, as Tylor put it—but as active participants, as persons, in day-to-day social relations. A rethinking of how “ancestors” are constituted emerges (Whitley 2002). Dowson (in preparation) interprets the early Neolithic cup-and-ring art of Britain as evidence of ancestors as immanent in the landscape, but I am uncomfortable with immanence standing in necessary relation to transcendence in a dualistic theological model, and while I agree it is important to distinguish critically between “different kinds of ancestor” (Whitley 2002: 125), an animic approach offers a different course.

In the anthropocentric discourse of some later prehistoric archaeology, “ancestors” tends to mean human ancestors, but ancestry need not be exclusive to humans. The “recurrent intermixing of human and animal bones” (Evans 2004: 57) alongside ceramics and worked lithics, in many funerary deposits (e.g. Fowler 2002), suggests that those interred or retired at “death” includes human persons and other-than-human persons. The material remains of prehistory are predominantly funerary and interpretation tends to be focused on death and human ancestors, but in animic systems death is a transformation, a necessary part of life in order to maintain the flow of life force among all persons: it might be said that everything is connected

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and everyone is eating everyone else all of the time, in an ongoing system of cannibalist relations11. In the “economy of substances” (Thomas 2002: 42) of later prehistoric Britain, humans can be viewed as “temporary combinations of substances” (ibid.) and, in an animic modification of this, ancestors are represented in mortuary archaeological remains in the form of human persons, animal persons, pot persons, stone persons, and so on, with a connectedness or permeability of boundaries between these grouping of “persons” in composite settings. Human ancestors are situated among a wider community of other-than-human ancestors, and the personhood of these people is entangled in death as it was in life.

The terms “partible,” “multiple,” “fractal,” and “distributed” personhood (see e.g. Godelier and Strathern 1991; Strathern 1999; Fowler 2004; Jones 2005) theorize personhood, as “dividual,” away from singularity—the “individual” “a classic marker of modernity” (Kirk 2006, following Thomas 2004). These terms begin to disrupt human preeminence in the determination of personhood, but multiple personhood risks implying a number of separate individuals or discrete personalities in one person; distributed personhood tends to originate agency with humans; and fractal personhood suggests a person subdivided into parts (“fractal” derives from the Latin for “fractured” or “broken”) yet animic ontologies and epistemologies are not a result of damaged or incorrect perceptions. In an effort to be more sensitive (and for want of a better term, “organic”), I introduce the term “rhizomic personhood:” in botany, a rhizome refers to the usually underground, horizontal stem of a plant which sends

out roots and shoots, nomadically, from its nodes, leading to the growth of new plants. In essence there is no beginning or end to the rhizomic pattern of growth, but there is interconnectedness, exchange, and an apparently unsystematic, ceaselessly unfolding web of relationships. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972) rhizomic approach facilitates multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in order to analyse (and decenter) data, with their concept of “vitalism” referring to a sea of constant flow, flux, change, and “becoming.” These ideas resonate with the theorizing of “new animism” and offer a critical methodology for engaging with such indigenous realities as animism (see also Harvey and Wallis 2007; Wallis forthcoming 2009). I propose rhizomic personhood as referring to the relationality inherent in a world which is filled with persons, only some of whom are human, which facilitates a nonhierarchical approach to agency, deprivileging humans and permitting greater fluidity of personhood; for example, the mixing of pot, stone, human, and animal persons in Neolithic mortuary contexts, and comparable treatment of human people and nonhuman agents (houses, pots, quernstones, objects in hoards, and so on) in the Bronze Age (Brück 2006).

While rock-art images may, from the viewpoint of the modern rock-art researcher, be “made” by human people for potentially diverse human interest groups, rhizomic personhood allows for the interpretation of both human and nonhuman people as producers and consumers. Dowson (2007) gives the example of rhino persons (my term) whose engagements with rock-art panels locate them as agents in the biography of images. My approach extends

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this personhood rhizomically to include nonhuman and nonanimal persons as agents constituted in interconnected relational webs, with the potential for rock-art images to act as nonhuman intentional agents themselves.

ConclusionArchaeology, of landscape particularly, tends to take a bird’s-eye view. An alternative is a “worm’s-eye-view” (Taussig 2006). Rather than looking from the outside in (looking at the surface of a rock-art panel, from above or in-front), we might think from the inside out (from the point of view of those beneath, below, or within the rock), the viewpoint, put mythopoetically, of a “wight” (Holtorf 2004), or animically, “other-than-human person.” The task is not straightforward and critics might argue against the existence of such a position beyond human imagination or hard-wiring of the human brain, at the outset, even as this disenfranchises indigenous epistemologies. But the quest for rational objectivity and assumption of Cartesian and humanist personhood, if helpful in some regards (such as the writing of this academic paper) is misleading in others; Latour argues that We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and have never rigidly distinguished nature from culture, and Graham Harvey points out:

The ideology of modernity has never entirely succeeded . . . [Modernism] cannot succeed because our bodies and our material surroundings are resistant . . . [W]e have far too many experiences of the aliveness of the world and the importance of a diversity of life to fall in step completely with Cartesian modernity. (Harvey 2005: 207)

While we are not required to be animists ourselves, engaging with animic relational epistemologies enables a broadening of the interpretative frame, theorizing how rock art is constituted, and theorizing the nature of embodiment, personhood, and materiality, as well as the active negotiation of these in terms of agency and social relations (which are not restricted to humans). Tilley notes that “[t]he study of material culture is an irrelevant distraction if it merely becomes a study of things for the sake of things. It must be a study of persons and social identities which should lead to critical reflection on those lives and identities” (Tilley 1999: 338). To go further, the study of “things” requires “thinking through things” (Henare et al. 2007) on their terms, in some instances as “persons,” without overemphasis on human-person intentionality. Reflecting critically on how “persons” and identities are constituted, animic ontologies present unsettling challenges to Western mindsets and some of our most deeply held values (the nature of “self ” and discreteness of “mind,” for instance, and Baudrillard’s [1994] capitalist “system of objects”). A relational approach rethinks “passive” rock art as potentially agentive and associated as much with nonhuman as with human agency. It also reconfigures what is “materiality” and considers landscape as plausibly “alive” with people, only some of whom are human. Not wishing to generalize later prehistoric cognition or the regionalization of the evidence, we may find more sustained interpretations of the variety of these animic geographies over time, where the evidence is conducive, worthy of further exploration.

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AcknowledgementsI thank the following for feedback, discussion, and criticism during the writing of this paper: Ben Alberti, Jenny Blain, Michele Cohen, Paul Devereux, Thomas Dowson, Gyrus, Graham Harvey, Andy Jones, Ken Lymer, Mark Pilkington, Alex Seago, and three reviewers (two anonymous, the other David Whitley). Ideas raised here were also presented at Metageum: Exploring the Megalithic Mind in Malta (2007), the Sixth World Archaeological Congress in Dublin (2008), and at two events at Richmond University: the Philosophy Society Conference (2008) and Research at Richmond Bi-Annual Conference (2008)—I thank participants at these forums for their comments. Any faults in the paper are my own.

Notes

1 I prefer the term animic over animistic (following Ingold 2006); there is a significant if delicate shading. The suffix “-istic,” meaning “in imitation of ” or “having some characteristic of ” suggests that “animistic” is pejorative, hinting in the former case at something imitative or inauthentic, and in the latter case at something only partially evident, formed, or performed. “Animic” more concretely accentuates a fully functioning, coherent, and effective ontology, and also looks away from the “old animism” of Victorian anthropology, concerned with subject/object distinctions, to a “new animism” engaged with relationality and personhood.

2 For a critical review of European Landscapes of Rock Art see Tilley 2003.

3 For a critical review of Tilley 2004a, see Jones 2007b.

4 See Janik 1999 for a challenge to Tilley’s approach to rock art as text.

5 An introduction to and summary of research in England is offered in the Rock Art Pilot Project Main Report (2000).

6 Fieldwork was undertaken in these regions while I was completing an MA in the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art (1995/96) and PhD in archaeology at the University of Southampton (1996–1999), and most recently (2000–2007) while codirecting the Sacred Sites Contested Rites/Rights Project (www.sacredsites.org.uk). My discussion here also builds on papers presented at conferences as Wallis 2007, Wallis 2008.

7 Considering this entanglement further, I am reminded of the Chumash’s ‘atiswin: “a complex concept having no analogue in English: it seems to stand for both supernatural beings and the quality of power they embody. It also stands for powerful substances … [M]any things could potentially contain ‘atiswin including places” (Robinson 2004: 96). Similarly, the Cuban aché is both a hallucinogenic “powder” and “power,” but rather than “conceptually identical” they are in “a relationship of mutual generation” (Holbraad 2007: 206). Such sophisticated concepts may also have been iterated in the production and consumption of the rock art I discuss here.

8 Interestingly, quartz is an important substance in many indigenous contexts (see Vitebsky 1995), including for the Chumash (Robinson 2004: 98), Aboriginal Australians (Elkin 1977) and Jivaro (Harner 1990 [1980): 109), and its presence is much-noted in the later prehistoric archaeology of Britain (e.g. Fowler 2004; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005; Jones 2007c).

9 Recorded on stones 3, 4, and 53.

10 See also http://www.stonehengelaserscan.org/press.html

11 Harvey (2005) defines such animic relationality as doing violence with impunity.

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