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Painted and engraved rock art appear at the Pak Ou caves, a complex of caverns containing Buddhist offerings and shrines located at the confluence of two rivers in Luang Prabang Province, Lao PDR. Faded red paintings and writing can be found on the cliff face housing the lower cave, colloquially known as the 'Cave of a Thousand Buddhas,' while in the upper cave, red anthropomorphs and flowers along with black anthropomorphic figures are painted on the walls. This red and black rock art may predate the Buddhist use of the cave. However, one painting found in the upper cave 10 m from the entrance is unusual as it utilizes a green pigment, and resembles modern steamships that might have transited the upper Mekong. This article considers the historic context of the cave and significance of this Laotian rock art site, which has received little attention in academic literature thus far. Because boat imagery in rock art is not unheard of in Southeast Asia, we hope to highlight the potential for this art to illuminate episodes from the recent past. Keywords: Laos, rock art, maritime archaeology, steamship, Pak Ou caves, Luang Prabang., INTRODUCTION EXAMINING THE ROCK ART OF THE PAK OU CAVES IN LUANG PRABANG PROVINCE contributes to the archaeological knowledge of Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR, henceforth referred to as [...]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a number of veteran Plains Indian warriors were commissioned to paint their war histories and provide accompanying verbal explanations of the depicted events. These important sources of primary information add significantly to our understanding of earlier, poorly documented war exploit paintings and rock art. As well, a look at the formalistic qualities of these commissioned works against the background of events surrounding their execution tells us much about contemporaneous reservation life and relations between Native Americans and Euro-Americans. The present study centers on the elk skin painting and accompanying explanations which Big Nose, a Piegan chief, was commissioned to execute in 1893-1894. Keywords: Blackfeet, Big Nose, warfare, pictography

It can be argued that rock art can be as aesthetically stimulating as art that has its origins in modern European art. This is sufficient justification for investigating specific elements of rock art's aesthetics. Research in this area proposes that rock art offers an extremely eloquent perspective on the continuity of art making among human beings, on rock art makers and on the places in which rock art is found. Rock art can be seen as a mark of spirit.

The western Great Basin witnessed a transition from generalized hunting and gathering to a strategy emphasizing seed gathering at c. AD 1200. This was matched by accelerated production of ritual art: rock engravings, depicting big game and hunters. To explain this paradox, seed gatherers creating hunters' art, I examine directly relevant ethnography to show that the art concerns an application of a shaman's power: killing a mountain sheep was a metaphor for making rain. This was increasingly important with a seed-oriented economy but, since subsistence is more than diet, involving things like the sexual division of labour, it has implications for social relations. An examination of these shows two systems of inequality: men over women, and shamans over non-shaman males. The increase in male-oriented ritual art with subsistence change can then be understood in terms of ideological efforts to maintain gender asymmetries, and the growing forms of incipient political organization present in this region.

This paper seeks to establish the primacy of the image in the study of the prehistoric paintings of Zimbabwe and to show how detailed comparative iconographic analyses of a range of images may elucidate something of the significance of the art. It seeks to demonstrate that art was concerned with basic ideological concepts of the society, that the human imagery was concerned with the construction of a limited range of archetypes. Thus that the art has little or no relevance to such things as scenic representation, narrative, historical record or myth. The human imagery was qualified by the addition of a limited range of attributes or emblems attached to figures. These provide a pervasive additional dimension to almost all the imagery, a constant sub-text that almost certainly refers to San metaphysics.

This paper outlines a new role for rock art in the writing of southern African history. The old view of the art as a pictorial record of Stone Age life needs to be discarded. What has been learned about southern African rock art has raised the status of its images from objects in need of explanation to evidence for historically situated social processes. These processes implicated not only the makers of the art but also neighbouring peoples with whom they interacted. The art became a site of struggle as 'egalitarian' values were eroded and shamans assumed political roles that included control of resources.

Decorated horse bridles are probably the most common horse tack shown in Plains biographic art. Painted on robes, drawn in ledgers, and incised or painted as rock art from northern Mexico to southern Alberta, these images illustrate the emphasis placed on horse finery by Plains and Southwestern Indian cultures. Rock art is replete with these decorated bridles. A cursory literature review identified more than 25 sites with illustrated examples, located from northern Mexico through nine of the United States and into southern Canada at Writing-On-Stone, Alberta. Given the number of these rock art images and the wealth of comparative material from historical sources and recently published robe art and ledger drawings, we have identified and described seven distinct types of bridle decorations in Plains rock art. These decorations provide clues to ethnic identity of the artists and illuminate the extent of trade networks and intertribal alliances that extended across the region and into the American Southwest. Keywords: biographic rock art; horse tack in rock art; Plains rock art; ledger art; robe art.