British
Prehistoric Rock Art by STAN BECKENSALL
Tempus, 1999. 160 pages, 82 drawings, 89
photographs (27 colour, 63 B&W), 17 maps; ISBN 0-7524-2514-5. (£16.99)
Why British prehistoric rock art should ever have
been considered a subject undeserving of serious archaeological study
is a question that confronts you as soon as you open this book. It is
comprehensively illustrated with Stan Beckensall’s drawings and
photographs of rock art from across the country – the product
of many years of often solitary fieldwork – and the briefest glance
is enough to explain what it was that inspired him and kept him going.
Here is archaeology literally sticking out of the ground, and archaeology
of the most intriguing kind – you can’t look at the illustrations
in this book without your mind going into puzzle-solving mode.
Since his publication of Northumberland rock art in
1983, Beckensall has produced regular volumes, some privately printed,
recording the cup-and-circle marks, spirals, concentric arcs and other
motifs that were carved into natural rock outcrops, earthfast boulders
and parts of cairns, cists and standing stones across northern England.
This book offers an overview covering the whole country of what has
by now become, belatedly in Britain compared to elsewhere in the world,
a subject of mainstream scholarly research. His contribution, not only
in raising awareness about the subject but also in helping to assemble
a comprehensive record of British rock art, was acknowledged in Richard
Bradley’s dedication of his Rock Art and the Prehistory of
Atlantic Europe: Signing the Land (1997) to this ‘most devoted
of amateur archaeologists’.
In his Introduction Beckensall articulates
some of the questions that were raised in his mind when he first encountered
rock art (who, why and when?), and he suggests that now we can at least
provide some tentative answers – that the phenomenon may have
spanned a thousand years from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, and
was perhaps associated with the exploitation of marginal land for hunting
and pastoralism, the rock art signing the land (to adopt Bradley’s
phrase) from prominent viewpoints.
There follow five main chapters (confusingly with
different numbering on the Contents page). In Symbols and motifs
Beckensall considers first the symbolic power of the circle, as
manifested both in the shape of henge monuments such as Avebury and
in individual cup marks; he is less willing, however, to consider possible
‘meanings’ for the spiral with which much of the chapter
is concerned. He also presents a preliminary ‘vocabulary of rock
art’ with diagrams showing suggested relationships between, and
variants of, many of the most common motifs.
He suggests, however, that is not the single motifs,
of which there is a quite restricted range, that are important, but
their combination and arrangement on individual rock surfaces, and in
Panels of Rock Art he provides a sample of these compositions
recorded from West Yorkshire to Argyll. He starts the chapter giving
symbol by symbol descriptions of each surface (perhaps unnecessarily
given the accompanying drawings), but by the end, perhaps realising
the superfluous nature of the exercise, he leaves the reader ‘to
contemplate some others without any comments from the author’.
The short chapter on How the study of Rock Art
began and developed starts with an account of some of the individuals
who studied the phenomenon up to the point where professional archaeologists
began to take a serious interest. From there, however, Beckensall appears
to be less comfortable with some of the directions of current research.
Archaeologists who have expanded on his recording and documenting work
are commended, but many of those discussing the phenomenon within the
wider context of rock art studies in Europe and around the world are
(with the exception of Bradley) largely overlooked, as are many of the
theoretical works on the subject – is it to the latter that he
is referring when he writes of ‘long-winded papers that have little
of value to contribute’? A flavour of Beckensall’s attitude
to some of these more general theoretical approaches is indicated, perhaps,
by his characterisation of studies associating motifs in rock art (and
passage tomb art) with altered neurological states as a product of ‘our
drug-obsessed culture’. Beckensall, himself, takes no explicit
theoretical position (although implied stances clearly emerge from his
text), looking instead, throughout the book, largely to Bradley’s
work to provide some explanatory framework.
The next two chapters describe the main occurrences
of rock art, firstly on natural rock exposures and secondly on rocks
built into a range of archaeological monuments. Art in the landscape,
comprising at least half of the book, provides overviews of the rock
art in eleven regions across Britain, and relates the major sites to
the local geology and topography, and to other rock art sites and archaeological
sites in the surrounding landscape. It is illustrated with regional
and local maps, and numerous drawings and photographs of the decorated
surfaces. However, although this chapter certainly contains a mass of
information, the lack of figure references in the text (this applies
throughout the book), and the sometimes confusing mapping, makes following
the text quite a struggle. While there is, within the text, comment
on landscape differences, regional comparisons, as well as monument,
settlement and economic contexts, the text is structured in such a way
that it is hard to get an overall picture or understanding of each area.
A more consistent approach providing general contextual information,
with more coherent mapping showing the sites described, would have helped
considerably in the presentation of the material.
Rock art in context is divided into two main
sections – ‘Standing stones and circles of stone’
and ‘Burial monuments’ – but this is not always an
useful distinction, resulting in, for instance, the Clava cairns in
the Scottish Highlands being considered in both sections. Similar confusion
stems from describing and illustrating one Angelsey burial monument,
Barclodiad y Gawres, in this chapter, and another, Bryn Celli Ddu, in
the previous Landscape chapter. As the comparisons and contrasts
between the rock art on monuments and that on natural exposures would
seem to be essential to an understanding of the origins and development
of both phenomena, they might have been more usefully combined within
the series of consistently present regional summaries.
While much of the rock art at archaeological sites
is offered some statutory protection, those dispersed in the landscape
are more vulnerable to damage, and Beckensall ends the book with a brief
comment on the future management of this resource in the face of a range
of impacts including quarrying, agriculture, erosion and acid rain,
risks that have prompted welcome programmes of work by English Heritage
and Historic Scotland.
There is much to commend in Beckensall’s work,
and while I can’t say that I will try and read this book through
again, I will certainly refer to it again, and it has made me want to
know more about a subject that I, too, had largely overlooked up till
now. It may perhaps be more profitably used as a general field guide,
although this is a pity as it had the potential to be considerably more.
The general reader looking for an introduction to this interesting subject
will certainly get a flavour of British rock art from the drawings and
photographs, but may find it harder, as I did, to gain from the text
an understanding of the phenomenon within the contexts of the local
and regional archaeology and the wider study of rock art around the
world. This, too, is a shame because an accessible, authoritative and
comprehensive introduction to the subject is certainly needed, and Beckensall’s
extensive knowledge would make his contribution an essential ingredient.
I must say that it surprised me that the most obvious
of book’s shortcomings appear not to have been identified at an
early stage by Tempus, since even minor changes and editing (such as
the inclusion of figure references, and tidying up the rather erratic
formatting) could have resulted in substantial improvements to the benefit
of all concerned (reader, author and publisher). These criticisms are,
however, no reflection on the extent of the author’s expertise
and enthusiasm, or on his desire to communicate his knowledge for the
subject; I just feel that prehistoric British rock art, and the efforts
of Stan Beckensall, deserve a better book than this.
Andrew B Powell
Wessex Archaeology
Review Submitted: March 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
|