CHRISTOPH BAUMER and THERESE WEBER Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art. Reviewed by Ann Skea

This account of ancient rock art in Eurasia, Arabia and the Sahara attempts to discover the beliefs of the people who created it.

This is a big, beautiful and fascinating book. It is a weighty tome, not just because there are large colour images on most of its glossy pages, which make it so heavy that you need a book stand to read it comfortably, but also because of the expert, scholarly and revealing descriptions and discussion of the rock art found in most of the known sites in Europe, Scandinavia, Arabia, North Africa, and Central Asia.

What were the lives of our progenitors like? What sort of world did they live in? Were myth, magic and ritual important parts of their beliefs? Sometimes only the images they created and, much later, the inscriptions they left on the rocks around them, can tell us.

Rock Art amply fulfils the intention of the authors who have

in 19 expeditions and journeys over the course of the last 26 years, personally studied and documented more than 90 per cent of the sites described … [So] the present book aims at offering a broad and well-illustrated overview of petroglyphs within the Afro-Eurasian realm as a whole. Where possible it will attempt to connect rock art motifs to the mythological heritage of their respective cultures.

I have no expertise in the history, anthropology, ethnology, geology and climate science discussed in this book but my interest in myth, art and the way humans have recorded their lives since the earliest times made it easy to read, and the images accompanying the text were a constant source of delight and discovery.

Christoph Baumer is a respected, award-winning explorer and historian who has published widely on ‘history, religion, archaeology and travel’. Therese Weber is an artist whose innovative Paper Art is inspired and shaped by these expeditions and weaves together photography, drawing, object and performance art. In this book, they share their expertise to link rock art to the cultures that created it, and to explore the way it reflects the lives of its creators and the environmental and cultural changes that influenced its imagery and its location.

In the opening chapter, ‘Definitions and Methods’, Baumer names four types of rock art: petroglyphs (gouged, engraved or incised), pictoglyphs (‘made by painting, drawing, printing or stencilling’ and also known as ‘parietal art’), geoglyphs (arrangements of stones, or removal of surface layers of rock to reveal a lower, differently coloured surface), and graffiti (thinly incised rock or ancient inscriptions, e.g. personal epigrams, names, greetings, merchants’ messages, obscene texts and defacement). He also traces the changing meaning of ‘art’ from the definitions of Aristotle and Plato (‘mimesis’, ‘beauty, grace and formal perfection’), to the reproduction of nature and illustration of religious and cultural beliefs, then to the modern interpretation of art as a personal expression of the artist’s inner world. In other parts of the book, he discusses methods of dating, and the reasons for the climate changes that forced the human and animal migrations reflected in the position and imagery of the rock art.

Baumer concentrates on factual descriptions of the images, changes in the environment that influenced their subject matter and location, the methods used, and the links to myth and legend that archaeological discoveries and grave-goods suggest, and which ethnologists record among modern societies. Weber looks at them from an artist’s perspective, examining their ‘visual language’ – iconography, style, perspective, skill and expressiveness. She also writes of the influence that exhibitions of rock art – in museums such as MoMA in New York, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris – had on modern art, and the way artists such as Klee, Picasso, Miro, and more recently, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, and a number of other prominent artists in many parts of the world have been inspired by it.

Weber is alive to the question of who made the rock art – men, women, children? Recent research on hand prints in France and Spain (the earliest known form of rock art*) suggested that 75 per cent were made by women, but changes in human anatomy since they were created make this uncertain. And both authors admire the imaginative skill and sophistication required to create two-dimensional images of living creatures on rock using primitive tools.

Baumer writes of the discovery of parietal paintings and engravings in the Chauvet Cave in southern France that ‘shook previous beliefs in the beginning of art’.

The paintings feature almost 300 animals belonging to thirteen different species, herbivores such as woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, bison, aurochs, wild horses and reindeer as well as carnivores – cave lions and hyenas, leopards and bears – and also an owl. These paintings appear as perfect masterpieces in their naturalistic and dynamic rendering of moving animals, the attention to spatial perspective, the application of light and dark surfaces to create shadows, and the use of the natural shape of the rock surfaces as a design element of the images.

All this art was done by our earliest ancestors in the depths of a dark cave and most of it has been dated to 37,000 years before the present (37-36.2 ka cal BP). Both authors agree that the interpretation of rock art images is ambiguous and speculative. The suggested meaning of a group of beautifully life-like lionesses in the ‘deepest hall of the Chauvet Cave’, among images of their possible prey, has been that they are a hunting pack intent on the hunt. It could just as well be that the artist or artists were practising their skills or maybe copying a first image to learn how to do it.

Luckily, although Bauer states that ‘this book concentrates on outdoor petroglyphs and will leave the subject of cave engraving untouched’, he does include detailed descriptions and photographs from the French caves; and also of much less well-known but equally stunning art in shelters in the Sahara, where pictoglyphs are widespread. These pictoglyphs, however, are only a small part of the book. The petroglyphs from other places predominate and are equally stunning but in very different ways.

Some petroglyphs in the sub-Arctic area of Karelia in Russia appear to tell stories that seem easier to interpret. Those at Novaya Zalavruga, dating from 3700-2100 BCE, show how

three hunters on skis track and kill three elk: the tracks of the skiers and the elk run for a while parallel. In the centre and lower right there are not only a couple of beluga hunts and one or two bear hunts, but also a mortal fight between humans. Archers are shooting at each other and one of them is hit from behind by two arrows.

There is also a longboat with a crew of 12. One on the prow has harpooned a whale and the rope snakes back to the boat as if this has just happened.

These petroglyphs were buried in about 2100 BCE when the White Sea briefly rose and covered them with a thick layer of sand and silt. Humans returned to the island when the sea level fell but a later inundation by a river turned the area into a swamp. The petroglyphs only appeared again, and were documented, in the twentieth century.

Petroglyphs, especially those in the Scandinavian area, not only chart the rise and fall of sea levels due to climate change, their images also show the changes in flora and fauna and the way animals and humans migrated in order to survive. Over the millennia, they show how humans, although still hunting and fishing, began to domesticate and farm animals, to tame and then ride horses and camels, and to use ploughs, wagons and, later, light chariots. Changes in religious beliefs are reflected in Buddhist, Christian and Islamic inscriptions, iconography and motifs. Warfare, too, is shown. A Saudi Arabian petroglyph, created in the middle of the first millennium CE, shows four women with long braided hair and raised arms seemingly cheering on a battle.

The conservation of rock art is controversial. In Scandinavia the lines of the images are painted red to make them easy to see and protective coverings are devised. This is seen by some as destructive, but even recording the images by tracings and rubbings can damage them. In one notorious case, in 1956-7 the explorer Henri Lhote, supported by the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, led a team of photographers and well-qualified artists to Wadi Djerat in south-east Algeria ‘to make full scale coloured copies of the rock paintings based on in situ tracings’. To make the images clearer they were scrubbed with sponges and brushes, after which, chemical processes caused by moisture resulted in the disappearance of most of the paintings.

Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art is a superb record, with numerous accompanying illustrations, of many of the most important known rock art sites in Eurasia, Arabia and the Sahara. Many millennia of human history are here, from the earliest, rare, Neanderthal scratching on a few stones, to the planes, ships and bullet scars of modern times, as are the links to myth, magic and ritual that still exist in many societies. Charts and maps help to negotiate possibly unfamiliar names of geological, archaeological and historical eras; and the appendices, with notes and indexes, are extensive, although I found the division of indexes into ‘concepts’, ‘people’ and ‘places’ unhelpful.

Overall this is a beautifully created, easy to read, informative and very interesting book.

Christoph Baumer and Therese Weber Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art Bloomsbury 2025 HB 488pp $60.00

*Editor’s note: a paper published on 21 January 2026 by Australian and Indonesian researchers in the scientific journal Nature dates rock art found in Sulawesi to 67,800 years old. As Australian Geographic reports, this is ‘more than 30,000 years older than the oldest cave art found in France. It shows humans were making cave art images much earlier than we once believed.’

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Chauvet Cave, Christoph | Baumer, conservation of rock art, Eurasia, geoglyphs, graffiti, Karelia, paper art, petroglyphs, pictoglyphs, rock art, Sahara, Scandinavia, Therese | Weber, White Sea