Sailing through Stone: Carved Ships and the Rock Face at Revheim,Southwest Norway

The relationship between rock art and the material qualities of the rock surface on which it is executed is investigated. The case study of Revheim, Rogaland, Southwest Norway, is the starting-point for a discussion on the way in which the contours of the rock, quartz outcrops and the flow of water across the rock surface affect the placement of images on the rock. It is argued that a fuller examination of the interrelationship between rock and rock art provides a more coherent interpretation of rock art images.     

Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany

This article discusses Der gelbe Stern by Gerhard Schoenberner,a book of Holocaust photodocumentation appearing in West Germanyin 1960, and analyses its reception in the contemporary WestGerman press. Both the work and its public discussion are placedin context of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (‘comingto terms with the past’) and of what historian Habbo Knochhas termed ‘the return of the pictures’, in otherwords, atrocity pictures of the kind that the Allies forcedGermans to see right after the war, that Germans tended to shunthereafter, but that came back into public view in the late1950s. The reception of Schoenberner's book included reviewsfrom a wide range of West German newspapers and magazines. Thesereviews were overwhelmingly favourable and in considerable agreementon the book's importance. There was consensus that its pictureswould stir viewers emotionally and lead them to ‘the truth’about the Third Reich and its crime against the Jews. In addition,there were moral, historical and political reflections, includinga discussion of German ‘guilt’ concerned not onlywith specific crimes but with the general acquiescence of Germansociety in persecution of Jews in the 1930s. There was alsoappreciation of the role of pictures in conveying historicalunderstanding and, it was hoped, in educating West German youth.In addition, some reviewers considered Der gelbe Stern to bea prod to greater public discussion and thus to an enlargementof democratic culture. There was a marked reticence in the reviewsto indicate that awareness generated by this book would contributeto public outcry against the employment of men with a Nazi pastas high officials of the Federal Republic, or to defend Schoenberneragainst the charge that was sure to come from the Right: sincesome of his photos were from Communist Eastern Europe they wereof dubious origin and no doubt part of a plot to distract theWest from the fight against Communism. It is suggested thatsilence on either issue would have had the effect of keepingreaders focused on the pictures and their moral, historicaland democratic implications.     

Approaches to style in lithic archaeology

A key issue in lithic archaeology is how to identify the respective roles played by ethnicity and activity—that is, style and function—in the formal variation exhibited by stone tools. This paper argues that style is most profitably regarded as the ethnic idiom imparted to lithic technology in each and all of its aspects due to the culture-historical context of its manufacture and employment. Style is thus a full complement of function, and it is to be looked for wherever artisans encounter options of form and use to “choose” from in pursuing a given task. Because it equates ethnicity with functionally equivalent choice, this is labeled the isochrestic approach to style. Contrasted to this is the iconological approach, which restricts style solely to those aspects of formal variation that artisans purposefully invest with symbolic content reflecting self-conscious social groups. Pottery decoration appears to reveal such investment and therefore ceramic sociology is a feasible enterprise. However, a parallel iconological approach to stone tools is much less promising. At least as it is exemplified by the writings of Lewis Binford, lithic sociology would seem to have little substantive grounding in the relevant empirical data, to be argued within what may be an unsound theoretical frame (including the distinction between curative and expedient technologies), and in any case to resist translation into a workable analytic machinery. Not least among the reasons for this last is the fact that stone tools do not possess formal variation wherein iconologically significant investment can be objectively identified and defined. The archaeological frame of reference within which the isochrestic and iconological approaches are discussed is largely contributed by the classic Paleolithic sequence of the Perigord region of southwestern France.