Abstract
The study of religion or spirituality as related to rock art consists of a variety of definitions and approaches, and here we examine what constitutes those beliefs, oral traditions, practices, and rituals as they are represented in the landscape with rock art. In this worldwide collection of essays we are concerned with how one class of material culture―rock art―is employed to address issues regarding the internal and external dynamics of religion/spirituality. Spirituality in modern societies along with data on past religions indicates that premodern religious or spiritual concepts were complex and inclusive. Prehistoric groups likely viewed the world as composed of living humans and a range of nonhuman spirits or beings, dead ancestors, and animate forces. This totality of life or spirituality was largely linked to religious or moral systems, unlike modern cultures where spirituality may be divorced from religion in the mind of the practitioner. Also, unlike modern Western views of spirituality, earlier peoples did not appear to limit or compartmentalize individual and societal expression of incorporeal needs and desires. Instead, spirituality and the inanimate world were intertwined in their daily life. Recognizing that spirituality is an interlinked system of ideas, behaviors, and physical characteristics implies that the latter can be used to infer the former, and this method is used in many of the studies presented here.
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Gillette, D.L., Greer, M., Hayward, M.H., Murray, W.B. (2014). Introduction to Rock Art and Sacred Places. In: Gillette, D., Greer, M., Helene Hayward, M., Breen Murray, W. (eds) Rock Art and Sacred Landscapes. One World Archaeology, vol 8. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8406-6_1
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