Rock art worldings (Editorial)

Abstract

This and the previous (June) number of Time and Mind presents some proceedings from a week-long international conference held at Linnæus University in late October 2017: ‘Rock Art Worldings: Chronologies, Materialities and Ontologies.’ The conference, which I co-organized together with Ingrid Fuglestvedt (Oslo University) and Antti Lahelma (University of Helsinki), gathered more than 70 international scholars from all over the world. The conference aimed to explore different human cognitions and perceptions of the world, and how this might be unfolded through the global phenomenon that we – in the wish for a better notion – call ‘rock art.’ Its pursuit was to present a reconnaissance of rock art worldings; an exposé of how pictographs and petroglyphs can be used to explore different forms of ‘modes of identifications’ (e.g. Descola 2013), such as animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism (Goldhahn 2019a).