This elegantly written book considers hunter-gatherer rock art in two understudied areas from two different continents. Its approach signals the importance of studying regional corpuses of rock art in comparative perspective. Jamie Hampson specifically examines the eastern Trans-Pecos, in western Texas, the United States, and the Bongani Mountain Lodge Game Reserve and Kruger National Park in the south-eastern corner of the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. The author's optimism that the meaning and significance of many bodies of rock art can be uncovered will be welcomed by rock art researchers. It also serves to counteract what Hampson terms ‘ethnographic despair’ — that is, the notion that the motives and meanings behind prehistoric rock art production are out of reach (15).

The author previously worked at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and the influence of this affiliation is clear. Hampson's approach follows that of David Lewis-Williams and colleagues, who have had success in interpreting southern African rock art using shamanism, San ethnography, and the neuropsychological basis of altered states of consciousness.Footnote ⁵

Hampson's new approach, which identifies and analyzes rock art regions by the presence or absence of diagnostic rock art motifs, offers exciting possibilities for future research. He presents a compelling case for defining rock art regions by ethnographically-informed patterns, a method that goes some way to avoiding the tricky and subjective terrain of stylistic analysis. Hampson assembles rock art motifs into categories based on their relative frequency in a geographical region. Those types are then further sub-divided into clusters that can be grouped through recourse to ethnographic analogy, and those that remain of unknown meaning. For example, in Southern Africa, the distribution and frequency of the formling motif could potentially be used to describe a rock art region in Zimbabwe and parts of northern South Africa.Footnote ⁶ Importantly, this technique serves as a starting point for asking questions about regional differences, including the motivations that inspired hunter-gatherers to make these motifs in some areas, but not in others. Hampson demonstrates the applicability of this method in two detailed case studies. This analysis constitutes this book's first major contribution.

The second major contribution relates to the ethnographically-informed interpretation of meanings and motivations that Hampson develops to explain the making of Trans-Pecos rock art, which is the main focus of the book. Hampson skillfully weaves together embodiment theory and neuropsychological models of altered states of consciousness with a wide ethnographic literature on shamanistic and animistic hunter-gatherers, in South and North America as well as Africa. This investigation enables Hampson to make a compelling case that this rock art was the product of a people who had a strong belief in supernatural potency and a tiered cosmos. He does not fall into the trap of playing ‘ethnographic snap’, that is, the borrowing of interpretations from one body of ethnography and rock art to understand a wholly different body of rock art.Footnote ⁷ Hampson consequently fulfills his aim to provide ‘complementary hypotheses that can be evaluated independently’ (83).

Besides these two major contributions, there is much thought-provoking material in this book. Topics include a detailed history of the ways North American rock art was perceived and studied from the late nineteenth century onwards, as well as an investigation into the use of peyote to induce altered states of consciousness among North American hunter-gatherers. Hampson furthermore points out that the process of making rock art was just as important, if not more so, than the product itself. He also considers carefully the interactions of the artists with the rock face and reflects on concepts of somatic transformation and embodiment theory to explain why rock art was produced.

The idea of regions as a framework for understanding rock art is central to Hampson's work. But there is much scope for further study on this topic, in order to fully develop the framework of rock art regions. Do different kinds of rock art indicate ‘different cosmologies or cultural belief systems’ (87)? This line of inquiry, which is not pursued in this book, will undoubtedly be aided by a better understanding of the age of rock art in both Southern Africa and North America and, indeed, worldwide. One of the weaknesses in Hampson's approach is that it overlooks chronologies of rock art production; there is thus a danger of seeing patterns across space that might unravel when analyzed through the added dimension of time.

This book deserves to be essential reading for rock art scholars. It will serve particularly well as a guide for those interested in exploring the connections that can be legitimately made between ethnography and rock art. While methodologically important, Africanist archaeologists might be disappointed that less than fifteen percent of the book covers the African continent. It is no doubt due to financial constraints that the images have been reproduced in black and white, which is a pity, especially for a book on rock art.