Not only is this one of the most beautiful rock art books to have been produced in recent years, it also presents wonderful imagery that was hitherto not well known outside of Norway. The first rock carvings were found in this remote northern part of the country in the late 1940s, but it was only in the mid 1970s that the discoveries were made that revealed it to be a major rock art centre—there are thousands of figures. In 1985, the Alta rock art was added to the World Heritage list, and, six years later, a fine museum was opened.
The figures are carved and incised into reddish-brown slate, sandstone and volcanite. They are dominated by reindeer (sometimes in a kind of enclosure) and elk, but one of the most striking and attractive motifs is the bear, often depicted with long lines of its tracks. There are also fishes (mostly large halibut), birds, boats (sometimes with elk-head prows), humans and enigmatic geometric motifs. There are also some fairly crude rock paintings made with red ochre, but they constitute only 0.5 per cent of the corpus.
Knut Helskog, one of Norway's foremost rock art specialists, has devoted decades to the detailed study of Alta's imagery, in the face of numerous difficulties. The first of these, of course, is chronology, since nothing here can be directly dated, and no figures can be assigned an age with any certainty on the basis of motif or shape. It is thought that the artists generally made their images on or just above the waterline, and so chronology is established mostly by the land rise that followed the Ice Age. The carved figures lie between 26.5m and 8.5m above sea level, and the dating of shoreline areas determines the maximal age of the motifs—with the oldest located on the uppermost rock surfaces.
Helskog divides the figures into six periods, from 5000 BC to AD 100. He looks at the natural surroundings, the techniques used to make the images (basically direct and indirect percussion) and the different motifs, systematically highlighting their diversity and changes through time. Some are particularly intriguing, such as people holding huge poles topped with elk heads. There are also hunting scenes, often involving bears or fish, although it is sometimes very hard to know which figures go together and which form groups or scenes, rather than being mere accumulations of single images.
The author also believes, very convincingly, that the topography of the rock surface may have been understood as mountains, valleys, rivers and lakes, and hence played a crucial role in the tales relating to the figures. Bears, for instance, sometimes seem to emerge from cracks or recesses that probably represent dens or the underworld.
The second major difficulty facing Helskog is the complete lack of ethnography that could shed light on the possible meanings of the imagery. He therefore relies heavily on some basic recent beliefs of Samis and Karelians—for example, where bear cults are concerned—and extrapolates them to the remote past. The author's interpretations, although often mere speculations, are nevertheless extremely reasonable and plausible, and constitute a very refreshing change from the fake certainties and dogmas about ‘shamans’ and ‘trance’ that have plagued rock art studies in recent decades.
Helskog proposes that both ritual events and stories are represented in the Alta imagery, and that the figures were a means of communication with other people and non-human beings: spirits, underworld beings and the dead or souls, including the depicted animals. People appealed to them, probably based on a belief that living beings and inert objects and natural phenomena had souls—in short, they had animistic beliefs, where everything had a consciousness and identity of its own, independent and imbued with a will. So there is a large measure of subjectivity here, but, as Helskog himself puts it, “the present work is my communication with the past, my story” (p. 19).
Thousands of visitors now come to Alta every year, using the extensive walkways and platforms to see the petroglyphs. They are, of course, forbidden to stray off these paths for the sake of conservation. In the past, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, many of the figures were highlighted in red for easier viewing, but this practice has now been discontinued at Alta. It can be difficult to make out the non-highlighted figures—the optimal viewing conditions are in the low light of sunrise and sunset, although the most magical time is in the low midnight sun of summer.
Even though there are numerous wonderful panels to be seen, they are doubtless just the tip of the iceberg. I well remember, during a visit in the 1990s, being taken into an area still covered by vegetation, where great mats of turf and other plants could be lifted and rolled back to expose exquisite pristine petroglyphs such as bears and their tracks emerging from dens. These probably remain hidden and protected, for the delectation of future generations of researchers.
My one quibble with this magnificent book is that it is not always easy to make out what the author is describing in some photographs—explanatory drawings would have been helpful in those cases. Overall, however, this beautifully produced volume, aimed at the general public, and so lavishly illustrated with colour photographs and drawings, is unsurpassed and deserves an honoured place in every rock art library.
