Why does the history of rock art research matter?

In many regions of the world, we can learn more about past societies from their rock art than from any other archaeological source. Rock art research opens up new vistas on Indigenous beliefs about ‘being in the world’. That said, histories of archaeology and anthropology, often imply that until recently there were no systematic studies of rock art. Some overviews of the history of archaeology devote a page or two to rock art studies; others do not mention rock art at all. Implicit theoretical biases within the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology have led to the privileging of stratigraphic excavation, or in the wording of Thomas Dowson (1993: 642), ‘occupational debris’. Ironically, and echoing the famous notion that ‘archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’ (Willey and Phillips 1958: 2), the implication in these work. In this article we argues for why the history of rock art research matters.