ROCK ART FROM WEST AND SOUTH WEST ARABIA: SOCIO-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY’S INSIGHTS FOR THE REGION’S EASTERN TRANSITION ZONES

Abstract

Socio-cultural anthropology has a fairly long record of contributing expertise to the analysis and

interpretation of rock art, although that record was somewhat neglected in recent times. The present paper

offers an updated usage of that legacy from a particular methodological angle, by putting it into practice

through comparative means for South West and West Arabian evidence from the hilly and mountain parts

of the region‟s transition zones to the east. That evidence was primarily established during an ethnographic

documentation and field work project of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The visual results from this as well

as from other projects presently are systematically classified and analyzed in Vienna, in the framework of

the Institute for Social Anthropology‟s “Visual Archive for South West Arabian Ethnographic Materials” at

the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This article builds on a first survey of about one dozen examples of rock

art cases, but selects only a couple among them considered to be fairly representative of the overall

collection. The empirical sample then is addressed by means of comparative insights from socio-cultural

anthropology. The sample primarily represents visualizations of hunting scenes. The analytical and

methodological tools best suited for discussing it are derived from anthropology‟s expertise about the

contexts and relevance of human hunting activities under early scriptural conditions. As long as few other

methods of dating can yet be applied to most of the materials in this particular sample, and parallel to

possibly more reliable ways of dating in the future, precise conceptualizations about the contexts and

features of hunting under early scriptural conditions will remain indispensable.