Petroglyphs are since the Upper Palaeolithic one of the oldest types of human visual expression. They not only reflect societal and economic adaptations to climate and environmental changes but also encapsulate the worldviews, myths and rituals that were prevalent at the time. As climate dramatically changed since the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene Climatic Optimum and again to a renewed climatic cooling and gradual desiccation, fauna, flora and humans had to adapt. These changes are recorded in petroglyphs. Regarding pre-literate societies, they represent, together with archaeology, one of the most informative sources to gain insights in bygone cultures. The makers of petroglyphs were masters of abstraction, using the simplest of tools to capture the essence of a wide variety of animals, humans and objects, and to depict complex scenes. In this sense, petroglyphs are pieces of ancient art. In spite of their great antiquity, petroglyphs regained in the last decades in topicality as contemporary artists find in them inspiration and a means to gain access to their own cultural heritage.

The illustrated lecture is related to Christoph Baumer’s and Therese Weber’s recent book Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art (Bloomsbury) which is the result of thirty years of petroglyph research in Central Asia, Scandinavia, Arabia and the Sahara.