Using the pioneering research of David Lewis-Williams as a foundation, contributors from around the world examine how the availability of ethnographic analogies, or lack thereof, affect the interpretation of rock art.

1: Rock art with and without ethnography; 2: Flashes of brilliance: San rock paintings of heaven's things; 3: Snake and veil: The rock engravings of Driekopseiland, Northern Cape, South Africa; 4: Cups and saucers: A preliminary investigation of the rock carvings of Tsodilo Hills, northern Botswana 1; 5: Art and authorship in southern African rock art: Examining the Limpopo-Shashe Confluence Area; 6: Archaeology, ethnography, and rock art: A modern-day study from Tanzania; 7: Art and belief: The ever-changing and the never-changing in the Far West; 8: Crow Indian elk love-medicine and rock art in Montana and Wyoming; 9: Layer by layer: Precision and accuracy in rock art recording and dating; 10: From the tyranny of the figures to the interrelationship between myths, rock art and their surfaces; 11: Composite creatures in european Palaeolithic art; 12: Thinking strings: On theory, shifts and conceptual issues in the study of Palaeolithic art; 13: Rock art without ethnography?; 14: Meaning cannot rest or stay the same; 15: Manica rock art in contemporary society; 16: Oral tradition, ethnography, and the practice of North American archaeology; 17: Beyond rock art: Archaeological interpretation and the shamanic frame