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these can account for the absence of evidence for coastal resource use, particularly during the Pleistocene. The main focus of the volume is to address the importance and antiquity of coastal adaptations and resource use from the Pleistocene to mid-Holocene across a wide geographical area. As such, it revises the notion that coastal resources were relatively unimportant and only relied upon when other, more desirable (terrestrial) food sources were scarce. This book is a useful and up-to-date resource for those interested in a broad perspective of coastal resource utilisation and how issues relating to these are being addressed in different geographical research areas. It should be noted that it does not give a global overview, as vast areas of the world are not represented in this book (which would be impossible). However, the articles in this volume have certainly stimulated my interest in coastal resource use in these other areas, and I imagine it will do the same for other readers. References Avery, G., Halkett, D., Orton, J., Steele, T., Tusenius, M. & Klein, R. 2008. The Ysterfontein 1 Middle Stone Age rock shelter and the evolution of coastal foraging. South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 10: 66–89. Cortés-Sánchez, M., Morales-Muñiz, A., Simón-Vallejo, M.D., LozanoFrancisco, M.C., Vera-Peláez, J.L., Finlayson, C., Rodríguez-Vidal, J., Delgado-Huertas, A., Jiménez-Espejo, F.J., Martínez-Ruiz, F., Aranzazu Martínez-Aguirre, M., Pascual-Granged, A.J., Mercè Bergadà-Zapata, M., Gibaja-Bao, J.F., Riquelme-Cantal, J.A., López-Sáez, J.A., Rodrigo-Gámiz, M., Saburo Sakai, S., Sugisaki, S., Finlayson, G., Fa, D.A. & Bicho, N.F. 2011. Earliest known use of marine resources by Neanderthals. PloS One 6: e24026. Parkington, J. 2003. Middens and moderns: Shellfishing and the Middle Stone Age of the Western Cape, South Africa. South African Journal of Science 99: 243–247. Steele, T.E. & Klein, R.G. 2005/2006. Mollusk and tortoise size as proxies for Stone Age population density in South Africa: Implications for the evolution of human cultural capacity. Munibe. Antropologia-arkeologia 57: 221–237. Stiner, M.C. 1994. Honor Among Thieves: A Zooarchaeological Study of Neandertal Ecology. New Jersey: Princeton University Press Stringer, C.B., Finlayson, J.C., Barton, R.N.E., Fernández-Jalvo, Y., Cáceres, I., Sabin, R.C., Rhodes, E.J., Currant, A.P., Rodriguez-Vidal, J., Giles-Pacheco, F. & Riquelme-Cantal, J.A. 2008. Neanderthal exploitation of marine mammals in Gibraltar. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 14319–14324.

Karen van Niekerk Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion University of Bergen Norway

Blundell, G., Chippindale, C. & Smith, B. (editors) 2010. Seeing and Knowing. Understanding Rock Art with and without Ethnography. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 314 pp. ISBN 978-1-86814-513-3 (paperback). Price R355.00. Since the 1970s, rock art studies have contributed more than any other archaeological sub-discipline to our understanding of prehistoric religions, cognition and worldviews. David Lewis-Williams, to whom Seeing and Knowing is dedicated, has been – and continues to be – central to this seminal advance. The third volume in the Rock Art Research Institute Monograph Series, Seeing and Knowing grew out of a celebratory conference marking Lewis-Williams’s official retirement in 2000; this book echoes the title of his first major publication, Believing and Seeing (Lewis-Williams 1981). Although his work focuses primarily on southern Africa and, in more recent years, on western Europe, Lewis-Williams’s impact on rock art research has been truly international, and truly revolutionary. This is clear from the quality and range of the case studies in Seeing and

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Knowing. In 17 chapters, 19 authors pay tribute to and draw on Lewis-Williams’s contributions to rock art research and to cognitive interpretative archaeology in general. The research trajectory in southern African academia from the 19th century to recently published articles on San rock art demonstrates that two interacting resources – ethnography and the rock art images themselves – should undoubtedly be at the centre of enquiries into the reasons why the San painted and engraved. Seeing and Knowing is an elegant testimony to this approach. Today, the idea that ethnographic records, ethnohistory, and contemporary indigenous understandings could be treated as irrelevant to rock art research is risible. It is easy to forget, however, that as recently as the 1970s, when LewisWilliams published his first major articles, this statement was not true; ethnographic records and the utility of ethnographic analogy were routinely ignored by almost every rock art researcher in southern Africa and elsewhere. For more than a century, researchers have asked: what, exactly, is the relationship between the rock art and San beliefs and rituals? Do the images merely ‘illustrate’, or ‘reflect’, beliefs or, as eventually became apparent, are they more integrally and actively involved in the San belief system? Ethnographic research and analogy were – and remain – the most effective ways of discovering what the San themselves understood and understand by rock art motifs. As the 20th century wore on, further sources of evidence, such as ethology, improved dating techniques, and neuropsychological research opened up, but Lewis-Williams and his co-authors sensibly insisted that the mutually illuminating ethnography and rock art remain central. Southern Africa became a testing ground for widely applicable methodological principles. As Seeing and Knowing makes clear, the dual southern African context is also usefully comparable to research contexts in other parts of the world. In the introduction, the editors state that the successes in South African rock art research act as a “beacon in that darkness of gloom, which sees the meaning of rock art as unknowable, and therefore the whole enterprise of studying it as permanently stuck. If meaning can be known in South Africa and is known, then perhaps it can be and should be known elsewhere?” (p. 2). This sets the tone for the rest of the book. Although some researchers still find it easy to speak of ‘the art’ without linking their explanations to actual images and repeated features of images, the work of others – including the contributors to Seeing and Knowing – is more focused. Diligent and astute researchers are now able to move beyond a vague and slippery notion of ‘the art’ and tackle specific questions in specific contexts. The confidence with which the 19 authors of Seeing and Knowing make their analogies and inferences is carefully justified, regardless of how ‘direct’ or numerous their ethnographic references are. There is no naïve ethnographic ‘snap’ here (Garlake 1994); rather, by employing sound theoretical and methodological frameworks, the contributors develop a range of intellectual possibilities within which individual case studies and models are posited and then evaluated. In this way, researchers demonstrate – not merely assume – differences as well as similarities within and between rock art corpuses and worldviews, across space and also through time. A précis of each of Seeing and Knowing‘s chapters is not possible here, but, following Lewis-Williams and the editors’ introduction, each author makes two key points clearly, and with confidence: first, there is no need for defeatism regarding what actually happened in the past – we can and do know at least some of the reasons why prehistoric artists created rock

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art, and what those images meant, to the original artists and to subsequent viewers. Indeed, because there are and were shared social meanings – although polysemic, these meanings are not untrammelled – and because these meanings are accessible at least in part, we can be confident when proposing hypotheses and confident when stressing the symbolic and powerful nature of rock art in specific contexts. Second, the contributors to Seeing and Knowing demonstrate that ethnographic and neuropsychological models need not smother further research. Clearly, ethnography – like any methodology that enables archaeological interpretation – needs to be used with caution. It is a truism that there are both spatial and temporal limits to ethnographic analogy. By employing nuanced variations of what the editors call the ‘classic’ ethnographic-neuropsychological approach to hunter-gatherer rock art, most of the contributors (e.g. Whitley, Clottes, Vinnicombe, Loendorf, Ouzman, Loubser, Walker, Morris, Lim) show skillfully that the comprehension of one facet of a specific group’s cosmology or rock art allows further insights about others. Several authors (especially Price, Francis & Loendorf, T. Sætersdal, E. Walderhaug Sætersdal) highlight the fact that employment of the ‘classic’ approach does not inevitably lead to sidestepping issues surrounding temporal change. The meanings of images – or, more precisely, one or more of an image’s polysemic meanings – may have changed through time, but we must not forget that those changes, and the significance of those changes, need to be demonstrated. Most of the contributors wisely draw much from LewisWilliams’s work on focused polysemy and penumbral associations. Other authors (e.g. Eastwood, Blundell & Smith) concentrate more on regional differences, and how rock art motifs change as one moves geographically from one rock art ‘corpus’ to the next. The manner in which researchers approach rock art regionalism is becoming an increasingly important aspect of archaeological research. I have argued recently that it is more useful to define rock art regions and ‘traditions’ primarily by content – the presence and absence of definable motifs, some of which are intelligible from an ethnographic perspective – rather than by aesthetics or other ‘formal’ methods (e.g. Hampson et al. 2002; Hampson 2011). One could quibble over one or two facets of this book. Although evenness of coverage was not the intent of the editors, chapters on Australian, South American, and Asian rock art would have been welcome additions. Meg Conkey’s paper on the place of theory in rock art research, with particular reference to recent shifts in Upper Palaeolithic scholarship, is noteworthy; perhaps a chapter on the evolution of rock art research in southern Africa (e.g. Lewis-Williams 2006) would have sat nicely alongside her perceptive analysis? More importantly, the utility of the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informed’ methods to understand rock art remains a contentious issue (Chippindale & Taçon 1998). The methods employed in Chapters 7–10 (Whitley, Loendorf, Loubser, Helskog), for instance, are surely as ‘informed’ as those employed in previous chapters, despite the editors’ implication to the contrary. Conkey points out that “no formal methods could ever be taken up outside of some informing context, and anyone investigating imagery from an informing context approach must also use some methods or means to link the informing context to the images” (p. 200). Chapters 15–17 (T. Sætersdal, Francis & Loendorf, Price) are purportedly concerned with ‘change and its consequences’, but so are the majority of chapters. There is a sense here in particular that these last three contributions were elbowed together simply because they did not fit elsewhere.

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These, however, are minor criticisms that should not detract from this admirable and theoretically sophisticated collection of papers. Using rock art as empirical data, the 17 chapters show that regardless of where we work, cognitive archaeology is both feasible and useful. Like the “silent forms” on Keats’s urn, rock paintings “tease us out of thought as doth eternity ” (Keats, quoted in Lewis-Williams 1981: ix). Since the book is dedicated to him, perhaps it is fitting that Lewis-Williams should have the last word. In Believing and Seeing, he stated that it would “be rash to suggest that what we can learn from the San art illuminates rock art elsewhere, but it does at least provide a well documented case study. Any data on so elusive a goal as understanding hunter-gatherer rock art is to be prized” (Lewis-Williams 1981: ix–x). Seeing and Knowing does justice to Lewis-Williams’s corpus of academic work – a corpus that continues to grow. References Chippindale, C. & Taçon, P.S.C. (eds). 1998. The Archaeology of Rock-Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garlake, P.S. 1994. Archetypes and attributes: rock paintings in Zimbabwe. World Archaeology 25: 346–355. Hampson, J.G. 2011. Rock art regionalism and identity: case studies from the Texas Trans-Pecos and Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Hampson, J.G., Challis, W.R., Blundell, G.B. & de Rosner, C. 2002. The rock art of Bongani Mountain Lodge and its environs, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa: an introduction to problems of southern African rock-art regions. South African Archaeological Bulletin 57: 17–32. Lewis-Williams, J.D. 1981. Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meaning in Southern African Rock Paintings. London: Academic Press. Lewis-Williams, J.D. 2006. The evolution of theory, method and technique in southern African rock art research. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13: 343–377.

Jamie G. Hampson University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Sul Ross State University, USA

Phillips, C. & Allen, H. (editors), 2010. Bridging the Divide: Indigenous Communities in Archaeology into the 21st Century. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. 290 pp. ISBN 978-1-59874393-7 (paperback). Price US$36.95. This book is about one of the most political issues in the discipline of archaeology: the nature of the relationship archaeologists have with ‘Indigenous Communities’ in pursuit of an informed understanding of the past. This is a subject that occupies us archaeologists as we strive to address the divide that exists between us and our significant stakeholders. Such a divide has not been caused by a ‘lack of education’ amongst indigenous communities, but instead by the manner in which we as archaeologists have undertaken our research, i.e. the collection of archaeological materials and ‘human remains’, lack of transformation within archaeology (Smith 2009), etc. It is much more politically sensitive to define who indigenous communities are in southern Africa than is the case in New Zealand and Australia (the two main countries covered in the book). This already speaks to the deep seated challenges in African archaeology, when it comes to the involvement of indigenous communities. Bridging the Divide is partly an outcome of the 2nd Indigenous WAC Inter-Congress held in Aetearoa, also known as New Zealand (2005) and published in the One World Archaeology series. It is edited by two established archaeologists, who have