During Scotland’s Rock Art Project, we used the information gathered by our Community Teams to carry out detailed research into Scotland’s rock art. This is the first nationwide project to investigate prehistoric carvings and their contexts across the whole country. Studying the carvings at a range of scales offered exciting opportunities to explore relationships between the rock art and the contexts in which it was created.
Our research focused on detailed investigation of the rock art at a small scale (the motifs, the ways in which they have been carved, and their relationship to the rock surface), a medium scale (the nature of the rocks selected for carving), and a large scale (the relationship between the rock art and its natural and cultural contexts).
Our methodology involved detailed scrutiny of around 1000 3D models of rock art from across Scotland, combined with a range of spatial and statistical analyses of rock art in relation to a range of landscape attributes, such as soil,, geology,, elevation and other archaeological monuments. We also used computational techniques to investigate visibility and mobility in relation to rock art from different regions of Scotland. You can find out more about our research in our webinar here
You can read our article Revealing the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland: The Dunchraigaig Deer, Kilmartin, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in 2023 by clicking on this link
You can read our article Close encounters: visibility and accessibility of Atlantic rock art in Scotland, published in 2022 in Abstractions Based on Circles (edited by P. Frodsham and K. Sharpe) by clicking on this link and downloading the free Open Access ebook.
