ABSTRACT
Not all formal investigations focus on shamanism or employ neuropsychological principles. To the contrary, they include a variety of approaches that address a plethora of concerns from a number of different theoretical perspectives, and employ a wide range of rock art data. In this sense, they exhibit (with a few exceptions) a lack of theoretical or methodological cohesiveness, and many of them stand more as individual case studies rather than as widely followed general approaches to analysis. But they also exhibit notable creativity in their use of rock art data for understanding the past. This is important to emphasize, due to the significance of independent analytical models and empirical data in the support of a preferred hypothesis. In this chapter, we look at formal approaches beyond those concerned solely with shamanism, focusing on the approaches that are most common and widely employed.
