ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses south Scandinavian petroglyphs as "material articulations". This means to emphasize the relationships that they help to integrate and to focus on their material conditions, their production process, and on how new and old motifs relate to each other, the rock face, and the local environment. The idea that an image, thing, or practice can be entangled in a multitude of relationships is perhaps most frequently discussed within various strands of Actor-Network Theory. Such relational and non-representational perspectives favor relational connections before categorical thinking. This view has also been explored in anthropology, geography, and archaeology. In Scandinavian rock art research, a distinction is generally made between a northern hunter-gatherer tradition and a southern tradition emerging at the beginning of the Bronze Age. The south Scandinavian petroglyphs have traditionally been interpreted as a cultural expression of Bronze Age ideology, religion, or cosmology.
