ABSTRACT
In rock art, as in any other kind of material culture, there are many ways for artists to encode information about their social identity. Style has become a valuable tool in the decoding of this social information, despite the controversy about its validity as a chronological marker. In Levantine rock art, stylistic studies have mainly examined where formal features of individual motifs intersect or diverge. This chapter explores the stylistic study of Levantine rock art as a way of discerning changes in the identity of the artists on the basis of a regional study of the Levantine human figure. This study has important implications for current debates concerning the evolution of human behaviours in this region. The predominance of hunting scenes in the rock art panels has been used to argue for hunter-gatherer economy of the artists.
