ABSTRACT
This chapter recovers some of the meanings and motivations behind the production and consumption of rock art in Trans-Pecos Texas and Kruger National Park and environs in South Africa using anthropological and archaeological approaches. It argues that judicious use of anthropologically informed frameworks and neuropsychological models are useful analytical tools when people are explicating the significance of regional rock art corpuses. The chapter shows that six repeated and diagnostic Trans-Pecos motifs can be seen as rationalisations and manifestations of the tiered cosmos on rock surfaces. The precise effect that rock art had in hunter-gatherer societies in the past, both before and after contact with agriculturalist and colonial settlers, is hard to determine. Most rock art researchers and site managers now acknowledge that rock art images were potent in the past and, crucially, that the images are still potent today.
