Rock art is one of the most ubiquitous material cultural expressions in the world and can be found on virtually every continent. In this edited book, 26 authors and 15 chapters address the question of how rock art, dating from the Pleistocene to recent times, is viewed in a variety of contemporary settings including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. Judging from the useful historical summaries given in most chapters, it is apparent that fully fledged archaeological research of rock art only started in the late twentieth century. Prior to this time a wide variety of individuals from outside archaeology were the main publishers of rock art. Also neglected until recently are various stakeholders associated with rock art, ranging from indigenous descendants through current landowners to the curious public.

It is the explicit intention of the book to focus attention on the stakeholders, particularly how indigenous descendants and/or local communities interact with archaeologists, governmental institutions, and business interests. Most chapters assess these interactions in the light of sustainable conservation and management practices. Using Uganda as an example, Namono shows in Chapter 2 how these practices are influenced by particular stakeholders and proposes that it matters if memory makers and memory consumers are of the same cultural tradition or not. In this regard it is useful to differentiate interactions based on personal community ties (gemeinschaft) from those based on impersonal relations (gesellschaft). Various case studies among indigenous communities show that because rock art locales are at least as important as the images, traditional knowledge regarding these enduring landscape features help sustain and are sustained by regional community-based ties. Where cultural descendants have been removed from traditional landscapes (e.g., South African San people as described by Smith in Chapter 7) and/or where new religions take over a region (e.g., Buddhists in Thailand as described by Tan et al. in Chapter 3), then impersonal relations with the rock art tend to prevail. There are of course exceptions; for example, Eisenberg-Degen and colleagues (Chapter 8) showing how late eighteenth-century Bedouin arrivals in the Negev continued to create petroglyphs more or less on the same surfaces as their predecessors. It is moreover worth noting that archaeologists and other outside individuals tend to have impersonal relations with communities that live around rock art sites regardless of their best intentions and efforts. For this and other reasons, the emic approach of a community toward rock art interpretation and maintenance usually contrasts with the etic approach of archaeologists and other outsiders.

Chapter 6 by Dongoske and Hays-Gilpin shows how indigenous Zuni people not only perceive rock art but also associated rocks, water, plants, animals, and the landscape east of the Grand Canyon as sentient entities that participated in their eastward migration. The ongoing well-being of these entities is proactively cared for by current Zuni people, fortunately with the help of various agencies. Indigenous Australians living in the Northern Territory (Brady and Bradley, Chapter 5) and Cape York Peninsula (Cole, Chapter 9) view and treat spirit ancestors and other spirit beings as part of a sentient and life-sustaining country. Believing that the spirits of their ancestors still live in the rocks with paintings, it is important for living descendants to care for rocks, plants, and animals lest the spirits cause the rock paintings to deteriorate. Taçon (Chapter 11) mentions that the Zhuang people of southwest China are protective of cliff paintings depicting their ancestors done by powerful spirits and still leave the spirits offerings of food.

The wide time gap that separates Pleistocene rock art from current inhabitants in places such as eastern Spain (Domingo and Bea, Chapter 10) implies that impersonal relationships prevail not only between the art and the people but also between stakeholders. Although rock art in this part of the world has benefited substantially from proactive research, conservation, and management by archaeologists, insightful interpretation of the art should be informed by comparative ethnography, such as successfully done by Clottes in neighboring France. In Chapter 5 Brady and Bradley propose that archaeologists should “move away from a description of what is seen or represented in rock art to instead consider the social dynamics” (pp. 83–84). Contrary to this statement, close observation, recording, and analysis of rock art, in conjunction with a study of social dynamics, have advanced rock art studies. This is demonstrated, for example, by Smith's Chapter 7 account of Vinnicombe and Lewis-Williams's groundbreaking work in the Drakensberg of South Africa during the late 1970s, culminating into San rock art becoming the centerpiece of the official South African national coat of arms in 2000. Instead of being viewed as mutually exclusive, detailed investigation of rock art content should be integrated with case-by-case investigations of meaning and significance. Such an integrated approach guards against armchair archaeology and spurious conclusions.

The editors and contributing authors should be congratulated for producing an informative book on current issues regarding rock art management. Knowing that rock art sites have been foci not only of collaboration but also of contestation, it is recommended that a future book explores the internal dynamics and divisions among indigenous communities and among stakeholders. Although Chapter 4 by Norder and Zawadzka hints at internal divisions, readers can perhaps benefit from having more information on local sociopolitical and cultural dynamics.