Rob Linrothe's Seeing into Stone is a beautiful and brave book. It is beautiful because it is filled with stunning color photography of the rock art, mostly petroglyphs carved and pecked into stone, and landscapes of Zangskar, India, its subject. The images in the book—more than 150 that are accompanied by another 143 on a companion DVD—are critical to the success of the volume because rock art is an intensely visual subject matter, and much of its interpretation depends on its context and placement within a landscape. The book is brave because it treads into an anthropological and archaeological domain that is deeply contested by those who conduct rock art studies and the many others who critique them. Rock art is almost impossible to place into a secure chronological framework unless observed motifs are found in a secure archaeological context or can be assigned to one via stylistic analysis. The interpretation of the motifs, even the labeling of images, is often problematic, and much of the literature tends to devolve into mere description. And those scholars who seek to interpret rock art through the lens of some cognitive or anthropological framework, such as shamanism, are often subjected to savage criticism.

Linrothe has deftly avoided most of the pitfalls in the study of rock art in this volume. His study area, broadly defined as the High Himalayas in Ladakh and Zangskar, is well known for the quantity and quality of rock art found there, which has seen a series of attempts over the past century to place it within a comprehensive regional framework to understand its origins and track its transformations over time. Although most of the art cannot be placed confidently into a time frame, some of it is clearly of the Buddhist era, and a small number of images can be attributed to the so-called “Animal Style,” more formally known as the Scythian-Saka Style, a distinctive, widespread rendering of animals dating to the first millennium BCE and thought to be of Central Eurasian origin.

The book, divided into four sections with each having between two and seven chapters, begins with an introduction that briefly describes Zangskar's geography and history. Trained as an art historian, Linrothe acknowledges his lack of specialist training in archaeology, but also notes that the analysis of rock art is a multidisciplinary endeavor, and does not necessarily belong to any one discipline. In chapter 1, he expands on this theme and describes the competing camps of rock art specialists: those who work from a primarily stylistic perspective versus those who eschew such studies as mere speculation and the imposition of the observer's personal biases and instead demand that any interpretation be first based on science-based approaches that fix the production of the image in time. Chapters 2–7 present his typology of the motifs encountered. The categories are familiar: the locations in which art is found, various animal and human representations, and abstract designs.

Regarding interpretation, Linrothe chooses no sides, but wisely opts for a middle ground, described in Chapters 8–11, that permits a careful, limited interpretation of motif based upon the regional archaeological record, ethnography, analogy, and consideration of the place and space of the art. Given that every science-based method to dating rock art has failed badly, this is an entirely reasonable and widely used approach. The trick, of course, is to make every effort not to get trapped in familiar tropes—shamanism, hunting magic, and the like—without some empirical warrant to do so. Although many of his interpretations are plausible, I find some problematic, such as the firm conclusion that the large majority of what he describes as hunting scenes—humans with bows and arrows or spears either shooting at or in pursuit of animals—date to the earliest occupation of the region, and were likely created between 3000 and 1000 BCE (p. 175). This ignores archaeological evidence from the region that people have hunted up until the modern era, and therefore, there is no a priori reason to assume that people of later periods could not be responsible for some of these scenes.

Chapters 12–14 are devoted to Buddhist-era art, and here, Linrothe is in more familiar territory. He places this art, mostly images of stupas, but also of Buddhas, within the interpretative framework of the tīrtha, which he describes, citing Diana Eck, as a “… spiritual ford which is the destination of pilgrims” (p. 135).Footnote ³ Although tīrthas may be associated with a literal stream crossing, they take on the more general role of sacred spaces that are imbued with the power of the spirit or the deity of that place. Linrothe makes a compelling argument about how the rock art images enhance and mark out these places, and often are found in prominent places of great natural beauty.

In the final chapters (15–16), Linrothe summarizes the observations he has made in the preceding chapters and evinces a healthy “agnosticism” (p. 172) about their veracity. Although I am also skeptical of many of his conclusions, especially those that treat the pre-Buddhist images, he has produced a book worth reading and reflecting upon. Finally, and most poignantly, he draws our attention to the wanton destruction of the stones on which the art is found—primarily for road construction, but also for houses, walls, and other facilities. None of these sites are under the protection of the Indian archaeological authorities in any serious manner, and even those in the remotest places are under constant threat. The people of Zangskar, as do we, owe Linrothe a debt of gratitude for preserving a visual and documentary record of this magnificent cultural heritage.