Translation and Transformation: The Materiality of Rock Art in a World of Bytes

Rock art is fundamentally material and local in several ways: its substrate’s material qualities affect how humans made it and interact with it (for instance, how visible it is), it is fixed in a specific landscape location, and it participates in local systems of knowledge ranging from what it is ontologically to what specific motifs represent. This article, working from a material culture perspective and using European rock art as an example, explores what happens when we translate rock art into other media, particularly digitised forms. The process of translation liberates rock art from its location and medium, heightens its visibility and representational clarity, passes it through filters prioritising some imagery (particularly narrative pictures) over others, and reinscribes it into new frames of reference. Thus, it often results in losing the fundamental material qualities that made it rock art, in the process refashioning it into an entirely new product that meets the needs of different people living in a different world.