Working With Prehistoric Art 2nd Edition — A Practical Guide
I use Prehistoric Art 2nd Edition regularly when I need a reliable reference for cave art, petroglyph typology, and stratigraphic dating ranges. It's not a glamorous book. The binding cracks after about six months of heavy use if you keep it open flat. The plates are decent but some figures are reproduced at too small a scale for field work. That said, the chapters on Upper Paleolithic imagery and the Mediterranean rock art surveys are still the most useful compilations I've found, and I keep this as my go-to when someone asks where a particular motif comes from. The textbook is published by Wiley-Blackwell. You can order it directly from the publisher's site, from Amazon, or through academic book resellers like Barnes & Noble. The hardcover runs about $85 to $110 depending on the seller. The paperback is roughly half that price but the pages are thinner and the spine does not hold up as well. If you are a student, check your university library first — many programs have at least one copy on reserve. I found my copy at a campus surplus sale for $12. Avoid the rental options if you plan to use this as a long-term reference. Rentals arrive worn and the page numbers often do not match the current printing. Prehistoric Art 2nd Edition is organized around three main sections: European cave art, African and Middle Eastern rock art, and a shorter section on North and South American proto-historic petroglyphs. Each chapter includes a methodology breakdown, regional chronologies, and a bibliography that is more current than most introductory textbooks offer. The illustrations lean toward well-known sites — Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira — but the later chapters cover lesser-documented locations in the Sahara and the Kimberley region that most other books skip entirely.
The dating tables are useful but they reflect the publication date, so any work published after 2018 is not included. I cross-reference the tables with the latest Radiocarbon Database entries when I need precision. This adds about twenty minutes to my research process but it keeps the dates honest.
How to Actually Use This Book in Practice
The book is dense. Reading it cover to cover in one sitting is not practical. I break each chapter into two passes: first a quick skim of the headings and figure captions to locate the relevant section, then a careful read of just the passages that apply to the site or motif I am working with. This usually cuts my reading time from three hours down to about forty minutes for a single chapter. The index is alphabetized by site name and by motif type. If you know the region, look up the site. If you know the type of image — animal, hand stencil, geometric — search the motif index. Both routes save significant time compared to flipping through the text sequentially. One specific problem I ran into: Chapter 7 discusses Saharan rock art dating using patination analysis combined with stylistic sequencing. I was trying to apply those methods to a set of petroglyphs in the Tassili n'Ajjer area and found the published dates did not align with newer OSL results I had sourced from a 2021 journal article. The book lists the older range of 6,000 to 10,000 years BP for certain phases. The OSL data pushed some of those phases earlier by roughly 1,500 years. The workaround was straightforward — I kept the stylistic classifications from the book as a baseline and updated the chronology column in my notes with the newer dates. This hybrid approach works fine as long as you flag the discrepancy in any write-up or report.
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Common Mistakes People Make
The first mistake is treating the motif classifications as absolute. They are typological shorthand, not forensic identifiers. A similar spiral pattern appears in the Iberian Levantine art and in parts of Central African rock art, but the cultural contexts and dating ranges are completely different. Using the book's style categories as a universal key will get you confused quickly. The second mistake is assuming the plate reproductions are color-accurate. Some of the photographs, especially the ones from older surveys, are oversaturated or underexposed. I always verify critical visual details against the primary site reports linked in the bibliography. It adds time but it prevents errors that would otherwise surface during peer review or field verification.
What the Book Does Not Handle Well
The North American section is thin. If your work involves Mississippian or Ancestral Puebloan symbol systems, this book will not give you much to work with. The coverage stops at proto-historic petroglyphs and the bibliography for that section is limited. For those regions, I recommend supplementing with works by David S. Whitley or the Petroglyph West database. The European section is stronger but still incomplete on Southern Iberian and Scandinavian bronze age rock art. Those are major gaps if your research spans those areas. Another limitation: the book relies heavily on published site reports. It does not include raw survey data or unpublished field notes. If you need access to primary documentation, you will have to track down the original excavation reports or contact the responsible institutions directly. Factor in an extra few days for that process.
Who Should Use This Book
This is appropriate for upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate students who need a structured overview of prehistoric visual culture. It is not suitable for researchers who need primary site data or for anyone working exclusively on non-European or non-Saharan rock art traditions. The price point makes it a reasonable investment for students who plan to keep it, but a library copy is sufficient if you only need it for one semester. I keep a highlighted copy on my desk. The pages dog-eared at Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 are the ones I return to most often. That should tell you what I find most useful about it.
