‘New’ Rock Art from Gua Tambun, Perak, Malaysia
Tan, N. H. and Chia, S.
Rock Art Research, 2010, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 9-18.

The rock art site at Gua Tambun in Perak, Malaysia was first reported in 1959 and was noted for its spectacular collection of rock art with depictions of anthropomorphs, animal figures and abstract shapes. Little scholarly attention was paid to it, however, and much of the interpretations produced thus far on the rock art have been speculative or unverified. The site was revisited by the authors in January 2009 in order to examine, record and study the rock art in detail. During the course of the fieldwork, individual rock art elements were identified and recorded, including a number of ‘new’ motifs, which are presented in this paper for the first time. The total count now stands at slightly over 500 distinct rock art elements, spread over ten distinct panels, making Gua Tambun one of the largest rock art sites in Malaysia, if not the largest.

Sapa ancient carved rock field to be introduced in Sweden
Vietnam Net Bridge, 28 July 2009

An exhibition about the ancient carved rock field in Sapa, the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai, Vietnam will take place at the Vasterrbotten Museum in Sweden from September 27 to November 8.

The Hanoi Art University have made surveys and produced 150 large-sized photos about the ancient rock field in Sapa since 2003. In 2006, the “Sapa ancient rock field” exhibition was held in Hanoi, using these materials and some artworks by foreign painters, which have close connection to the ancient figures carved on Sapa ancient rocks.

The Hanoi Art University’s materials will be displayed at the exhibition in Sweden.

photo credit: Wm Jas

Ancient cavemen getting high, drawing on walls? Something related to this idea was explored by Lewis-Williams and Dowson about 20 years ago when he proposed that some rock art forms may be derived from of entoptic phenomena that one envisions when hallucinating. The idea is that when humans hallucinate, they experience visual phenomena such as dots, lines and zigzags that constantly move or change into one form or another. Since the hallucinations are a function of the human nervous system, the experiencing of entoptic phenomena is a universal experience rather than a cultural one – a model can be constructed to explain how humans can construct images when experiencing an altered of consciousness.

This Neuropsychological Model, as it has come to be called, unfolds in a series of three stages, firstly with the experiencing of entoptic forms, followed by the mind trying to make sense of the entoptic forms by transforming them into more familiar forms (this is where cultural specifivity comes in, where a bunch of zigzags can turn into a zebra for one person and a lightning bolt for another), and then finally these iconic forms themselves start undergoing drastic changes themselves, such as becoming more vivid or the clichéd vortex effect. The workability of the model was then applied to examples of rock art around the world, including the prehistoric art in Europe as well as in the relatively more recent South African San, looking for art that would occur in these three stages.

Lewis-Williams and Dowson’s ideas were quite novel and still generate some discussion today over the role altered states of consciousness could have played in the production of rock art, since hallucinations are quite easily induced. Of course there have been quite a few valid criticisms about the model, such as the universality of the entoptic forms across time, and that the model still doesn’t explain the meaning behind the rock art, but provides a really plausible explanation for how they might have originated. And there’s been renewed interest in the role of shamanism, and in particular the role of trance, in the production of rock art, which in itself may not be universal.

But the point about shamanism is why the story of the trippin’ wallabies is so intriguing. While ‘shamanism’ implies some sort of agency, that the entering into an altered state of consciousness via narcotics (where and if applicable) is a deliberate act, could some rock art have been produced accidentally through the same means? Another possibility for non-deliberate agency in the creation of rock art could be mental illness, as seen in this early 20th century engravings on the wall of a dementia praecox sufferer.

I’m quite sure getting stoned was probably not a factor behind the rock art at the site I’m investigating, at least it would be highly unlikely they were stoned like the wallabies. But it would be an interesting line of inquiry to look into ethnographic examples of narcotic use or inducing an altered state of consciousness among traditional peoples in Southeast Asia, to see if such a possibility could exist in the region.

More information about the course can be found here, and you can read about my experiences at last year’s World Rock Art Course here. The prices listed on the site might seem a little high, but if there’s enough interest from local residents a subsidised price can be arranged. To get an idea of how much you may have to fork out, my course fees came up to about RM600 for the five days; but the fee excluded accomodation. At this point of time I understand it’s hard to come up with a fee structure for local/Southeast Asian residents until there’s a better idea of the numbers interested, so if you think you’re up for it please register your interest with Barry at tpa@nottingham.ac.uk

Relics from the past at the Sarawak museum
The Star, 26 March 2009

A NEW History Gallery has opened at the Sarawak Museum, chronicling the state’s history from its pre-Brunei Sultanate days right up to independence.

Located on the first floor of Dewan Tun Abdul Razak, the gallery is divided into several sections in chronological order – from the Santubong era (7th-14th century) and the Brunei Sultanate era (15th-19th century) to the Brooke era (1841-1946), the Japanese Occupation (1941-45), colonial rule (1946-63) and finally independence.

Sarawak’s history is told through various artifacts, photographs and documents displayed according to their respective eras.

While I do have physical finds to examine, the bulk of my data consists of the visual imagery that’s been recorded on forms and by the digital camera. For each rock art element that’s been recorded in the field, digital image analysis on the computer helps to confirm – or more often, expand on – what’s been observed by the naked eye. This is particularly important since I’m building an inventory of what’s on the walls of the site. The top left image is the ‘raw’ image rom the site using a DSLR. The subject of the photo is the anthromorph, but you can see some other rock paintings to the right and one rectangular shape between the left leg and foot, as well as some exfoliation on the bottom left corner.

On the top right is the same image run through a decorrelation stretch, a nifty image processing filter that basically translates the original colour matrix (RGB) into a different one (in this case, LDS) which results in a false-colour image that makes certain colours more distinctive than others. The type of colours enhanced depends on the type of stretch matrix used – and you can see here that the anthromorph turns up purple, and some red dots that were nearly invisible to the naked eye also show up quite nicely in this image.

The combination of the original and false-colour image are then used to derive two more images, the highlight photo (bottom left) and the shape photo (bottom right). A highlight photo is basically a black and white version of the original with the rock art subject in colour. It makes a good illustrative device to draw attention to a single element, particularly in more crowded images with complex compositions. The shape photo is a negative version of the highlight photo – it only shows the isolated black-and-white element on a white background.

Interestingly enough, this rock painting was first described as a ‘man with a club’ – after the digital image analysis, it looks like the ‘club’ appears to be entirely separate – in fact, what may be the left ‘hand’ has been weathered away by exfoliation, so there’s no way to be sure – which means that I’ll have to record the ‘anthomorph’ and the ‘hand’ as two seperate elements.

All this tweaking on photoshop is quite time-consuming. A small investment in a computer tablet (where you use a stylus instead of a mouse) goes quite a long way in making accurate digital tracings – not to mention the frustrations with using a mouse for such precise work!

The field crew: Nick, Suresh, Velat, Dr Stephen, me

The rock art is situated in a rock shelter approximately 175m above sea-level and contains numerous depictions of animals and humans, along with plenty of other shapes that have yet to be discerned as well as many others that have been damaged by erosion and quarrying. The purpose for this field session was to map and survey the site, while documenting rock art in order to compile an inventory. For this purpose, a scaffolding was erected, about 30 feet high and 25 feet wide, in order to take a close look at the rock art situated at the main cluster in the centre of the rock shelter. Samples from the site were also collected for later investigation.

The scaffolding used to access the main concentration of rock art in the cave

The typical day starts around 8 am, starting with breakfast at one of Ipoh’s many fine coffee shops for our daily dose of ba-kopi (white coffee) or cham (a tea and coffee mixture). Then begins a short trek to the site, which involves cutting through a polo field, a short walk through a newly-placed gravel track and then a gruelling climb up a steep flight of stairs. Work usually starts before nine, and doesn’t stop until after one where we break for lunch. Most of the fieldwork was spent inspecting and defining each rock art ‘element’ before documenting and photographically recording them. In the afternoon it was much harder to take photographs, because the sun shining onto the westward-facing site and the shadows cast by the scaffolding, so work was more geared towards documentation and field surveys. At the end of the day, we lock up the access ladder to the scaffolding before heading back to our rented rooms nearby. Nights were spent reconciling forms with the photographs taken that day, and backing up the data on two sources – my laptop and a portable hard disk.

While I can’t reveal many specific details of the results (you’ll just have to wait until publication), the preliminary findings are certainly quite exciting: we’ve documented far more rock art than was initially thought to be there (50 years ago, the estimate was between 30-50 paintings); back at the labs, I’ll be doing more digital analysis to tease out more details from the art while also running some physical and chemical tests on some of the physical samples.

You can check out more of the pictures from the fieldwork here.

Me, on the 7th level of the scaffolding, about 30-35 ft above the floor

Related Books:
- Encyclopedia of Malaysia V04: Early History (The Encyclopedia of Malaysia)
- World Rock Art (Conservation and Cultural Heritage Series)
- The Archaeology of Rock-Art (New Directions in Archaeology Series)
- Rock Art Research
- Introduction to Rock Art Research
- Handbook of Rock Art Research

(my bad. i had inadvertedly got only half of Dr George Nash's face in this shot)

The course was attended by 11 participants from around the world (Malaysia, Singapore, US, UK, Canada and Australia) who were given an overview of specific rock art traditions from around the world, including examples from Australia, England, Spain, and of course, Malaysia. The course instructor were Paul Tacon and Sally May from Griffith University in Australia, George Nash, a visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol, Mokhtar Saidin from Universiti Sains Malaysia, as well as Barry Lewis, from the University of Nottingham’s Trent & Peak Archaeology. I had previously met Paul and Barry at a conference last year, and Paul and Sally have been more recently in the news with the discovery of contact rock art in Northern Australia.

Besides learning about the different rock art traditions (it should be noted that rock art can be found in almost every part of the world), we also got an idea of how to go about researching and documenting rock art sites, especially with the current use of digital image processing. It must be said that rock art is still seen somewhat as being on the fringes of traditional (pit and trench) archaeology, partly because earlier researchers tended to be focused on making (mostly inaccurate or unsubstantiated) interpretations about the rock art, and also partly because rock paintings and engravings are so notoriously hard to analyse as an archaeological material.

These days, a primary concern is preserving, protecting and recording such rock art in the most non-invasive way possible. There is much emphasis on using accurate recording techniques, as well as working with the traditional custodians wherever possible. Also, technology has improved quite a bit, allowing researchers to analyse paintings on a microscopic level, as well as using digital image processing to retouch and restore paintings on a digital canvas.

George and James holding the ranging poles in an attempt at photogrammetry

Shell and bone fragments recovered from the very-disturbed surface of the rock shelter

I felt particularly fortunate that the field trip conducted at my research site – it’s not every day that you have some of the world’s foremost authorities on rock art giving you lots of helpful suggestions and insights on how to go about your research.

World Rock Art: Landscapes and Cultures was held on 23-27 Nov. There’s a plan to conduct a longer, more-intensive course next year, but I shall leave it at that for the moment until details are firmed up. Until then, watch this space!

Related Books:
- Introduction to Rock Art Research
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art (Cambridge Illustrated Histories)
- The Figured Landscapes of Rock-Art: Looking at Pictures in Place
- World Rock Art (Conservation and Cultural Heritage Series)
- Handbook of Rock Art Research
- Introduction to Rock Art Research

Paul Taçon, whom I met last year at a conference, is fronting most of the sessions for the week – he’s got a wealth of experience researching rock art in Australia. He’s in the news earlier this year for discovering a spectacular find of contact rock art in Arnhem Land in northern Australia; his colleague Sally May is also present for the course, and I’m looking forward to discussing the use of photoshop and other digital tools to enhance degraded rock paintings later on this week.

To recap:
WORLD ROCK-ART, LANDSCAPES AND CREATIVITY: RECORDING, INTERPRETING AND PROTECTING OUR GLOBAL INHERITANCE

1. COURSE AIMS

Several hundred thousand rock-art sites lie scattered across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Americas and Pacific islands. Together these sites contain millions of images of individual or group identity, most of which were made from about 30,000 years ago. As paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, stencils and beeswax designs, rock-art has captured Western and Asian imagination since at least the late 1700s but it was only in the early 1900s that Science accepted rock-art as something legitimate to study. However, rock-art remained marginal to archaeology until the early 1980s, with it only recently emerging as an area of serious and concerted research. Today new discoveries and ideas of their origin are trumpeted in academic journals and on the front pages of newspapers and magazines on a regular basis and rigorous methods have been developed to study rock-art. In this course students are introduced to world rock-art and many of its major art bodies. Topics discussed by way of illustrated lectures include:

• The origins of art
• Working with indigenous peoples
• Survey and recording
• Rock-art dating
• Conservation and management
• Bridging to archaeological and ethnographic records
• Documenting cultural contact and change
• Group versus individual identity
• Monsters and supernatural beings
• Rock-art and ecology
• Re-contextualising rock-art
• Rock-art and mass media
• The rock-art of different geographic areas
• Rock-art as a wider ritual package
• The new rock-art of the Ghetto
The aim of the course is to introduce students to world rock-art and the landscapes in which they are placed. Particular interest will be the way we interact with our shared palaeoart heritage; to illustrate its connection and relevance to contemporary art and culture; to introduce the protocols and ethics of studying art produced by other cultures; and to develop a range of research and presentation skills. An overriding aim to emphasise the key role creativity plays in everyone’s lives, including those of the students themselves.

2. LEARNING OUTCOMES

This course is designed to have ten major learning outcomes:

1. To provide an introduction to our world rock-art heritage.
2. To provide an understanding of ethics and protocols when working with indigenous peoples.
3. To develop creativity and creative practice.
4. To develop research techniques.
5. To provide experience translating pictures into words.
6. To hone writing skills.
7. To provide experience in public presentation.
8. To provide specific rock-art and landscape archaeology training.
9. To understand rock-art chronology and panel stratigraphy.
10. To understand the cultural links between ancient and modern rock-artists.

3. CONTENT SUMMARY

This course will comprise a series of lectures and workshops that will introduce students to method, theory and practice, with the three fully intertwined and integrated with each other. Although the focus relates to the course topic, rock-art and landscapes, many aspects of theory, method and practice will be relevant and applicable to other aspects of archaeology, human evolution, contemporary art, Indigenous studies and even daily life.

Related Books:
- The Archaeology of Rock-Art (New Directions in Archaeology)
- Introduction to Rock Art Research
- Handbook of Rock Art Research