Slaggyford Stones forum 1 room
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StoneGloves wrote:
"Is rock-art (esp cups and rings)...representative, communicative or aesthetic and will we ever know?"

It continues up until the present day. People are still making Rock Art, of various forms, right now. There's not many of them, and they're not working in a tradition, generally, but it is still going. The gargoyles and flourishes on ancient churches are rock art. So are the Celtic Heads.

The cup and ring motif is well known and easily recognised. Cupmarks, of various form, are found around the world. They are generally assumed to be prehistoric, but that is because they are associated with other ancient monuments. Some of the English cupmarks attributed as prehistoric might even be medieval (or later).

There are said to be three stages of response following new discoveries. Silence, ridicule and hearty acceptance. A person finding a cup and ring marked stone on the moors of North Yorkshire might expect the three stages to occur quite rapidly - in a couple of weeks. A person finding something that has not previously been seen before might expect to wait years or even decades ...

Showing once again my almost complete ignorance of 'rock art' was there a 'start' and 'finish' point in time in the UK when the BULK of it was done in the ancient world?

British rock art can’t be dated ,therefore we have to resort to context to get the earliest secure date , this is a usually accepted as being the cup marked rock found in the barrow at Dalladies dated approx 3280 BC slightly earlier than the Boyne monuments . Clearly there would have been earlier markings with some arguing albeit with little evidence for a Mesolithic date .The end of that tradition is considered to date those cases of the re-use of marked rocks in Late Bronze Age Early/Iron Age monuments like souterrains and hillforts . Cup marks have dated to as early as 50,000 BP in the cave at La Ferrassie and Indian caves have cup marks dated from at least 290,000 BP and possibly much earlier .