Every picture in its place - A spatial analysis of rock art in Tjust using GIS

Sammanfattning: Rock art is the closest we have to a written language from the Bronze age. The different motifs make us wonder what stories they tell us, what they are representing and why they were even made in the first place. The focus of this thesis is on the placement of rock art motifs on the panel and by using digital techniques like photogrammetry and GIS, the spatial relation between different motifs is examined. Do certain motifs have a predetermined place on the panel, and how do the panel, cosmological beliefs, and people, who interacted with rock art then, affected the placement of motifs? To study this, ten rock art panels were chosen from Gamleby parish in Tjust in eastern Småland. Tjust is well-known for being a landscape filled with remnants from the Bronze age, and it constitutes the rock art richest area in Småland. Spatiality and digital technology were the theories and practices used for studying the placement of rock art motifs. By treating the panel as a topographical landscape and look at density, distance, slope and topography, it’s possible to study rock art in relation to the rock panel. What this study shows is that motifs are concentrated in certain parts of the panels, with small differentiations between individual motifs, and that the panels’ texture, including cracks and striations, could possibly have been affecting the way motifs were placed on the panels.