Rogers is a communication scholar, and his subject isn’t what rock art meant but what we keep doing with it. Visitor centers, guidebooks, New Age tours, corporate logos, and the shaman theory all get examined as acts of appropriation, each one projecting a set of modern needs onto marks whose makers are gone or, more often, still here and not consulted. He’s good on the difference between how archaeologists, land managers, tourists, and tribal members talk about the same panel. It’s an academic book with a plain argument: The interpretation says more about the interpreter than the rock.
Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Projections