Neolithic and Bronze Age rock art in the British Isles

Petroglyphic in nature, the majority of such carvings are abstract in design, usually cup and ring marks, although examples of spirals or figurative depictions of weaponry are also known.

Surviving examples of rock art in the British Isles are believed to represent only a small sample of that which had been produced in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

[1] In other examples, images might have been painted onto rock, or marked onto less permanent surfaces, such as wood, livestock or the human body, thereby also failing to survive into the present.

[4] Rock art specialist George Nash considered the petroglyphs of this region to constitute a distinct artistic tradition from that in the North.

[9] Archaeologists are aware of three instances in South West Britain where weapons are depicted in petroglyphs: at Boscawen-un stone circle in Cornwall, at Badbury Rings Barrow in Dorset, and at Stonehenge in Wiltshire.

As evidence, she noted that labyrinths were a popular motif in folk customs at the time, and that the good state of preservation would not be present if they had prehistoric origins.

[17] The purposes of Neolithic and Bronze Age petroglyphs in the British Isles have long been debated, with amateur rock art researcher Ronald Morris listing 104 different proposals that he had encountered, ranking them according to what he believed to be their plausibility.

[21] One suggestion is that the motifs found in the rock art of the British Isles are depictions of phosphenes, entoptic phenomenon produced through the disturbance of the optic nerve that result from altered states of consciousness.

Examining art produced by a society that placed great emphasis on altered states of consciousness with another that did not, he highlighted that the former contained motifs identified as phosphenes while the latter did not.