THE PROBLEM

Rock art management requires concrete answers to a multitude of interrelated questions. What are our motives and issues; what are the relevant past and present data and situations, and how do we make it all come together in management planning and practice without compromising the sites themselves, the people who made what we are managing today, our own scientific and ethical ideals, or the society we serve?

The inherent problem of rock art management is that different goals and motivations do not always act in one way, but in many. We have research interests; we have the obligations of conservation, protection, preservation and long-term maintenance, and then again we have the demand for public presentation, with on-site infrastructural measures and facilities, walkways, signposts, adaptations for visitors, and so on. All these different motivations are valid and relevant, but the trouble is that they may be in opposition to each other. Therefore, we also have to ask and answer these questions: What are the vested interests in rock art, whose interests are we dealing with, and can different interests be combined without destructive compromises?

WHAT DO WE MANAGE WHEN MANAGING ROCK ART?

The precondition for knowing what we are dealing with in rock art management, as in archaeology in general, is of course documentation and recording, of the rock art in its multiple synchronic and diachronic micro and macro contexts. But in rock art management we need to go a step further and ask: What, ultimately, are we managing? I will not go into the fact that we also manage visitors; local, regional and national interests; economic and political interests and development issues but rather ask: Do we manage physical manifestations, landscapes and features, or do we manage meanings? Of course we should do both according to Hodder's two types of contextual meaning, ”… object as object, and object as meaningfully constituted” (1986: 171), but in any case we need to “know” what “the objects” are (ibid: 15). In order to “know” what they are, they must be identified and for practical purposes named, and we all know that terminology in archaeology is infused with interpretation, however cool and neutral we set out to be.