The Northern Tradition rock art of western Norway: from archaeological relativism to iconographic relevance under Late Mesolithic demographic change

The paper argues that more holistic and theoretically informed approaches to contextualizing the Northern Tradition rock art of Scandinavia have significantly expanded the interpretive potential of its iconography. By integrating archaeological excavations, independent scientific analyses, and extensive radiocarbon dating procedures, a more robust chronological framework has emerged, situating the production of Northern tradition rock art firmly to the end of the Late Mesolithic. This chronological anchoring has enabled a reconceptualization of the imagery not merely as isolated symbolic expressions, but as practices embedded within contemporaneous material, social, and perhaps even ecological transformations. The demonstrated synchrony between iconographic themes and demographic shifts at the term of the Late Mesolithic further suggests that the imagery may be read as an active engagement with – and representation of – structures and features once part of prehistoric dynamics. The paper also critiques prevailing interpretive models shaped by modern Western utilitarian and consumption-based assumptions, arguing that such frameworks still constrain our ability to access alternative ontological premises. Instead, it advocates theoretical approaches inspired by multispecies perspectives, relational ontologies, and broader anthropological debates on animism and posthumanism, to reconstruct past premises. From this standpoint, the Northern Tradition iconography may be understood as preserving traces of Late Mesolithic worldviews in which humans, animals, landscapes, and non-human entities were entangled within shared social and cosmological fields. This perspective not only opens new interpretive pathways for understanding the epistemic content encoded in the imagery and tentatively helps to explain the sudden appearance of rock art, but also provides a more expansive foundation for revisiting and recontextualising the wider corpus of Northern Tradition rock art.