To See the Invisible: Karelian Rock Art

This contribution considers 25 years of discovery of the possible origins and development of the Rock Art Tradition to create Karelian Rock Art images under the open sky through the analysis of different types of intercessions into the horizontal surface of granite rocks.

Karelian petroglyphs are located-at the eastern bank of the Onega Lake and 300 km to the north, close to the southern bank of the White Sea. One of them, the “New Zalavruga,” was discovered by the expedition of U.Savvateev under the Neolithic cultural layer and sterile sand layer in 1963-1968. This is a great and very rare opportunity to obtain direct dating of the end of the tradition to create Karelian Rock Art images around 5-6 ka ago. Therefore, the task was to find the “Invisible” evidences of the tradition’s origins and development similar to both regions via the different use of context.