Rock Art Is Just Graffiti, Right?

I’ve seen comments on my SUV RVing videos that were something along these lines:

It’s funny. We get mad at people today for scratching their names on rocks, but when it’s old, it’s valuable for some reason.

Or maybe something as simple as this:

Rock art is just old graffiti, right? So why is it important?

Or this:

They were probably just doodling.

Ancient rock art served several purposes. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

[Rock art was used] to mark territory, to record historical events or stories or to help enact rituals. Some art seems to depict real events whilst many other examples are apparently entirely abstract. … Prehistoric rock depictions were not purely descriptive. Each motif and design had a ‘deep significance’ that is not always understandable to modern scholars. In many instances, the creation of rock art was itself a ritual act.

Here’s some more info from the New World Encyclopedia:

[Rock art] has been regarded as the foundation of art as well as an indication of the development of cognitive and abstract thinking ability in humankind, as most rock art is thousands of years old, created before the advent of the first major civilizations.

Many pictographs and petroglyphs depict animals, images of nature, and hunting. Some have argued that such images are records of hunts that served not only to inventory the amount of animals killed as well as future references for animal migrating patterns.

And one more from this PDF brochure:

This legacy on stone is unique and irreplaceable. Our knowledge of these past groups comes only from the artwork and artifacts they left behind. That is why it is not appropriate to add to the rock art. Our culture is well-documented in other ways.

You may be joking when you say that Native American rock art is graffiti, but rock art was a primary form of communication and recording information in the ancient world. The same is not true for modern day graffiti, which is practiced by a small, fringe percentage of the population.

Seriously calling ancient rock art graffiti is like calling today’s books, maps, and artworks graffiti and shows a misunderstanding of what the various purposes of the ancient rock art were and an unwillingness to learn from what experts in the field say.