by Alan Thompson.
NOSAS were partners in and major contributors to Scotland’s Rock Art Project (ScRAP) which ran for five years from January 2017 to December 2021. We enjoyed some very productive field work and learned a lot about prehistoric rock art (sometimes called cup and ring marked rocks) and also about how to run a community-based project.
This is not an attempt to analyse the rock art in our region or to provide a critique of what was achieved during ScRAP (for that it might be best to download the booklet produced at the end of the project – Prehistoric Rock Art in Scotland). It’s more personal, really a set of memories and reflections on what we did, and a few suggestions for the future. There is still more rock art to record in Northern Scotland and some of us would like to continue with that. Should we therefore establish a new, perhaps smaller project, making use of our experience with ScRAP?
A bit of history
Our interest in prehistoric rock art begins with the Ross-shire Rock Art project (RRAP) led by John Wombell in the 1990s and early 2000s (before my time with NOSAS). John and a NOSAS team set out to find and record the rock art in (broadly) Ross-shire. This involved research of the records, contact with local people, a good deal of ‘fossicking’, and experiments with various methods of recording. The output was mostly on paper, i.e. forms filled in and photos printed. Many finds were notified to the Highland HER.
NOSAS Archaeology Blog 