Paul Bahn is familiar to thousands of people worldwide as the author of many many books on all aspects of archaeology, from Easter Island to Mammoths, from human remains to Bluff Your Way in Archaeology (... a firm favourite with Oxbow customers). His Archaeology: Methods, Theories and Practices, written with Colin Renfrew, goes into a new edition this year having sold tens of thousands worldwide. But somehow, amidst all these pressing demands, Paul Bahn finds time to pursue his original interests – the Palaeolithic of France and rock art studies throughout the world (his strong views on the relationship between shamanism and rock art are described in his recent book Desperately Seeking Trance Plants )

Paul is the editor of the Oxbow series on Rock Art Studies, and to celebrate the publication of the next instalment in the series, News of the World 2, I caught up with Paul and asked him about his books, his interest in our earliest ancestors, and his strong views on some recent work on rock art.

Paul, why does rock art interest you?

Rock art has interested me for a very long time - I explained in the introduction to Images of the Ice Age and Journey Through the Ice Age how I was first struck by cave art as a young boy; then, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was encouraged in this direction by both Eric Higgs and Glyn Daniel (as well as in lectures by John Coles and Charles McBurney). Out of my love of Ice Age art grew my interest in the rock art of all places and cultures. I find it endlessly fascinating because it provides us with our most direct view of the preoccupations and beliefs of these people, and it can be very moving in that it is exactly where the artist chose to put it (which in itself can tell us a great deal, especially in the caves) - in viewing it you are occupying the very same space as the artist all those centuries or millennia ago. And of course the cream on the cake is that it is often found in some of the most spectacular scenery in the world - deserts, mountains, canyons, jungles, etc. - and includes some of the most fantastic imagery ever created.

News of the World 2 is the second in the Oxbow series of 5 yearly surveys of research in rock art which you first planned in 1995. It looks very useful, but in this volume you seem more cynical about the field than you were in News of the World 1. You suggest that there have been no sensible developments in interpreting images, that direct dating methods are being sloppily used, and that scholarly research on rock art in many parts of the world is lacking. Is rock art studies in crisis?

Im not sure why you feel that News of the World 2 presents a more cynical view of rock art studies than the first volume. The brief introduction focuses on the frustrations we have encountered in obtaining contributions from some parts of the world; and my own essay on Pleistocene art merely points out the lack of new interpretation and the uncertainties of dating in that particular sphere. The coverage of different parts of the world in the book is inevitably very uneven, but I think it shows that, while some areas have sparse or poor research, others are flourishing and doing brilliant work. So rock art studies are definitely not in crisis - they are almost non-existent in some regions, but very vigorous in others: one might cite, for instance, the exemplary activities of the Society for Rock Art Research in Bolivia (SIARB), created and run by amateurs (a word I hate) who - despite the extreme poverty of their country - not only do great work in education and conservation, but also produce the best rock art journal in Latin America and frequently organise rock art conferences and international congresses. This is in stark contrast to the feeble output of some of Bolivias richer neighbours, who not only have no specialist journal of their own, but also few meetings - they leave it to SIARBs amateurs to do the hard and expensive work of organising these events, and then these professionals flood in to take part, rather than bothering to organise their own!

I see that you have just translated Jean Clottes first full report on Chauvet Cave, Return to Chauvet Cave, to be published in March. Did everybody get carried away by the excitement of this discovery in 1994, or have some genuinely new ideas about Palaeolithic Europe emerged from work at Chauvet?

I have indeed recently translated the second coffee-table book on the Chauvet Cave. You call it the first full report on the cave, but it is, in fact, no such thing. It provides lots of nice photos, and the bulk of the book takes one through the cave, chamber by chamber, describing what is depicted. But I know that some of the Chauvet team were against the publication of a second book so soon, as they felt that not enough work had yet been done in the cave to merit it - and indeed readers of the volume will see that this is an extremely preliminary presentation of data.

On a personal note, I would say that it was translating this book which strengthened my growing doubts about the validity of the caves dates. At the beginning, I had accepted the early dates, startling though they were, because they seemed coherent (dates under the calcite being earlier than those on top of it) and because of the sophisticated portable art from the same period in SW Germany. But I was always sceptical, and I have become increasingly convinced by the arguments of German specialist Christian Zuechner, expressed from the start, that the style, content and technique of most of the caves figures are somewhat later. As I say, translating the new book and studying the illustrations closely helped to convince me that all was not well.

The final straw came when I learned that some black dots in the Spanish cave of Candamo had been dated to more than 31,000 years ago by the lab which dated Chauvet; but samples from the same group of dots, dated by an American lab, produced two results of 15,000. So I have written an article with the palaeolithic archaeologist Paul Pettitt, a radiocarbon specialist, which is due to appear in the March issue of Antiquity, and in which we explain the Candamo anomaly, and examine the possible implications for Chauvet. I must stress that some figures in Chauvet may indeed be Aurignacian in date - we do not reject this - but we do argue that this is far from proven. What we urge - since it has not been done yet - is that multiple laboratories must be used in the direct dating of cave art (almost all dates so far, dozens of them, from umpteen caves, have come from the same lab); that samples should be split, where possible, for verification of results by different labs; that undecorated walls should be checked for natural contamination; and that the existing dates should be published with full data in specialised journals - the new series of dates for Chauvet, for example, have as yet only been published in the coffee-table book. These points appear to us to be basic science, but none of them has yet been implemented.

So, in answer to your question, everybody did get carried away by Chauvet in a sense, in that we believed the early dates although they flew in the face of all that we had learned about cave art over the past century. It was like a re-run of what happened with the arrival of radiocarbon dating after the war - archaeologists were suddenly presented with this unhoped-for gift, the ability to obtain direct dates from organic material, and so they readily and uncritically accepted lots of dates which seemed to contradict established knowledge, and which later proved to be wrong. As time went by, we gradually learned about the ifs and buts in radiocarbon, the false assumptions that had been made, the calibrations that were necessary, etc. I feel that exactly the same has happened again - cave art specialists had long despaired of dating the images directly, since it was traditionally thought that they were all made with inorganic minerals. Once it was found that most black images were in fact made with charcoal, and that AMS could sometimes date them, we joyfully and uncritically accepted all the dates that the boffins produced. Now, however, we are sobering up, and starting to realise that contamination may be having radical effects, and that these results from the cutting-edge of prehistory need to be validated and checked, not just accepted at face value. If valid, the early dates for art at Chauvet do indeed have profound implications for our view of palaeolithic Europe, the development of art, and so forth, and that is why it is absolutely imperative that the caves dating must be checked and rechecked. Jean Clottes once wrote in an Oxbow book (Rock Art Studies: the Post-stylistic era) that one date is no date, and in this case one must add that one lab is no lab. Paul Pettitt and I are not casting aspersions on the lab involved - we would feel exactly the same whichever lab had been used - but we insist that for dates of such global importance, independent verification is absolutely crucial.

As well as your work on rock art you are the author or editor of a large number of excellent popular archaeology books which sell in 10,000s. What makes a good popular archaeology book?

At last, an easy question - but of course, there is no easy answer to what makes a good popular archaeology book - excellent illustrations help, as does interesting subject matter! I think it was through the influence of Glyn Daniel, in his TV shows before my student days, and then as a lecturer and friend, that I grew interested in the popularisation (or, in Glyns terms, haute vulgarisation) of archaeology. I am at a loss to understand the ivory tower mentality of those who refuse to write for the public, when it is usually the public which pays their salary! Everybody has the right to be given the latest information available about their heritage. The team which I put together more than a decade ago, and with which I have now produced about a dozen books for the public on different subjects, is made up of academics who are all top specialists in their field and yet who are highly skilled at writing for the interested public. My aim is always to include material which the public expects to find and is familiar with, but to combine it with lesser-known but extremely important or interesting material which the public should know about. And my other aim is to combine readability with accuracy. It really irritates me to find mistakes or false facts in my books, and I always strive to correct them at the next printing or edition (if anyone encounters one, please let me know!). And of course, nothing angers me more than rubbish being peddled as archaeology to the public, whether it be lunatic fringe stuff, like ancient astronauts and lost super-civilisations, or misguided and distorted views of the past like those of Thor Heyerdahl - but this is taking me back to question 2, so I will stop here.

This Spring you are bringing out a new edition of your controversial book with John Flenley, Enigmas of Easter Island. Whats exciting and new in Easter Island research since Easter Island, Earth Island in 1992?

The new edition of my book with John Flenley about Easter Island has given us a chance to completely update it, covering all the varied and important work done there over the past decade. This means it is in stark contrast to that very disappointing Horizon programme on BBC television a few weeks ago, which was originally supposed to cover the new work, but was actually - perhaps due to budgetary problems - largely a rehash of older material. In particular they completely omitted the most exciting piece of new research on the island, despite having interviewed the excavator on camera at some length! This is Wyoming geologist Charlie Love, who has been excavating stretches of some of the roads that lead away from the great statue quarry. For the first time we now have some idea of the complexity and labour involved in the road construction; and, above all, Charlie has shown that none of the methods so far envisaged for moving the statues - and done to death in various TV documentaries - fits the roads evidence. In other words, all the experiments done so far, including Charlies own, are now redundant, and we have to go back to the drawing board. We simply have no idea how they did it - and I love that about archaeology ... the fact that the ancients can still surprise us, outwit us and baffle us. It would be a great pity if we ever did manage to understand all their secrets.

You take a global view of archaeology in a period where most archaeologists have become very specialized and narrowly focused. One only has to look at a list of international conferences to see how little different sub-disciplines talk to each other. What field of archaeology excites you at the moment? Is there a big question that finally looks like being solved? Or is there a big issue now being discussed that has never been seriously considered before?

Its fun to have a global view of archaeology, especially in terms of the travel it necessitates, but its also exhausting, as you realise how many things you simply have no time to read or follow up. In terms of big issues at the moment, I would say that the colonisation of the New World is one of the hottest topics. It took the Monte Verde volumes finally to demolish the old Clovis first model (already long discredited in many eyes, including mine) and to show that people were in South America by 13,000 and maybe even 33,000 years ago. Most North American archaeologists, even now, take a jaundiced view of the great Brazilian rock shelter of Pedra Furada, largely because of the lack of published data to support its claims. Now, however, Fabio Parentis massive thesis of 1993 about the site has been published as a monograph (Le Gisement Quaternaire de Pedra Furada (PiauÌ, Brésil). Stratigraphie, Chronologie, Evolution Culturelle. Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, Paris, 2001); but since it is in French, it is unlikely to be read by many American specialists. It is to be hoped that a future English translation will finally bring the site to the worlds attention, and reveal it to be one of the most important early sites in the New World, with occupation (and rock art) going back more than 30,000 years. Now that Clovis first is a thing of the past, new controversies have arisen - did the European Solutrean possibly have a link with fluted points? Could the morphology of some South American skulls point to contacts with Africa or Australia? Some of these claims will collapse, others will flourish, but I think that the next few years - now that most closed minds have been forced open - will bring lots of surprises for the early prehistory of the New World. Which will be fun!

For more books by Paul Bahn, take a look at Oxbows online catalogue.

For the interesting-substances-induced side of the argumant read this article by Gyrus, in Form & Meaning in Altered States & Rock Art.

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