For me, it all started with a dilemma.

How was I to situate myself in a specific field - rock art studies - being personally attracted to prehistoric pictures as a visual, historical phenomenon, but sceptical of instant, un-reflected interpretations couched in terms of a stereotypical history of religion?

Among archaeologists, theories are often received as general, and not as historical products with specific time-bound qualities.

For me, fortunately, the problem of finding a reasonable platform for discussion was not limited to an internal, archaeological discussion where the full breadth of the academic discipline of religion has never been considered. Criticism of the way archaeologists dealt with religious themes was almost non­existent. Among archaeologists, religion was much easier to handle than for scholars of religion; the reason being, however, that archaeology was simply not keeping up with the discipline of the study of religion. On the other hand, being based primarily on textual sources, this latter discipline was not comfortable working with material remains and structures. This left a gap between the two disciplines, a gap which had to be bridged. A beginning was made with Words and Objects, an undeservedly neglected symposium volume edited by Gro Steinsland in 1986.

Thus, even if grounded in generally available sources of inspiration, my own approach was not timeless: a conjunction of specific circumstances formed my working conditions. The many social changes of the late 1960s and 1970s affected academia: students became more concerned about the functioning of democratic society, seeking clearer relations between the contents and use of archaeological studies and knowledge on one hand, and the problems of contemporary society on the other.

The archaeological revolution was not radical. Yet it inspired new questions and new methods, often based on quantitative methods; above all, the answers did not resemble earlier results. A constant flow of new books and journals presented fresh studies or new subjects and it became impossible to be an archaeologist without a deep and continuous knowledge of the new literature, a knowledge and ability which divided scholars into informed and uninformed, active or passive, intellectual workers. But this is not the whole picture. Inspiration was also sought outside the discipline: culture studies, economics, geography and - above all - social anthropology (Cassel 2008). In Scandinavia new publishing houses were established which published a flood of translations from Italian and French (of, among others, Eco, Levi-Strauss, Foucault). On the basis of these, it was possible to do informed theoretical archaeological work. This meant that theoretical archaeology in Scandinavia was temporarily ahead of developments in the UK, where translations only appeared much later (if at all) and then in highly abridged form, sometimes without references.

A great deal of my own inspiration came from works beyond the discipline: John Berger (1975); Umberto Eco (1968); Michel Foucault (1972); Henri Lefebvre (1974); Claude Levi-Strauss (1966); Ferdinand de Saussure (1959) and Adam Schaff (1962), among others. However, the archaeological twist was not only a change in the book and library situation. New international contacts enabled direct access to archaeological work in neighbouring lands, but also in more exotic milieus, such as France, Italy, Spain, and even Canada, Australia and Russia.

Among the most influential sources inspiring me were the studies by Leroi- Gourhan (1965b) on Palaeolithic cave art. These opened up the possibility of escaping from old interpretations of hunting magic and concentrating more closely on the archaeological material and the remarkable topographical characteristics of caves. These studies looked for systematic relations between the images and their locations and denied that the locations of these images were fortuitous. So the qualities of the windings of the caves were seen as a three- dimensional part of the meaning of the pictures.

The aim of finding patterns and systems within this rather wide material convinced me that a similar approach could be tested on Swedish rock art. In my mind, I transformed some valleys of the province of Bohuslan into a model of caves where the ceiling was missing, thus creating a special cave-like structure, where the petroglyphs could be placed and observed. I had hoped to find an information-bearing structure and an ordering system, with, for instance, armed men representing guards protecting the entrances. Sorry to say, these attempts failed. But it was an opening towards seeing the different figures as signs, both as individual ones and as groups and maybe with special preferences and placement, space and even scale (Nordbladh 1991, 1999).

In the early years few archaeologists were aware of the wider possibilities; Leroi-Gourhan (1964, 1965a) remained a rare exception. I was also struck by writers and artists who kept up with the archaeological literature and criticized archaeologists for being too absorbed in their own written culture and hence neglecting the image world (Broby-Johansen 1967; Jorn 1972).

This is one problem, but there is another. Through description and analysis, archaeologists want to explain and hopefully be able to offer a possibility for understanding - but they have no intention of recreating the object of investigation. History is generally seen as something which is over. In the highly unusual circumstances of the present day with increasing archaeological interest in religion, we face attempts at the revival of prehistoric religious beliefs where the contemporary cult of Norse Paganism is an example of a contemporary social interest in archaeology. The Swedish Asatru Assembly (www.asatrosamfundet.se) claims to be a democratic, non-racist, ecological and peaceful organization based on a prehistoric belief system. The academic study of religion can easily accommodate such movements, but one wonders what effects such developments might have on archaeology as a discipline.

Thus my own story is part of contemporary archaeology, and my image of religion will reflect that.