page_title: Rock carvings at Alta
section_title: Imagery and interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Rock carvings at Alta / Imagery and interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail from the en:Rock carvings at Alta: a herd of moose, with two pregnant cows in the foreground. Photo from NL Wikipedia, originally uploaded by en:nl:Gebruiker:Serassot
context_page_description: The Rock art of Alta are located in and around the municipality of Alta in the county of Finnmark in northern Norway. Since the first carvings were discovered in 1973, more than 6000 carvings have been found on several sites around Alta. The largest locality, at Jiepmaluokta about 5 kilometres from Alta, contains thousands of individual carvings and has been turned into an open-air museum. The site, along with the sites Storsteinen, Kåfjord, Amtmannsnes and Transfarelv, was placed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites on 3 December 1985. It is Norway's only prehistoric World Heritage Site.
  The carvings were divided into five separate groups by Professor Knut Helskog, of the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Tromsø. Using shoreline dating, the earliest carvings were dated to around 4200 BC; the most recent carvings were dated to around 500 BC. In 2010 researcher Jan Magne Gjerde pushed the dates for the oldest phases back by 1000 years.
context_section_description: Possible explanations include use in shamanistic rituals, totemistic symbols that denoted tribal unity or marked a tribe's territory,  a kind of historical record of important events, or even simple artistic pleasure. Since individual carvings show such a wide array of different images and the carvings were created over an extremely long period of time, it seems plausible that individual carvings might have served any of the purposes listed above. Some of the more common types of images are listed below:
caption: A herd of elks, with two pregnant females in the foreground.
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