KIBO--Le serment grave: Essai de synthese sur les petroglyphes caledoniens.(Book review)

KIBO--Le serment grave: Essai de synthese sur les petroglyphes caledoniens. Jean Monnin and Christophe Sand, eds. Les Cahiers de l'Archeologie en Nouvelle-Caledonie 16, 2004.

It is common sense that "digging a hole" (1) on a surface like the face of a boulder guarantees the permanence of a message written in stone--a perennial memory. In a certain way, this is what the authors of this remarkable book have accomplished. Their recording campaigns and sophisticated synthesizing have resulted in the production of a work that is here to stay, firmly anchored in the pantheon of seminal works in rock art research. This book, I predict, will become a reference book for rock art students. My humble recommendation would be to translate this work into English.

Chapter 1 dissects the "hermeneutic" abuses perpetuated under colonial agendas and/or misguided scholarship. From this chapter, we learn that writing about alterity (otherness) is a complicated process in which the writer needs to remain shielded from the political and racial a priori of the time. Recontextualizing the voice of the author within the ideological currents of the time is a very effective process to relativize the erroneous statements and racial declamations that might offend the potential reader.

It is interesting to realize that until recently, the Kanaks were given no history and were assumed to have been a late wave of incoming population with no affiliation whatsoever with the archaeological records. The authors have made …