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  • Bangudae: Petroglyph Panels in Ulsan, Korea, in the Context of World Rock Art ed. by Ho-tae Jeon and Jiyeon Kim
  • Martin T. Bale
Bangudae: Petroglyph Panels in Ulsan, Korea, in the Context of World Rock Art edited by Ho-tae Jeon and Jiyeon Kim. Seoul: Hollym, 2013. 231 pp. 174 figures. 1 table. $29.50 (cloth)

Publications on early Korea and/or archaeology are critical to Korean Studies because the field is so skewed toward modern and contemporary scholarly endeavors. Yet Pan’gudae (romanized as Bangudae in the book), a petroglyphic archaeological site that is at once breathtakingly impressive as it is politically controversial, should be of interest to all Koreanists for its truly ancient depictions of animals, people, and lifeways dating back between two thousand and four thousand years. In addition, the petroglyphic depictions are regionally unique, the site is under threat, and many of the images have all but been rubbed away.

As such the publication of Bangudae: Petroglyph Panels in Ulsan, Korea, in the Context of World Rock Art is important and welcome because it discusses multiple aspects of Pan’gudae. While most contributions to early Korean studies (Paleolithic–10th century AD) in the last twenty-five years have been broad synthetic treatments, this is one of the few books to address a single archaeological site. This edited volume resulted from an impactful workshop organized by Hotae Jeon of Ulsan University and the Early Korea Project at Harvard University. I want to fully disclose that I worked closely with the Early Korea Project as a postdoctoral fellow in the Korea Institute at Harvard at the time the workshop was held.

This book examines Pan’gudae from a number of perspectives including anthropological, archaeological, art historical, and Korean rock art studies. Jeon offers a general overview of Korean prehistoric art in the context of the site in the first chapter in addition to a final chapter on Pan’gudae in the context of other rock art sites in Korea. Paul Bahn’s article sheds light on the whales depicted at Pan’gudae in comparison to other cetaceans at rock art sites. Two chapters deal [End Page 229] with regional comparisons from a Northeast Asian perspective (Esther Jacobson-Tepher, Se-gweon Yim). Others use the theme of meaning (Anne Solomon) and structural theory (Henri-Paul Francfort) to understand the petroglyphs of Pan’gudae. Jun-hi Han’s article can be described as a strategic guide to a nomination dossier for the inscription of Pan’gudae to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

In his introductory chapter, Ho-tae Jeon provides a comprehensive background to studies on Pan’gudae, including his own fascinating chronological analysis of the panels. Such an endeavor is quite challenging, but Jeon takes up the task with confidence. His first and second chronological “work layers” are reasonable, but the subsequent and highly detailed divisions of the third work layer seem less convincing if only because of the many sub-layers that he has created. The final chapter by Jeon is a compilation of information about some important petroglyphic archaeological sites, some of which have never been introduced comprehensively in English, such as Ch’ŏnjŏnni (Cheonjeon-ri in the book). The scope of coverage in Bahn’s article is truly global, and he notes that it is far from a straightforward process to identify whales. Bahn finds that the depiction of whales in petroglyphic images is uneven across the regions of the world. For example, they are absent in China, India, and most of Africa. Both chapters by Bahn and Jacobson-Tepher are richly illustrated with numerous figures that include photos, line-drawings, and rubbings.

Jacobson-Tepher astutely concludes in her diachronically organized chapter that she does not see many parallels between rock art at Siberian sites and Pan’gudae. At the end of her chapter she asks the critically important question: Should ethnographic studies from the last two hundred years have any bearing on the interpretation of images from the deep past? This is an interpretation of Pan’gudae that needs to be questioned and reassessed.

Using worldwide examples, Solomon firmly casts doubt on the notion that shamans passively reproduced the contents of...

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