In 1879, the discovery of painted images deep inside French and Spanish caves startled the world and unwittingly initiated a long debate on the nature and meaning of prehistoric "art". Pronounced genuine in 1902, these lifelike figures were quickly appropriated by and incorporated into what Olga Soffer and Margaret Conkey call the "self-congratulatory history of the achievements of the West''.

Over a century of study of Palaeolithic art has produced conflicting claims but no definitive theories. With justification, the editors believe that previous work often suffered from being decontextualised, ahistorical, and predisposed to making unwarranted uniformitarian assumptions. The stated aim of this book is to reassess prior ideas about the nature of these images and to ground their analysis firmly in archaeology rather than art history. To this end, the editors have brought together an impressive array of specialists, dealing with analytical methods, symbolism and imagery and the problems of interpretation.

Despite the attractions of regarding the striking "realism" of animal images at Lascaux or Altamira as a "creative explosion" and the "beginnings of art", the term "art" is argued here to be a misnomer. The editors stress that, as we cannot assume the priority of the aesthetic qualities of such images, previous studies told us more about our own cultural categories than the contexts of social action within which the images were made. Thus, "image making" is a less emotionally loaded and more useful description than "art" for activities seen now as the symbolic organisation and mediation of life through the arbitrary ordering of matter and energy.

Whether ostrich-shell beads from Kenya, cave-wall images in Australia, or sculpted ivory figurines from Austria and Germany, image making was both revolutionary and problematic in its development. Why is it that fully modern humans were in Africa and the Middle East for 60,000 years before they decided to create any images? What happened around 40,000 years ago to bring images into widespread existence? Why are they frequent in some areas yet rare or non-existent in others, and why do they disappear and/or reappear through time? Despite the uncertainties, one point appears clear: image making is not a universal phenomenon of human behaviour.

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Yet, it must be remembered that the durability of stone and bone, and the serendipitous preservation of cave paintings, has privileged some objects over others in ways not necessarily intended by their makers. Songs, myths, dances, body-painting and wood-carving all symbolically convey social and cultural information in modern indigenous societies and can be presumed to have done so among anatomically modern humans in Palaeolithic times as well. It is within these living but ephemeral worlds of action that images received and reproduced their meanings and values - not as the "stand-alone" items they now are.

Whether or not these (and other) problems prove ultimately intractable, it seems clear that the human capacity to make images is distinct from the act of doing so. While the former is a function of cognitive development and corresponding physical dexterity, the latter is dependent on social and cultural contexts that somehow make it worthwhile to engage in image-making activities. As such contexts vary widely, the variable processes that shape them arbitrarily determine the meanings accorded to symbols. The combination of environmental pressures, changing population densities, and cultural responses, produce situations in which, on occasion, there is an image-making dimension. The relativity of such processes indicates there can be no "laws of behaviour", no predictable images, and no obviously universal solution to the problem of revealing what an image means.

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While acknowledging these complexities, the search for meaning nevertheless remains the leitmotif of modern archaeology. Of particular significance here is the application of "hard science" techniques to the physical analysis of images. Several chapters deal with the dating of cave paintings and are useful on three counts: to establish chronologies for changing styles, to examine the problems and potentials of different analytical techniques, and to expose fakes.

The majority of chapters here say something important: whether on the vexed issue of why the abundant caves of Italy have a dearth of paintings and carvings, the role of demographic changes in the development of image-making in the Levant, or the use of rock art by Australian Aborigines to determine and express identity and territoriality. The issue of placement of images near the more frequently visited social spaces of bright cave entrances or the dark and remote deeper recesses raised by Jean Clottes is a particularly stimulating issue , as is Alexander Marshack's discussion of the conceptual relationship between Upper Palaeolithic hunters and Neolithic farmers.

Randall White offers a penetrating analysis of the so-called chaines operatoire (ie a learned sequence of technological operations in the making of something) underlying the manufacture of the abundant material culture of the Aurignacian period (30-35,000 years ago). These materials - including lustrous ivory beads and pendants - represent the first-ever appearance of personal adornments and indicate the material construction of individual and social identities. The technological choices of materials tell of more than simple production, revealing underlying thoughts and beliefs, and giving clues to the interactions of people and landscape.

In dealing with European Upper Palaeolithic imagery, David Lewis-Williams sees in the geometric and "representational" forms the material correlates of various stages of universal and neurologically generated altered states of consciousness. While all mammalian species may be hard-wired for hallucinations, this does not mean that Franco-Cantabrian image makers were trancing shamans engaged in vision quests deep inside womb-like caves. Even among Amerindian societies images resulting from ingesting powerful narcotics rarely, if ever, constitute an all-embracing explanation of iconography. The crux of the matter lies less in "universals" than in understanding the "rules of engagement" in non-western modes of explanation and social being. A shamanic world view is not predicated on dream-like visions in trance states. Rather, visions and dreams are part of the armature (and language) of engagement, which shape and are shaped by a fundamentally non-western accounting of existence.

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Such arguments make this a refreshing and timely book that challenges received wisdoms and sets a new course for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. By pushing at the boundaries of what is known and knowable, Beyond Art cuts to the quick of how humans create their material worlds and in turn are shaped by them.

Nicholas Saunders is lecturer in material culture and British Academy research fellow in anthropology, University College London.