Margaret Conkey is the Class of 1960 Professor of Anthropology at the University of California , Berkeley where she has been Director of the Archaeological Research Facility for the past 13 years. She has initiated and directed an active archaeology and public education program at the Facility, with all archaeology graduate students engaging in many outreach activities each year, including rock art. Her own research has focused on the cave and portable arts of the European Upper Paleolithic, and she has traveled extensively to see the rock arts of Africa, Australia , Norway , and in the United States . She has supervised/advised/been a reader for many Ph.D. dissertations that have focused on rock art—in Baja, the French Marquessas, California, Oregon, Australia, Spain, and France. She teaches Prehistoric Art at Berkeley , and has written extensively
about understanding the visual culture in archaeology.

One often hears that education about the values and the vulnerabilities of rock art is an essential component to insuring a future for rock art. Is this, however, just a simplistic hope for a panacea, a way to pass on the responsibility to unspecified people? Or, if one is deeply and genuinely committed to actually creating and carrying out an educational program, how does one do this? How do we know there can be or is a positive impact? What "works"?  Who has done what, along these lines? And, while we see how often rock art activities are featured in public education programs, how can things like kids making hand prints have an influence that is more than just a game? In this presentation, I will discuss only three dimensions surrounding the fundamental issue of rock art education, if we are to build a genuine and sustaining understanding of rock art that will help mobilize its protection: