REVISED PROOF Replication in Rock Art Past and Present: a Case Study of Bronze and Iron Age Rock Art in the Altai, Eastern Eurasia Rebecca O’Sullivan 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020, corrected publication 2020 Abstract Change to rock art has been treated as an unforgiveable act in many contemporary cases; however, rock art in many parts of the world was most likely not created with the intention that it would endure for eternity unaltered. This paper highlights three ways in which the rock art creation process has been ‘replicated’ in the past and present. These forms of replication behaviours—of form, place, and action—are identified in the case study of the rock art of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Mongolian Altai. Additionally, examples of modern imagery that represent continuity of tradition are also presented. I argue that the cognitive processes suggested by these forms of replication have been influential in forming the rock art record, and they can be used to explore contempo- rary, regional worldviews. In eastern Eurasia, replication behaviours in rock art refer- ence place-making strategies and regional cosmological traditions that see the land- scape as occupied by non-human beings. The goal is to provide a constructive framework by which alteration and change can be considered innate aspects of the archaeological record, as opposed to mere vandalism, in our interpretation of prehis- toric rock art. Keywords Rock art . Mongolia . Bronze Age . Iron Age . Change . Vandalism . Place- making Introduction The continued use of artefacts and sites post-creation forces archaeologists to consider the aspect of time in their reconstructions of the past (Bailey 2007). Whether by looking at the personal biographies of objects (Gosden and Marshall 1999) or modelling rates Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09460-z * Rebecca O’Sullivan rebecca@jlu.edu.cn 1 School of Archaeology, Jilin University, 2699 Qianjin Street, Changchun 130012 Jilin, China