In Bohuslän, western Sweden, the rock carvings of Tanum turn exposed granite into a record of people, animals, ships, weapons and signs. The figures are not a written chronicle, and archaeologists cannot translate every panel into a single story. Their significance comes from the range of images, their composition and their relationship to a landscape where people have lived for millennia. UNESCO inscribed the property in 1994, recognizing it as an exceptional body of Bronze Age art and evidence of life in prehistoric Europe.
The World Heritage property covers about 4,138 hectares and contains more than 600 known carving sites, among the densest concentrations of rock art in northern Europe. UNESCO places the main cultural sequence in the Nordic Bronze Age, approximately 1700 to 500 BCE, within a wider landscape of human settlement and land use extending across more than eight millennia. The figures were made by pecking and grinding granite with stone tools. Their scale ranges from individual marks to large, carefully arranged panels.