Central Norway is a region in Norway, comprising the two Trøndelag-counties, Nord- and Sør-Trøndelag as well as parts of the Nordland and Møre og Romsdal counties.
This region of Norway contains approximately 300 rock carving and rock painting sites from the Stone Age and Bronze Age. The petroglyph sites are much more plentiful than the rock painting sites. The prehistoric art of this area is not as well known as the more popular rock carving sites of Scandinavia, such as the Rock carvings at Alta, the Nämforsen rock art site, or the many petroglyph sites in Bohuslän, Sweden - but in recent years the amount of research into this corpus has increased, due largely to the work of professor Kalle Sognnes at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.
Scandinavian rock art comprise two categories. The first type dates to the Stone Age (in Norway from between 8000-1800 BC), and usually depicts mammals such as elk, red deer and reindeer, but also brown bears, whales and porpoises. It also depicts fish such as halibut and salmon, as well as birds. There are also examples of boats, humans and various geometrical figures. These rock carvings were probably made by people who used gathering, fishing and hunting as their subsistence. This type of rock art is commonly known as veideristninger (hunter's rock carvings). Since the most common motifs are hunted animals, a popular interpretation has been that the carvings were made as part of "hunter's magic" - in an attempt to gain control of the animals that were hunted.