Arnhem Land is a key region for understanding the Pleistocene colonisation of Australia, due to the presence of the oldest sites in the continent. Despite this, conventional archaeological survey has ...not been effective at locating additional pre-Holocene sites in the region due to a complex distribution of geomorphic units caused by sea level rise and coastal aggradation. This research uses geophysical and geomatic techniques to map the subsurface distribution of the geomorphic units in the Red Lily Lagoon region in eastern Arnhem Land. This reveals a complex Pleistocene landscape, which offers the potential to locate additional archaeological sites and so reveal more about the lifeways of the earliest Australians.
Objects have many stories to tell. The stories of their makers and their uses. Stories of exchange, acquisition, display and interpretation. This book is a collection of essays highlighting some of ...the collections, and their object biographies, that were displayed in the Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of Archaeology in Oceania (UPP) exhibition. The exhibition, which opened on 1 March 2020, sought to bring together both notable and relatively unknown Pacific material culture and archival collections from around the globe, displaying them simultaneously in their home institutions and linked online at www.uncoveringpacificpasts.org. Thirty‑eight collecting institutions participated in UPP, including major collecting institutions in the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the Americas, as well as collecting institutions from across the Pacific.
This data article contains mineralogic and chemical data from mineral coatings associated with rock art from the East Alligator River region. The coatings were collected adjacent to a rock art style ...known as the “Northern Running Figures” for the purposes of radiocarbon dating (doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.11.016; (T. Jones, V. Levchenko, P.L. King, U. Troitzsch, D. Wesley, 2017) 1). This contribution includes raw and processed powder X-ray Diffraction data, Scanning Electron Microscopy energy dispersive spectroscopy data, and Fourier Transform infrared spectral data.
Arnhem Land, which has one of the longest records of human activity on the Australian continent, also holds one of the most important assemblages of rock art in the world. Indigenous artistic ...practice in this region has continued since before the Last Glacial Maximum through to the modern day, a period of at least 28 thousand years, during which time the region has undergone significant environmental and palaeogeographical changes. Rock art research in the area, however, has not considered high resolution palaeolandscape data, but rather has used coarser scale regional environmental models. This paper addresses this issue, applying detailed palaeogeographic modelling of current and former landscapes in the Red Lily Lagoon region in eastern Arnhem Land, to the spatial analysis of rock art site placement in this important cultural landscape. The resultant elevation, land cover and visibility modelling reveal significant changes in site placement strategies for rock art in the region, which appear to relate to four key phases of the landscape change that have occurred from the late Pleistocene to the late Holocene.
This paper presents selected results of an experimental study using portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) for the non-destructive analysis of rock art pigments in northern Australia. During two weeks of ...fieldwork in the dry season of 2011 at the Red Lily Lagoon area in western Arnhem Land, 32 rock art motifs in four rockshelter sites were analysed. A total of 640 analyses were undertaken, including of white, red, black, yellow and blue pigments from both early and contact art motifs. This paper discusses the geochemical analysis of one particular motif painted with black pigment. It was determined that processed metal lead was the most likely pigment base. Contrary to previous stylistic analysis that suggested the motif had an old age, our analysis suggests that the motif was painted within the last 200-300 years.
This paper explores the complex story of a particular style of rock art in western Arnhem Land known as ‘Painted Hands’. Using new evidence from recent fieldwork, we present a definition for their ...style, distribution and place in the stylistic chronologies of this region. We argue these motifs played an important cultural role in Aboriginal society during the period of European settlement in the region. We explore the complex messages embedded in the design features of the Painted Hands, arguing that they are more than simply hand stencils or markers of individuality. We suggest that these figures represent stylized and intensely encoded motifs with the power to communicate a high level of personal, clan and ceremonial identity at a time when all aspects of Aboriginal cultural identity were under threat.
The analysis of style is a widespread method for describing classes of rock art and plays a significant role in forming a chronology for Arnhem Land rock art assemblages. A longstanding issue ...identified in Arnhem Land rock art has been the ill-defined nature of the 'Large Naturalistic Style' (LNS) as originally proposed by rock art researcher George Chaloupka. We have re-examined the distribution, frequency and the stylistic design attributes of 163 early naturalistic macropod paintings from 88 rock art sites across the region utilising predominately legacy records. This provides us with an opportunity to re-examine Chaloupka's stylistic category of the LNS and describe and map the stylistic attributes used by Indigenous artists in the depictions of early naturalistic animal forms that occur through the Early and Middle Periods (from Pleistocene to early Holocene). We examine Chaloupka's LNS against established criteria for the definition of a style, such as whether it exhibits a specific and characteristic manner of production and if it is localised to a specific time and place. We present the first reported quantifiable dataset of design attributes for this regional art type. The results provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the temporal and spatial coherence of the Large Naturalistic Style class of rock art. Although a generalised standard depiction of naturalistic macropod forms exists in Early Period rock art, the original definition of LNS and its chronological placement in the rock art sequence is not supported. Therefore, we propose using the more generalised term 'early large naturalistic fauna' to represent this class of rock art, rather than LNS in the Arnhem Land rock art schema. This provides a platform by which future research can attempt to investigate the function of early large naturalistic fauna and the potential links of this class of rock art to group identity, ritual and religious behaviours in northern Australia.
The archaeology of Bald Rock 1, Bald Rock 2 and Bald Rock 3 at the sandstone outcrop of Maliwawa has established ∼25,000 years of Indigenous occupation in the Wellington Range, northwestern Arnhem ...Land. Flaked stone artefacts were found from the beginning of the sequence, with ground-edge axes, pounding and grinding technology and ochre recovered from deposits dating from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the recent contact period. Maliwawa was occupied during the LGM and other major regional environmental changes arising from post-glacial sea level rise and stabilisation along with the climatic variability of the Indonesian Australian Summer Monsoon (IASM) and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), supporting models that define Arnhem Land as a refugium. Lithic assemblages are represented by a quartz and quartzite flake abundance technological strategy, with an unusual lack of stone points observed, although other typical Arnhem Land Holocene retouched lithics are present. Raw material diversity in the late Holocene, alongside a variety of emergent pan-Arnhem Land rock art styles in the Wellington Range, supports the proposition of increasing exchange between Indigenous groups. These changes in the archaeological record signal the expansion of cultural systems throughout western Arnhem Land, documented historically and archaeologically, at the time of culture contact.
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