Session 2.1-2: Archaeology of art: Networks and narratives

1. Rock art and eastern Arrernte clan affiliations

Ben Gun (Archaeological consultant, Stawell, VIctoria)

The identification of patterns and trends in rock art can offer substance to the interpretation of inter-group relationships beyond that provided by other areas of archaeology. The study of Central Australian rock art has been ongoing for several years and a broad framework is now available. Recent studies of Eastern Arrernte sites however have seen a number of smaller scale patterns identified that appear to sub-divide the Eastern Arrernte area into at least three areas on the basis of the occurrence of particular and distinctive motif types. As the distribution of these motifs overlaps a number of different clan areas, it suggests that adjoining clans held some form of confederation possibly based on ritual and social alliances.

2. Dating the Dreaming: Extinct fauna in the petroglyphs of the Pilbara region, Western Australia.

Ken Mulvaney (Heritage Officer, Pilbara Iron, Dampier WA)

Examples of striped marsupial depictions have been reported from both the coastal and inland Pilbara. Many are regarded as images of the Thylacine, an animal which disappeared from mainland Australia some 3-4,000 years ago. Also observable in the rock art is the 'fat-tailed' macropod, a distinctive rendition of this animal. Recent investigations in the Tom Price area and on the Burrup confirm that both motifs pertain to the more ancient rock art corpus. Restricted artistic variation within the depiction of these two species confirms the trend to naturalistic style within animal subjects and suggests a extensive, culturally cohesive, artistic tradition across the Pilbara during the Pleistocene and early Holocene.

At two specific locations, aspects of the rock art may be explained in terms of the oral traditions and cultural practises, affording a means of placing temporal parameters to these Pilbara Traditions. In these cases, the rock art is not just pictures on the rock but clearly communicate narratives and behavioural traits, and point to an antiquity to the Dreaming of more than just a few thousand years.

3. The morphing of the anthros: How the depiction of anthropomorphs demonstrate both networks and narratives

Jo McDonald (Australian National University)

Over the past four years I have been working on the rock art of the Calvert Ranges – in the remote Sandy Desert near the Canning Stock Route. While being in the western desert cultural block the rock art shows clear connections to the Pilbara. Given the language flow and mythological connections this is not a surprise – although the probable antiquity of these networks is greater than the linguistic models might have suggested.

In this paper I am interested in looking at how motif and trait analysis can inform us about stylistic behaviour. Long distance narratives and the nature of possible network systems are the focus of these discussions. We can see a cline between the pigment and engraved rock art of the Calvert Ranges, though various smaller recognisable style locales (engraved and/or pigment) to the engraved art of the Dampier Archipelago. This paper discusses the implication of shared traits and the morphing of motifs with distance and time.

4. Suffering a total collapse: Measuring the intensity of use of rock shelters in the Central Queensland Highlands

Luke Godwin and Scott L'Oste-Brown (Central Queensland Cultural Heritage Management)

Kenniff Cave has developed some major structural flaws and there is some reason to believe that this important site is in imminent danger of collapse. Longitudinal studies of a series of 52 art sites in the Central Queensland Highlands reveal that this situation is by no means unique. This paper reviews the results of the longitudinal studies, focusing on instances of mass collapse. There is reason to suppose that mass collapse of sites probably represents the interplay of large-scale tectonic events and the inherent rates of erosion of particular geological formations. The paper then moves on to consider the implications of this study for perceived patterns of occupational intensity in this and other regions. We conclude that, in the absence of a well developed understanding of regional and sub-regional geomorphological processes, at least one of commonly used measures of occupational intensity that underpins arguments of intensification is fraught.

5. Art in the open: landscape archaeology of unsheltered rock art in Cape York Peninsula

Noelene Cole (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, University of Queensland)

The best known (and the most studied) Aboriginal rock art of Cape York Peninsula is in rock shelters which provide potential for archaeology such as excavation and paint and rock surface research. However, there is also a lesser known corpus of rock art in unsheltered situations which provides different conditions for archaeological research. In the past the focus of interest in two recorded sites of this kind has been 'style' and 'chronology' rather than cultural context. Additional open air art sites have since been located, indicating that, as can be seen in the frequency of artefact scatters, stone arrangements and marked trees, much of the cultural life was conducted outside rock shelters. With reference to open air art sites in a range of situations this paper 1. explores methods of studying the roles of such places in Aboriginal life and landscape, and 2. considers how the archaeology of unsheltered art might contribute to our understanding of local and/or regional networks of communication and interaction in this region.

6. An archaeology of art: Challenging the meta-narrative of the story of art

Thomas Dowson (University of Manchester)

The story of art is one of those captivating narratives in which a history of the West is read as the history of humanity. Art is said to have its origins in Palaeolithic Europe and its present in the experimental, contemporary artists of the West. Prehistoric arts in this narrative merely serve as a handmaiden to the dominant, grand narrative we read in such texts as Gombrich’s The story of Art. The study of prehistoric and ancient arts can, I believe, challenge such grand narratives. Despite archaeologists long standing interest in art, we do not recognise an 'archaeology of art' as an area of study in the same way as we recognise such long established traditions as the history of art, anthropology of art, psychology of art and even the sociology of art. This is changing, and this session, entitled 'archaeology of art' is evidence of a growing commitment by archaeologists to a more theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous approach to prehistoric and ancient arts. I argue, however, an archaeology of art should not concentrate solely on theoretical and methodological concerns, but more on socio-political concerns – thus actively challenging the widely held misconception that art begins in Lascuax and ends in the Louvre. To do this I draw on an explicitly Foucauldian concept of archaeology and propose that an archaeology of art should explore the ways in which discursive practices define the conditions of possibility for knowledge about prehistoric and ancient visual traditions. I have identified five relational aspects that allow us to interrogate those discursive practices. In this paper I draw on five very different examples of 'art' to demonstrate potential of this approach; they are: European Palaeolithic art, Southern African hunter and gatherer rock art, Wandjina paintings in Australia, Romano-British mosaics and Celtic are of Iron Age Europe. An archaeology of art dispels the popular myth of there being a single story of art, with a distinct beginning, and many successively developmental phases since that beginning, and recognises there are in fact many narratives of art, some of which impact on one another, some of which do not.

7. Rock art and ritual

June Ross (University of New England)

Rock art researchers throughout the world have explicitly or implicitly invoked ritual as an activity associated with the production of rock art but the articulation between the structure and composition of rock art assemblages and ritual behaviour remains poorly understood. Anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999) argued that all ritual, whatever the content or focus, has a universal structure. In this paper, I present the methods and results of an archaeological analysis of central Australian rock art aimed at distinguishing such a ritual structure within a number of chronologically differentiated parts of the art assemblage. While the theoretical framework proposed has some limitations, it provides a foundation for the development of theory which will further the understanding of the relationship between the production of rock art and ritual in hunter-gatherer society.

8. Reconsidering handstencils in East Borneo

Jean-Michel Chazine (Maison Asie-Pacifique/CNRS-Marseille)

Recent unexpected discoveries of a rock art assemblage in East Borneo provide a new set of data focussed on hand motifs. Surveys undertaken in 30 caves and rockshelters located in the highest levels of steep karstic outcrops, have recorded more than 1500 hand motifs to date. Not always associated with other human or animal figures, the hand motifs display another aspect of rock art. The unusually high number of handstencils, which are often superimposed with different motifs or linked together, show that interpretation of handstencils should be reconsidered. The remote location of these ornate caves and the fact that the caves do not contain evidence of habitation, suggest that the rock art assemblage within the caves may be associated with ritual or initiation practices.

A calcite veil covering some hand motifs has been dated by U/Th and C14 methods to around 10,000 BP. These dates indicate that the oldest motifs would clearly predate the arrival of Austronesians 5,000 years ago. Thus the socio-cultural use and practice of rock art in Eastern South East Asia, which had been previously attributed to Austronesian influence, should be revised.

9. Regional spatial networks and the rock art of NW central Queensland

Mal Ridges (National Parks and Wildlife Service, NSW) and June Ross and Iain Davidson (University of New England)

This paper describes how spatial networks within a regional rock-art assemblage can be described using GIS procedures. Doing so involved focusing upon the spatial links between sites based on the depiction of similar motif types and the design elements of a single motif type. The results revealed two strong regional spatial patterns that were not directly evident in the distribution of individual motif types or their design elementsæalthough our research has shown that spatial distribution patterns exist for some of them. The spatial patterns revealed through the links analysis complemented other aspects of the region's rock art investigated through other means. On this basis, it is argued that the analysis of links between rock-art sites provides further evidence about the spatial pattern of the communication networks that operated in NW central Queensland. Furthermore, the methods developed in the study represent a generalised approach to describing how individual sites (of various types) are networked within their broader regional context.

10. Upper Nepean pigments, networks and narratives: A preliminary archaeometric investigation

Jillian Ford, Julie Dibden and Alan Watchman (Australian National University)

In 1997 Isabel McBryde wrote of a cultural landscape of the mind in reference to Aboriginal exchange and trade networks. She argued that exchange systems were a coherent mental construct, not a physical entity, and that the material manifestations of these constructs are visible in the archaeology of the spatial distribution of raw materials. Petrological and geochemical analyses provide the 'fundamental empirical data' by which the economic and symbolic value(s) of the raw materials can be interpreted. So what patterns emerge when geochemical and mineralogical analyses are carried out on processed raw materials, such as pigments? Are the pigments used to produce pictographic and stencil art potential indicators of trade/exchange networks, or could they reflect the corporate and/or individual relationships to place manifest in the rock art? Are the two mutually exclusive or are they components of the same coherent mental construct, a cultural landscape of the mind? This paper presents the preliminary results of the Woronora Pigment Project, which is designed to further the temporal, spatial and socio-cultural interpretations of the rock art of the Upper Nepean by examining the spatial variations of the mineralogy and geochemistry of the pigments.