Kimberley Visions: Antiquity of Rock Art Style Provinces of Northern Australia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Early figurative rock art from northern Australia contains large animal outline figures as well as monochrome anthropomorphic depictions. The latter often have extraordinary detail in accoutrements, headdresses, weaponry and associated material culture. They likely depict ceremonial and collective strategies shared over large areas and expected at the tail end of the arid phase of the LGM and until the re-set of the Indonesian Australian Summer Monsoon. The static and then dynamic phases in red/mulberry pigment anthropomorphs from both the Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions date to the terminal Pleistocene, when the two regions were connected by the now-drowned Bonaparte Basin; indeed, as much as 50% of the inscribed landmass was probably lost with post-LGM sea level rise. Intensive recording programs from multiple sites in both regions show that certain themes, artefacts and style conventions are shared while others differ markedly. This could be expected given the significant distance between the areas, likely different languages and clear differences in resource catchments and local climate. Nevertheless, these two cognate areas of the early non-Pama-Ngungan language family both show similar directionality in style during what I label the terminal Pleistocene Proliferation event (PE1) and early Holocene Proliferation Event 2 (PE2).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The Art of Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23240