Rock Art As Place-Making Strategy: A Papua New Guinea Case Study

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rock art and its ethnographic study provide important insights to understand people’s connection to place. In this research, formal and informed methods were used to analyze four stenciled rock art sites in Auwim village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). One thousand and seventy-seven rock art motifs were identified while the ethnographic data results show that Auwim people’s use of rock art production and its role through time has changed from ritual functions to mundane activities of place-marking. The variation in the subject matter of rock art production, the two-to-three layers of production and the tentative four-phase sequence model also show change in people’s choice from using human appendage design forms to the stenciling of significant long-distance trade and exchange goods and local weapons, and then the stenciling of European-introduced tools. The results of the rock art motif analysis also show links to other existing archaeological sites and objects of significance, revealing regional links with the Austronesian Painting Tradition model in PNG and the broader Indo-Pacific region. This suggests that Auwim rock art could have been made over a long time, but its production continues today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39603.0