Dating Rock Art – Context is everything

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The developments of microscopy and in other scientific fields over the last five decades have changed the face of rock art research enabling researchers to make huge leaps and bounds in understanding early human art-making. Long term collaborations with Aboriginal communities in Australia have also allowed for continuing research into how and why rock art was made, and even to explore the chronological age of rock art, even where this requires some impact on the art to pursue the question. This paper describes projects underway in the north-west of Australia where we are contextualizing regional rock art sequences by sourcing pigments and dating a range of environmental proxies and archaeological features. Some new results are announced!

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51921