Evidence for a 20,000-year sequence of Australian Aboriginal Rock Art

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.

A decade long research project has revealed the chronology of a sequence of Australian Aboriginal rock art styles that spans, at least, 20,000 years. The Kimberley region in north-western Australia is renowned for its rich concentration of painted rock art, traditionally believed to originate from the Pleistocene. Direct radiometric dating of the ochre pigment used for the older art is not possible. Attempts to date the art, therefore, rely on establishing age constraints through the dating of material overlying or underlying the paintings. Until now, the scarcity of suitable material meant there was extremely limited geochronological evidence to support its Pleistocene antiquity and insufficient results to date the distinctive styles of rock art. Our research project developed techniques to radiocarbon date the more abundant, small mud wasp nests commonly found in contact with Kimberley rock art. Statistical analysis indicated that hundreds of wasp nest ages were necessary to confidently estimate the age span of the five main Kimberley rock art styles. We collected over 600 mud wasp nest samples and prepared 565 for AMS measurement. Our findings, based on 440 radiocarbon dated wasp nests, establish a Kimberley stylistic sequence spanning at least 20,000 years.

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): 51388