Beyond age determinations: Building theoretically informed contextualised understandings of deep time rock art in Sunda and Sahul

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.

Innovations in methods that target datable materials using radiocarbon (Finch et al. 2019; Green et al. 2021) has enhanced the capacity of rock art researchers to date rock art in Australia, producing a range age determinations for a diversity of rock art motifs (Finch et al. 2020; 2021; Jones et al. 2017). Similarly age determinations generated by uranium series dating from rock art motifs from across ISEA (Aubert et al 2014; 2018; 2019; Brumm et al. 2021; Oktaviana et al. 2024) has drastically revised our understanding of the evolution of ancient symbolic behaviours globally. Despite ground-breaking novelty, the impact and benefit of these ages in enhancing our understanding of the sociocultural function of symbolic behaviours remains limited due to the lack of research that demonstrates the chronological and stylistic relationships between the dated motifs and the broader motif assemblage and their archaeological and environmental contexts (though see Jones and May 2017; Norman et al. 2024; Kowlessar et al. 2024 and Veth et al. 2021; 2024) hampering the ability to undertake interregional analysis. In this paper we identify the current gaps in knowledges and suggest research pathways forward in order to build more theoretically and contextually informed interpretations of rock art.

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): 51230