A Method to Date Rock Engravings Using Luminescence: Tested at Murujuga, Western Australia

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.

Rock engravings are a valuable component of the global archaeological record. They are significant to modern populations and are a visual archive of past cultural expression that can reflect material culture, practices, ideologies, territoriality, social organization, and environments in ways that other archaeological remains cannot. However, determining ages for rock engravings has proven difficult. Luminescence rock surface dating approaches have the potential to address this deficiency in applicable dating techniques. Specifically, luminescence rock surface exposure dating methods can be used to tell how long a rock surface has been exposed to sunlight, thus providing a potential avenue to date rock engravings. We conducted experiments to assess whether a luminescence rock surface exposure dating approach could be used to date when rock engravings were made at the Murujuga rock art complex in Western Australia. The major art-bearing lithologies were petrographically characterised and tested for usable luminescence signals. Laboratory and field luminescence bleaching experiments were conducted using non-cultural rock samples to test whether accurate exposure durations could be determined. Our results demonstrate that luminescence rock surface dating approaches have promising potential to date Murujuga’s vast assemblage of rock engravings.

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): 51232