Disentangling the styles, sequences and antiquity of the early rock art of western Arnhem Land

Abstract

The rock art of western Arnhem Land represents one of the largest corpuses and most complex ancient cultural records in ancient Australia, with both the rock art and the broader archaeological landscape amongst the oldest Indigenous occupied landscapes in the country (David et al. 2013; Clarkson et al. 2015; Roberts et al. 1990, 1993, 1994). While both the archaeology and aspects of the rock art have been rigorously studied, the early rock art of Arnhem Land rock art largely remains disarticulated from the archaeological record owing to its unknown antiquity (Langley and Tacon 2010). The inability to temporally link rock art sequences to the archaeological record has thus limited the capacity of rock art researchers to inform and engage in disciplinary debates regarding the social nature and the cultural complexity of Indigenous societies in the deep past. This issue remains the greatest limitation of rock art research (Ross et al. 2016). This thesis aims to revaluate and test the validity of the previously proposed stylistic sequences and their assumed antiquity (Brandl 1973; Chaloupka 1993; Chippindale and Tacon 1998; Lewis 1988) with particular reference to the early to middle periods of western Arnhem Land rock art (Chippindale and Tacon 1998; Wesley et al. in press). It aims to anchor the stylistic chronology and our current understanding of western Arnhem Land rock art to the broader regional archaeological record through the production of absolute chronometric age constraints for selected rock art styles. The rock art styles subject to stylistic analysis and radiocarbon dating include; the Northern Running Figure style, the Large Naturalistic style, and the early X-ray style. By producing chronometric information regarding the timings of the emergence and disappearance of key rock art styles, a revised chronology for the early to middle periods can be proposed. This revised stylistic chronology for early to middle period rock art enables a combined re-evaluation of both the archaeology and the rock art in the region, thus consolidating our understanding of the social nature, function and cultural context of rock art production in western Arnhem Land throughout the Pleistocene – Holocene transition.