Media and social context: Influences on stylistic communication networks in prehistoric Sydney

Abstract

This paper explores some inter-relationships between style, media and social context in a regional prehistoric art style in the Sydney Basin in coastal south-eastern Australia. Engravings on open sandstone platforms and a predominantly pigment tradition within sandstone shelters represent a dual media style which operated in the recent prehistoric past. These combined media provide insight into how style may have been used in the pursuit of differing social strategies within this region. There is an assumption that varying degrees of heterogeneity within two components of the one art system - operating simultaneously in the one environment - must be interpreted differently. It is argued that the differing stylistic uses of the two media reflects the pursuit of different social ends. In particular, varying degrees of heterogeneity within the assemblages of the two art media are interpreted in terms of varying social strategies associated with differing degrees of network 'openness'. The rock art is located in two distinct physical contexts provided by the sandstone bedrock which defines this region. Engravings, or petroglyph, sites occur in open locations. In rockshelter locations the art consists of drawings, stencils, paintings and engravings. Open rock platforms on ridgelines and hillslopes, and cavernously weathered overhangs and shelters in the valleys and gullies, are characteristic of the sandstone bedrock. These locations have been the foci for extensive artistic activity. While the region is generally classified as coastal, within this there is observable environmental variation. Art sites of both types occur across the full range of ecosystems within the region, i.e. coastal margin, estuarine, riverine, forest, woodland and the more marginal hinterland.