Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

Abstract

Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3 vi Dreamtime Superhighway: an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange FOREWORD I remember the visit with clarity: it was 1991 and my first trip to Australia. One day was spent at Sydney's West Head with the young and enthusiastic Jo McDonald, where we toured some of the rock engraving sites and the painted Great Mackerel rock shelter. I can still see the large flat curving rocks at West Head on which animals had been engraved -fish, kangaroos, a goanna. And, as is so often the case when I visit rock art sites, my imagination gets going as to the 'how's' and 'why's'. I try to run some sort of a show in my head as to the people who produced these, viewed these, and what kinds of significations the images and their makings played in the lives of past peoples. At the time of this visit, Jo McDonald was well into her 1994 dissertationthe work upon which this monograph is based. Already, in that PhD dissertation, she was able to touch on some of the things that my imagination was searching for. Thus, it is with great pleasure and even more enthusiasm that I am writing this Foreword to a revised and thoroughly up-dated monograph based on that initial dissertation research.At the time of the 1994 dissertation, the anthropological and archaeological study of 'rock art' was really emerging into new trends and new prominence. Surely Australia was one of the leaders in the training of students and in the research that contextualized the images and 'art', thanks to such scholars as Andrée Rosenfeld, Robert Layton, and John Clegg among others. By this time, the work of David Lewis-Williams and colleagues in southern Africa had set off numerous studies world-wide into the relationship between the production of rock art images and altered states of consciousness and the role of shamans in image-making practices. But this was not the direction or focus of rock art studies in Australia, and McDonald's original work would not be tempted either. Rather, she carried out an extensive project of contextualizing the rock art in question, and in two different ways. First, she wanted to give us an understanding of the rock art in its archaeological contexts-sheltered or open, dates and chronologies, site types and, in general, what the archaeology c...

Identity signalling in shields: how coastal hunter-gatherers use rock art and material culture in arid and temperate Australia

“…Franklin (2004) confirmed a number of 'Simple Figurative' styles operating at the regional level across Australia. It is generally assumed that these regional style provinces represent the art of defined culture blocs (sensu Peterson 1976) as various regional studies have demonstrated (McDonald 2008;Morwood 1984;Ross 2013). At a general level there are visual similarities between Port Hedland's and Sydney's art assemblages.…”

“…Both style regions are defined as being 'Simple Figurative' with the art consisting mostly of identifiable animal, human and material culture motifs depicted in a relatively simple schema (Maynard 1979;McCarthy 1962;and see Franklin 2004 for an analysis of these Simple Figurative styles). Both art provinces are probably Holocene manifestations (Attenbrow 2010;Clune and Harrison 2009;McDonald 2008). For both regions we have limited linguistic and ethnographic information about the social groups that produced the rock art.…”

“…Upper Yule : Wright 1968;and on Depuch Island: McCarthy 1961). In the Sydney Basin, there are many shield motifs found in both the painted and engraved rock art repertoires (McDonald 1999(McDonald , 2008) although here we focus only on the engraved shields.…”

“…Style information in shields: material culture and rock art Across Australia, shield designs have been the productive focus of previous research around symbolic imagery and shared designs across rock art and material culture (Akerman 1992;Brady 2005;Dickins 1996;Hatte 1992;McDonald 1999McDonald , 2008McNiven et al 2004;von Brandenstein 1972). Hatte (1992) compared shield designs in collected material culture items with those depicted in the painted rock art of Townsville in northern Queensland.…”

Understanding Australia’s cultural history through archaeological geophysics

“…tula adzes, cylcons), burials, rock art and biology, and attempts have been made to utilise the results to extrapolate past territorial organisation (e.g. David 1991;David and Chant 1995;David and Cole 1990;Franklin 2004;McDonald 2008;Pardoe 1988Pardoe , 1994Pardoe , 1995Wade et al 2011). With respect to mortuary practices, any regional patterning present may be strongly dependent on external-rather than cultural-factors such as the presence of trees suitable for burial or excarnation (flesh removal), a soft substrate into which to dig a grave, or rockshelters for placement of bundles.…”