Luminescence dating of rock art and past environments using mud-wasp nests in northern Australia

Roberts, Richard G.; Walsh, Grahame; Murray, Andrew; Olley, J. M.; Jones, Rhys; Morwood, Michael J; Tuniz, Claudio; Lawson, Ewan; Macphail, Michael; Bowdery, Doreen; Naumann, I. D.

doi:10.1038/42690

Cited by 142 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Elsewhere in the Sydney Basin the early use of red pigment in shelter art sites has been identified -as it has elsewhere across the continent (Cook et al 1990;Loy et al 1990;Roberts et al 1997).…”

Section: The Pigment Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dreamtime Superhighway: an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange 1993b; Roberts et al 1997). The dynamic figures of Kakadu have also been argued to have considerable antiquity (Chaloupka 1977(Chaloupka , 1985(Chaloupka , 1994Haskovec 1992;Taçon and Chippindale 1993) (McDonald 2005b).…”

Section: Sydney Art In the General Scheme Of Australian Rock Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

McDonald¹

2008

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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...

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Section: The Pigment Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sydney Art In the General Scheme Of Australian Rock Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

McDonald¹

2008

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“…While previous studies have assessed radiocarbon ages from organics within mud wasp nests in comparison to OSL ages (Roberts et al 1997(Roberts et al , 2000, the potential to exploit other methods, such as calcium oxalate radiocarbon dating, for comparative analysis in determining age estimations for rock art has been identified as a growing area of research (Bednarik 2014). The fact remains that problems persist for all 'direct' dating methods in rock art research, placing significant constraints on our ability to generate chronometric age estimates for rock art.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This date is interpreted as representing the moment of mud wasp nest construction, as the organic components, such as pollen, spores, phytoliths and charcoal dust, are gathered and integrated into the structure of the nest by mud dauber wasps during the construction process (Bednarik 2014;Roberts et al 1997). While some mud dauber wasps prefer to construct nests on the remnants of pre-existing nests, visual inspection upon sampling the mud wasp nest residue in the field indicated that in this instance there was only a single nest-building event.…”

Section: Radiocarbon Age Determinationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How old is X-ray art? Minimum age determinations for early X-ray rock art from the ‘Red Lily’ (Wulk) Lagoon rock art precinct, western Arnhem Land

Jones¹,

Levchenko²,

Wesley³

2017

The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia

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“…Roberts et al 1997;Wallis 2002). Again, such investigations are best done by applying multiple dating techniques, such as OSL and radiocarbon dating of individual wasp nests overlying or underlying the art.…”

Section: Terra Australis 47mentioning

confidence: 99%

The archaeology of western Arnhem Land’s rock art

David¹,

Taçon²,

Gunn³

et al. 2017

The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia

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Luminescence dating of rock art and past environments using mud-wasp nests in northern Australia

Cited by 142 publications

References 19 publications

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

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

How old is X-ray art? Minimum age determinations for early X-ray rock art from the ‘Red Lily’ (Wulk) Lagoon rock art precinct, western Arnhem Land

The archaeology of western Arnhem Land’s rock art

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