Regional Reponses to Global Climate Change: Exploring Anthropomorphic Depictions in Rock and Mobiliary Art Expressions from the Kimberley and Europe During the Late and Terminal Pleistocene

Abstract

Northern Australia and particularly the Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions are well known for the intensive production of figurative anthropomorphs as a dominant theme by the terminal Pleistocene. Ongoing analysis and dating places the archaeological efflorescence of individual human figures and grouped scenes, often with extraordinary detail in the depictions of accoutrements, weaponry, and personal ornamentation, subsequent to the LGM (MIS 2) and across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. In this chapter, we argue that the intensive production of human figures – in contrast to preceding millennia of predominantly figurative animal motifs – was a cultural response to ongoing loss of territory with sea level rise (and especially on the shallow continental shelves of the north), greater identity marking and emerging regionalism in northern Australia starting between 18–12 ka. While the impacts and climate details of MIS 3 and 2 were clearly different in the northern hemisphere, we believe there are complementary trajectories in Western Eurasian art bodies, which equally display regional and interregional patterns during approximately the same time period in both parietal and mobiliary art. We explore whether global drivers associated with glacio-eustatic trends, the loss of land through inundation and the emergence and subsequent relaxation of glacial refugia, might be implicated in the enhancement of anthropomorphic assemblages located on opposite sides of the world.