Indigenous artists have been engraving rock shelters for millennia - long before the Kimberley’s celebrated rock art paintings. Now the rocks’ natural coatings are yielding clues to the engravings’ creation.
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Articles on Rock art
Displaying 21 - 40 of 45 articles
Pictures of boats and ships in rock art at the northwestern tip of Australia show the European incursions from the 1800s — but also the much earlier and lesser known sea trade with southeast Asia.
The ancient cave paintings have only begun to tell us about the lives of the earliest people who lived in Australasia. The art is disappearing just as we are beginning to understand its significance.
How does rock art matter? New research finds it can act as a kind of intergenerational media –even when no longer visible to the eye.
The team from Wits University returned to a well-known ceiling panel in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains, armed with new knowledge about the beliefs of the San people who made the paintings.
The painting of pigs at least 45,500 years ago on a cave wall in Sulawesi may be the earliest figurative rock art ever found.
Aotearoa New Zealand is falling behind in world heritage sites. Is it time we lobbied for recognition of our unique cultural history?
Heritage is non-renewable — just like the mineral wealth of this country.
More than 500 paintings at 87 rock shelters provide a remarkable glimpse into past Aboriginal life.
A recent cave art discovery in remote Indonesia is changing our understanding of the beginnings of art and the emergence of religious-like thinking in the early human story.
The World Heritage Listing for Victoria’s Budj Bim fish traps was ground-breaking. Here are five other Australian Indigenous sites that also deserve greater attention.
An image of a ship on a rock in Western Australia’s Dampier Archipelago depicts HMC Mermaid – the main vessel of Phillip Parker King, an unsung hero of Australian exploration.
Etchings over much earlier Aboriginal engravings show foreign whalers made contact with Australia’s remote northwest long before colonial settlement of the area.
The cave paintings in Borneo show people and animals and are now thought to be the world’s oldest example of figurative art.
Rock art in the Dampier Archipelago and the Burrup Peninsula contains engravings of animals that are now extinct, such as thylacines and a fat-tailed species of kangaroos.
Trying to save Neolithic rock art made by our ancient ancestors is no easy task. But it tells us how people used to live.
New research has cast doubt on the effectiveness of scientific studies monitoring industry impact on rock art in the Burrup Peninsula.
Bringing the past into a digital space creates so much more overt space for interpretation and different narratives.
Murujuga, or the Burrup Peninsula, is home to over a million rock artworks. But as concern grows about the impact of industrial pollution on the art, the WA government continues to play down the area’s heritage value.
New ways of using forensic science in anthropology have been developed to advance our understanding of the past.
Top contributors
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Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
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Director, Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia
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Professor, Griffith University
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Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair, The University of Western Australia
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Professor, Griffith University
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Senior Researcher, University of the Witwatersrand
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Associate Professor, University of Adelaide
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Postdoctoral research fellow, University of the Witwatersrand
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Senior research fellow, Flinders University
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PhD Candidate, Griffith University
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Emeritus professor, University of the Witwatersrand
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Professor of Archaeological Theory and Method, University of Liverpool
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Support staff, University of the Witwatersrand
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Lecturer in Clinical Communication, University of Liverpool
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Associate Professor of Osteoarchaeology, Uppsala University
