tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/rock-art-11217/articles
Rock art – The Conversation
2024-01-09T00:48:20Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220029
2024-01-09T00:48:20Z
2024-01-09T00:48:20Z
New analysis unlocks the hidden meaning of 15,000-year-old rock art in Arnhem Land
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566518/original/file-20231219-27-o7yxd4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=55%2C462%2C4449%2C2986&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Rock art is one of the most intriguing records of the human past – it directly represents how our ancestors viewed their world. This provides a fundamentally different perspective compared to other archaeological items, such as stone artefacts.</p>
<p>Despite this beguiling potential, rock art research can be highly challenging. Different researchers can have contrasting interpretations of what the same image means. Sometimes they can’t even agree on what the rock art represents.</p>
<p>Given these difficulties, how can rock art contribute to understanding the past?</p>
<p>Our new research <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-023-01917-y">published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences</a> uses an innovative approach to understand rock art in Arnhem Land in a fundamentally different way.</p>
<h2>A dramatic landscape change</h2>
<p>Our work concerns the Red Lily Lagoon area. This part of western Arnhem Land contains an internationally significant record of humanity’s past, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/buried-tools-and-pigments-tell-a-new-history-of-humans-in-australia-for-65-000-years-81021">Australia’s oldest archaeological site</a>.</p>
<p>It has also been the subject of dramatic landscape change as a result of sea levels rising significantly over the last 14,000 years.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/remarkable-new-tech-has-revealed-the-ancient-landscape-of-arnhem-land-that-greeted-australias-first-peoples-201394">Remarkable new tech has revealed the ancient landscape of Arnhem Land that greeted Australia’s First Peoples</a>
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<p>The coastline moved from hundreds of kilometres away to right up against the cliffs in the Red Lily region, before retreating northwards about 50km to its current position. These changes would have had profound implications for people living in the area.</p>
<p>The complex landscape of sandstone cliffs and flat floodplains would have dramatically changed: from open savanna, to mudflat, to mangrove swamp. Eventually it would become the seasonally inundated freshwater wetlands that exist in the region today.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two people touching a wall with rock art showing outlines of human hands" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566796/original/file-20231220-29-rrvdey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Arnhem Land hosts a stunning rock art record which continues to be maintained today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span>
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<h2>An astonishing rock art record</h2>
<p>Arnhem Land has an astonishing <a href="https://theconversation.com/threat-or-trading-partner-sailing-vessels-in-northwestern-arnhem-land-rock-art-reveal-different-attitudes-to-visitors-161586">rock art record</a> that continues to be maintained by Traditional Owners today.</p>
<p>The rock art in Arnhem Land can be categorised into a number of different styles, which change over millennia. These styles, including <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/xray/hd_xray.htm">the well-known X-Ray style</a>, are thought to align with landscape changes driven by sea level rise. For example, saltwater animals such as fish appear in the rock art record when the sea had risen enough to impact this area.</p>
<p>To overcome the subjective nature of interpreting the artwork, archaeologists often turn to the landscape – to understand the placements of different types of art. </p>
<p>This approach usually assumes that the landscape today looks similar to when the art was painted. In Arnhem Land, where rock art has been estimated to be over 15,000 years old and the landscape has changed dramatically over this time, this isn’t true. </p>
<p>Our research used high-resolution elevation data, created from plane and drone surveys, to understand the placement of rock art sites throughout the landscape. We also mapped buried landscapes using imaging techniques to understand how the landscape has changed over time.</p>
<p>We used this data to understand how much of the landscape could be seen from each rock art site during each period of landscape evolution. We also examined what type of landscape was visible from each location. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A bearded smiling man holding a large black and red device with wings" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566230/original/file-20231218-19-xga6y3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Drone used to survey rock art in the Red Lily Lagoon area.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span>
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<p>This is the first time this approach has been used in Arnhem Land. The results provide new insights into what inspired people to create rock art at different times in the past.</p>
<h2>Valuable mangroves</h2>
<p>Importantly, we found rock art production was most active, diverse in style, and covered the most area of the plateau during the period when mangroves completely covered the floodplains.</p>
<p>This may be because the mangroves provided abundant resources which sustained a large and stable human population. Or perhaps it was a response to the substantial contraction of available land caused by the sea level rise.</p>
<p>We also found that during the period when the sea level was rising, rock art was preferentially made in areas with long-distance views over areas of open woodland.</p>
<p>This may have been to facilitate hunting, or to allow careful management of landscapes during a period when many people would have been displaced from the north by sea level rise.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A panorama of a rocky landscape with a blue sky above it" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=177&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=177&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=177&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=223&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=223&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566797/original/file-20231220-15-62df57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=223&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The complex mosaic of floodplain, plateau and escarpment country in the Red Lily Lagoon area.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span>
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<h2>Detailed landscapes provide deep insights</h2>
<p>Overall, our results show people in the past selected locations for rock art placement with intention. These rock art placements have the potential to tell us much more about the archaeology of Arnhem Land.</p>
<p>The locations where art is made have changed fundamentally over time. This reflects significant social and economic changes, which follow the landscape evolution over the long history of human occupation in western Arnhem Land.</p>
<p>Importantly, our results show that considering rock art through the lens of the modern landscape makes it impossible to make sense of the patterns of rock art placement and other archaeological records.</p>
<p>Our work shows more detailed models of the landscape directly surrounding archaeological sites can yield profound insights into past human activities, even those as difficult to interpret as the incredible artwork of Arnhem land.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/threat-or-trading-partner-sailing-vessels-in-northwestern-arnhem-land-rock-art-reveal-different-attitudes-to-visitors-161586">Threat or trading partner? Sailing vessels in northwestern Arnhem Land rock art reveal different attitudes to visitors</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220029/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jarrad Daniel Kowlessar receives funding from Flinders University. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daryl Wesley receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Flinders University, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and National Geographic. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Moffat receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Flinders University, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alfred Nayinggul does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Rock art directly represents how our ancestors saw the world. A new approach involving the history of the landscape brings fresh meaning to Arnhem Land rock art.
Jarrad Daniel Kowlessar, Associate Lecturer, Flinders University
Alfred Nayinggul, Senior Erre Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge
Daryl Wesley, Senior research fellow, Flinders University
Ian Moffat, Associate Professor of Archaeological Science, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/216548
2023-12-26T08:48:13Z
2023-12-26T08:48:13Z
Unusual ancient elephant tracks had our team of fossil experts stumped – how we solved the mystery
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559289/original/file-20231114-17-wm62rc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elephants communicate underground by generating seismic waves. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anadolu Agency</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the past 15 years, through our scientific study of tracks and traces, we have identified more than 350 <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.07.039">fossil vertebrate tracksites</a> from South Africa’s Cape south coast. Most are found in cemented sand dunes, called aeolianites, and all are from the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Pleistocene-Epoch">Pleistocene Epoch</a>, ranging in age from about 35,000 to 400,000 years. </p>
<p>During that time we have honed our identification skills and have become used to finding and interpreting tracksites – a field called ichnology. And yet, every once in a while, we encounter something we immediately realise is so novel that it has been found nowhere else on Earth.</p>
<p>Such a moment of unexpected discovery happened in 2019 along the coastline of the De Hoop Nature Reserve, about 200km east of Cape Town. Less than two metres away from a cluster of fossil elephant tracks was a round feature, 57cm in diameter, containing concentric ring features. Another layer was exposed about 7cm below this surface. It contained at least 14 parallel groove features. Where the grooves approached the rings, they made a slight curve towards them. The two findings, we hypothesised, were connected with each other and appeared to have a common origin.</p>
<p>Elephants are the largest, heaviest land animals. They leave large, deep, easily recognisable tracks. We’ve documented 35 fossilised elephant track sites in our study area, as well as the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2021.32">first evidence</a> of fossilised elephant trunk-drag impressions. </p>
<p>Elephants, like another group of massive land creatures, dinosaurs, can be viewed as geological engineers that create minor earth-moving forces on the ground they walk(ed) on. This can be related also to a remarkable ability that elephants possess: communicating by generating seismic waves. These are a form of energy that can travel under the surface of the Earth.</p>
<p>The feature we found in 2019 seemed to reflect just such a phenomenon: an elephant triggering waves that rippled outwards. After additional investigation and a thorough search for alternative explanations, we could report in a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016787823000792">recently published study</a> that we believe we’ve found the world’s first trace fossil signature of seismic, underground communication between elephants. </p>
<h2>Elephant seismicity</h2>
<p>Since the 1980s, an ever-increasing body of literature has documented “elephant seismicity” and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00300007">seismic communication through infrasound</a>. The lower threshold of human hearing is 20Hz; below that, low frequency sounds are known as infrasound. Elephant “rumbles”, originating in the larynx and transmitted into the ground through the limbs, fall within the infrasonic range. </p>
<p>Infrasound at high amplitude (it would seem very loud to us if at a slightly higher frequency) can travel further than high frequency sounds, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.062">over distances as great as 6km</a>. Elephants have an advantage here. Lighter creatures cannot <a href="https://doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00008.2007">generate low-frequency sound waves through vocalisation</a>. It is thought that long-distance seismic communication can allow elephant groups to interact over substantial distances, and it has <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.062">been shown</a> that sandy terrain allows the communication to travel furthest.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fossil-tracks-and-trunk-marks-reveal-signs-of-ancient-elephants-on-south-africas-coast-164306">Fossil tracks and trunk marks reveal signs of ancient elephants on South Africa's coast</a>
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<p>Continuing the elephant-dinosaur analogy, we considered the multitude of publications on dinosaur tracks. We are aware of only a single example that exhibits possible concentric rings within a track, from Korea, and none that involve parallel grooves. This suggests something unique about elephants that generates concentric rings within tracks and leads to the associated groove features. Elephant rumbling provides a plausible explanation.</p>
<p>In our scenario at De Hoop Nature Reserve, we postulate that vibrations from rumbling travelled down the elephant limb and created the concentric ring features. They are reminiscent of some of the patterns that become evident when <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAcYruShow">sprinkling sand onto a vibrating surface</a>. The surface on which the concentric rings appear must have been just below the dune surface at the time. The parallel grooves would then represent a trace fossil signature of subsurface communication. We’re not yet sure how old the trace fossil is; we’ve sent samples for testing.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tFAcYruShow?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A video showing sand vibrating when it’s exposed to sound.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Rumblings in rock art</h2>
<p>Elephant seismicity is a relatively new field of study for scientists. However, those who have lived close to elephants won’t be surprised at the idea of the animals communicating through vibration. Indeed, vibrations from elephant rumblings can sometimes be felt (rather than heard) by the astute observer. And it appears that this knowledge is not just recent. </p>
<p>The rock art experts on our team have identified and interpreted rock art that suggests the indigenous San people appreciated and celebrated this knowledge in southern Africa thousands of years ago. Elephants were of profound importance to the San and were prominently featured in <a href="https://www.archaeology.org.za/sites/default/files/attachments/publications/2019/09/02/ds_2018_december.pdf">their works of art</a>. Several rock art sites appear to contain paintings of elephants in relation to sound or vibration.</p>
<p>For example, at the Monte Cristo site in the Cederberg the artist has painted 31 elephants, in several groups. They are in a realistic arrangement. Fine red lines surround each elephant; zigzag lines touch the abdomen, groin, throat, trunk, and specifically the feet. Many zigzag lines link the elephant to the ground. The finest lines are closest to the elephants, and every elephant is connected to this set of lines. These are in turn connected to broader lines surrounding the elephant group, which radiate out and away from the elephants as concentric rings. </p>
<p>This is interpreted as the San artist’s probable illustration of seismic communication between elephants. The feeling of shaking and vibration, which the San call <em>thara n|om</em>, is vital to the San healing dances, including the <a href="https://www.archaeology.org.za/sites/default/files/attachments/publications/2019/09/02/ds_2018_december.pdf">elephant song and elephant dance</a>. Lines of energy, called <em>n|om</em>, are regarded as a vibrant life-giving force that animates all living beings and is the source of <a href="https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/28011/way-of-the-bushman">all inspired energy</a>.</p>
<p>We believe that an understanding of elephant seismicity requires the integration of three bodies of knowledge: research on extant elephant populations, ancestral knowledge (often manifested in rock art) and the trace fossil record. </p>
<p>That elephant seismic communication might leave a trace fossil record has never been reported before, or even postulated. Our findings may have the potential to stimulate multi-disciplinary research into this field. This could include a dedicated search for sub-surface patterns in the sand in the vicinity of modern rumbling elephants.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216548/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charles Helm does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Elephants can be viewed as geological engineers that create minor tectonic forces on the substrate they walk on.
Charles Helm, Research Associate, African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, Nelson Mandela University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219136
2023-12-12T14:42:58Z
2023-12-12T14:42:58Z
Madagascar cave art hints at ancient connections between Africa and Asia
<p>Unique, prehistoric rock art drawings have been discovered in the Andriamamelo Cave in western Madagascar. </p>
<p>I was part of a team that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564894.2020.1749735">discovered and described</a> these ancient treasures. They’re the first truly pictorial art, depicting images of nature with human-like and animal-like figures, to be seen on the island. Until recently, rock art in Madagascar had only yielded a few sites with basic symbols.</p>
<p>The dramatic discoveries contained several surprises, including hints at some remarkable cultural connections. </p>
<p>First, scenes depicted in some cases linked up fairly directly to Egyptian religious motifs from the Ptolemaic period (300-30 BCE). </p>
<p>Second, other inferences from symbols and writing on the walls showed connections to the Ethiopian and Afro-Arab worlds. </p>
<p>Finally, prevalent symbology and motifs evoked a two-millennia-old cave art style from Borneo. </p>
<p>An additional realm of surprises: at least three extinct animals of Madagascar (thought to have been extinct for many centuries) may be depicted – a giant sloth lemur, elephant birds and a giant tortoise. </p>
<p>It has long been believed – and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30846019_The_Culture_History_of_Madagascar">evidence</a> has confirmed – that the people, language, and culture of Madagascar are rooted in distant ancient connections to Borneo, an island in south-east Asia, combined with strong influences from continental eastern Africa.</p>
<p>However, who the first Malagasy were, when they arrived, and what they did after that, are all hotly <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379119303282?via%3Dihub">debated</a> topics.</p>
<p>Though our findings are speculative, any information that might be derived from the Andriamamelo Cave evidence is of considerable interest to the reconstruction of Malagasy early history.</p>
<h2>Connections beyond Madagascar</h2>
<p>Our research group – including Malagasy scientists from local institutions, and American, British and Australian specialists – visited the site near the village of Anahidrano on the north-west edge of the 17,100-hectare Beanka protected area in 2013. </p>
<p>Our team spent several days recording the images, surveying and mapping the entire cave, searching for associated archaeological sites, and interviewing local villagers regarding the art. It took several years, however, to search through relevant literature and museum archives to confirm the uniqueness and significance of what we’d found.</p>
<p>We made digital copies and hand-drawings of 72 cave-art objects. These were drawn in black pigment and included 16 animals, six human forms, two human-animal hybrid forms, two geometric designs, 16 examples of an M-shaped symbol, and many other patterns and indistinct forms. </p>
<p>Egyptian connections are hinted at in eight major images, including a falcon (Horus); the bird-headed god Thoth; the ostrich goddess Ma`at and two human-animal figures which were similar to Anubis – an ancient Egyptian god usually depicted as a man with a canine head. </p>
<p>The ubiquitous and mysterious M-figures demand explanation: we suggested, after searching many relevant alphabets, that it is a perfect match for only one, the letter “hawt” (ሐ) in the ancient Ethiopian Amharic alphabet, pronounced “ha”.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, though, we also found this symbol in cave art from Borneo thought to be about 2,000 years old, and in no other cave or rock art throughout the Indo-Pacific region. In some Austronesian languages (the diverse language family that extends from Malagasy on the west to distant Hawaii and Rapa Nui in the Pacific), the word “ha” is a term for the “breath of life”. </p>
<p>All these possible connections remind us that Madagascar’s people, language, and culture are in themselves syncretic, blending African and Asian influences to produce a unique Malagasy people.</p>
<p>The richly detailed and diverse art is notable also for what it doesn’t show. </p>
<p>No Christian, Muslim or Hindu symbolism is depicted, and no relatively modern motifs such as the Latin alphabet, cars, airplanes or flags. Even the ubiquitous zebu (cattle), the culturally paramount symbol of the last thousand years or more in Madagascar, are absent.</p>
<h2>When and whose</h2>
<p>It’s hard to know exactly when these drawings were made. Direct dating of cave art is notoriously difficult, and proved so in this case as the black pigment was made from dark inorganic minerals with only a small component of charcoal we could use for radiocarbon dating. </p>
<p>The presence of extinct animals, and the lack of modern motifs and the alphabet used in modern Malagasy, weigh heavily against the notion of a recent origin for the art.</p>
<p>We suspect that the art is about 2,000 years old – dating back to the time of Cleopatra or before, based on the religious motifs. If it is, that is remarkable and useful to know because it may provide evidence for who colonised Madagascar and when.</p>
<p>If, on the other hand, a set of pre-Christian religious beliefs has survived for centuries or even millennia among certain ethnic groups in very remote areas of the immense island – retaining recognisable influences from Egypt, Ethiopia and Borneo – that would be perhaps more remarkable. Village informants hinted at that possibility, by insisting that the “sorcerer” pictured was a member of a mysterious group of “Vazimba” or “Bosy”) who lived in the forest nearby.</p>
<p>So, whose art is this? We wish we knew, but clues are mostly lacking. The only possible writing, besides the M-figures, is a line of faint script in the lower right corner of this rock-art extravaganza. </p>
<p>Our best guess is that the legible middle six of eight characters, inferred to be <em>sorabe</em>, archaic Malagasy writing in Arabic script, may say “D-A-NT-IA-R-K”. </p>
<p>Does that refer to Antiochus IV Epiphanes? This king of the Seleucid Empire (western Asia) in the Ptolemaic period built a large navy, conquered much of Egypt in 170 BCE, and sent exploring and trading expeditions down the Red Sea and the east African coast. Ivory traders in that period <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/200009">spread</a> Roman goods as far south as ports in Tanzania south of Zanzibar, to trade with Azania. </p>
<p>Until more art or relevant archaeological evidence turns up for ancient African and Asian influences in Madagascar, we can only speculate.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219136/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Burney received funding from the National Geographic Society for the field research leading to these discoveries.</span></em></p>
Rock art from a Malagasy cave hints at some remarkable cultural connections.
David Burney, Professor of Conservation Paleobiology, National Tropical Botanical Garden, and Adjunct Professor, University of Hawaii
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214838
2023-10-04T19:05:00Z
2023-10-04T19:05:00Z
Stone Age herders transported heavy rock tools to grind animal bones, plants and pigment
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551583/original/file-20231003-19-rytk0g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C0%2C5988%2C4016&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maria Guagnin, Michael Petraglia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>About 7,000 years ago, a small group of people sat around a fire, next to a small lake in what is now the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia. </p>
<p>We found some of the tools they left behind – and on close inspection of the tools, we discovered these Stone Age herders were busy grinding animal bones, wild plants and pigments while their meat was cooking.</p>
<p>Our results are published in <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291085">a new paper</a> in PLOS ONE.</p>
<h2>Herders and artists</h2>
<p>Our earlier <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1920211117">research</a> has shown that between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago much of Arabia was far wetter and greener than it is today. </p>
<p>Grasslands spread, and trees and shrubs grew near water sources. Lakes formed and provided water. Herders lived around these lakes and led their cattle, sheep and goats to the best pastures.</p>
<p>These Stone Age herders were also skilled artists. They carved thousands of images into rock surfaces on cliffs and boulders, documenting their daily lives. </p>
<p>The rock art shows Stone Age people hunting gazelles, wild donkeys and ibex, and it also shows their most precious possession: their cattle.</p>
<h2>Stone Age camp sites</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352226721000258?via%3Dihub">Archaeological sites</a> from this period consist of collections of small fireplaces. The herders seem to have been extremely mobile, moving around the landscape with their herds, searching for pasture and water. </p>
<p>On these routes they made small camps near lakes, returning to the same places again and again as the years passed and the seasons turned.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/research-reveals-humans-ventured-out-of-africa-repeatedly-as-early-as-400-000-years-ago-to-visit-the-rolling-grasslands-of-arabia-167050">Research reveals humans ventured out of Africa repeatedly as early as 400,000 years ago, to visit the rolling grasslands of Arabia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A few years ago, we discovered one such camp at Jebel Oraf, near the Jubbah Oasis, in the Nefud Desert of Northern Saudi Arabia. </p>
<p>On the shores of a small, ancient lake, we discovered 170 small fireplaces. We excavated 17 of these fireplaces and radiocarbon dating showed that most of them are between 7,200 and 6,800 years old.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photos showing a grinding stone assembled from smaller pieces." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551585/original/file-20231003-21-8i9y72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A grinding stone reassembled from fragments appears to have had two holes for carrying with a rope or cord.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ceri Shipton</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What surprised us was that the small camps were full of grinding tools. Most of them had been broken into smaller pieces, and then placed on top of the fire. Some had had holes drilled into them to attach a rope to help carry them. </p>
<p>Although people were moving a lot, they took heavy grinding stones weighing up to three kilograms with them. It’s not clear how the grinding stones were transported – either they were carried by people or perhaps they were strapped to their cattle. Regardless, these grinding tools seem to have been very important to them.</p>
<p>Today the Jubbah Oasis is extremely arid and for archaeologists that means organic remains don’t survive. This made it very difficult to find out what the purpose of these grindstones was. </p>
<p>There are no plant remains in the archaeological sites, and animal bones only survive in small fragments. So, we turned to microscopic analysis in order to help determine the function of the grinding tools.</p>
<h2>Microscopic traces</h2>
<p>In experiments we find that grinding different materials, such as bone, pigment, or plants, leaves distinctive microscopic marks on the surface of the grinding tools. These marks, including striations, fractures, rounding of individual quartz grains and different types of polish, can be seen with a microscope.</p>
<p>We looked at the Stone Age grinding tools to identify similar traces, and from them to determine what materials were ground.</p>
<p>Our microscopic study showed the grindstones were used for a range of different purposes. </p>
<p>Some were used to process bones. We know the fires were used to cook the meat of cattle, sheep and goats, and of game such as oryx and ostrich. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photos of a stone grinding tool and high-magnification pictures of marks on its surface." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551586/original/file-20231003-27-qx5d3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A stone grinding tool showing microscopic traces of plant and pigment processing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Giulio Lucarini</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We think the herders broke open animal bones to get to the marrow. Bone marrow is high in fat, and this would have helped them to get extra nutrition.</p>
<p>Our analysis also showed they ground plants. None of the actual plant remains have survived, so we don’t know if they ground wild plants to make simple breads, or if they pounded plant fibres to make baskets or rope. </p>
<p>Both would have been important for their lifestyle. They moved a lot and bread would have been easy to preserve and carry around. Baskets and rope would have been used for storage and transport and also to construct simple, transportable shelters.</p>
<p>The grinding tools also showed pigment was processed. Red shale, a rock found in nearby mountains, can be used like a crayon or ground into red powder and mixed into paint. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photos showing rock art drawings of different animals, with different pigments highlighted." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=635&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=635&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=635&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551587/original/file-20231003-25-8gek3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Painted rock art from northern Saudi Arabia hints at the importance of pigment processing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maria Guagnin</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Painted rock art doesn’t often survive. Over the centuries it is washed off by rain and wind. </p>
<p>Only one painted rock art site from the Neolithic survives near Jebel Oraf. It shows cattle with beautiful long horns. </p>
<p>The grinding stones are now evidence that painted art may once have been a lot more widespread.</p>
<h2>Valuable tools</h2>
<p>Our analysis of the grinding marks also showed the tools were often used for different materials over time. They were clearly valuable and used as much as possible. </p>
<p>At the end they were broken into smaller pieces. In some cases we were able to piece back together up to 12 fragments. We’re still not sure why the discarded tools were placed on the fire – perhaps they used them to cook or to dry their meat.</p>
<p>Grinding stones appear to have been an important tool for mobile herders 7,000 years ago. Although they would have been hard to carry, these tools allowed Stone Age herders to produce food resources and plant materials that were vital to their highly mobile lives.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/enigmatic-ruins-across-arabia-hosted-ancient-ritual-sacrifices-201574">Enigmatic ruins across Arabia hosted ancient ritual sacrifices</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214838/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A close look at 7,000-year-old grinding stones left in ancient firepits shows wandering herders in northern Saudi Arabia carried heavy tools for working on bones, plants and rocks.
Maria Guagnin, Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Giulio Lucarini, Researcher, Institute of Heritage Science, National Research Council (CNR)
Michael Petraglia, Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211604
2023-08-31T14:09:55Z
2023-08-31T14:09:55Z
How our ancestors viewed the sky: new film explores both indigenous and modern cosmology
<p>Something remarkable is happening in a remote part of South Africa’s Northern Cape province, in a semi-desert area called the Karoo. In the past 15 years 64 radio receiving dishes have appeared on the landscape. These constitute the <a href="https://www.sarao.ac.za/gallery/meerkat/">MeerKAT telescope</a>, a precursor to the <a href="https://www.skao.int/en/about-us/skao">Square Kilometre Array Observatory</a> (SKAO), which will – when it is completed and fully functional in 2030 – be the world’s largest radio telescope.</p>
<p>The SKAO will receive signals emanating from the dark regions between the stars and galaxies. This data, studied by <a href="https://www.skao.int/en/resources/what-radio-astronomy">radio astronomers</a>, has the capacity to inform us about dark matter and could change our conception of the universe irrevocably.</p>
<p>In his new, award-winning documentary, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2g7eGjWGCk">!Aitsa</a>, filmmaker Dane Dodds explores the intellectual background and science of the SKAO alongside indigenous conceptions of the cosmos held by ancient <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/">ǀXam San people</a> and their Afrikaans-speaking descendants living in the Karoo today. As the film’s advisor I saw my task as bringing into focus the hidden assumptions that must be recognised in any encounter between knowledge, traditions and cosmology.</p>
<p>!Aitsa (a South African exclamation of praise or surprise) explores the SKAO’s approach to understanding the universe through big data made comprehensible by the techniques of empirical science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and instrumentation. The film also examines <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08949468.2023.2168962?journalCode=gvan20">Karoo star-lore</a> as it is shared and spread by an interwoven tapestry of oral traditions. Conventional ideas about the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2018.1447374">nature of science</a> are challenged and the dominant structures of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02533952.2020.1850626">knowledge creation</a> are questioned as a result.</p>
<p>To the ǀXam and San people, being in the world as a person includes “the sky’s things” – an understanding of and deep connection with the cosmos. In an age progressively dominated by digital and automated knowledge it was important that the film hold space for this notion.</p>
<h2>Inflected with star-lore</h2>
<p>Through <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dBUudaAAAAAJ&hl=en">my own research</a> in the fields of archaeoacoustics, rock art and oral tradition I have come to understand that there is a profound multiplicity of connections within the ǀXam knowledge tradition. In a ǀXam conception of the universe there is no alienating distance between inner and outer, person, stars and space. That’s because their cultural understanding of reciprocities encourages ecological and cosmic connection. </p>
<p>!Aitsa strives to express astronomy as a lived-body experience. One person interviewed in the film says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I look up into the sky and look at how my star is positioned, and look up at the star’s direction, I know which way to walk.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another describes the Milky Way as being “right at the centre of a person’s spirituality.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/z2g7eGjWGCk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for !Aitsa.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Animism and animation</h2>
<p>The instruments of modern science deliver facts, innovation and technical advancement. But all this comes with societal entanglements and colonial dynamics, a part of the <a href="https://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu05se/uu05se00.htm">intellectual history</a> of scientific endeavour that assumes authority and stands aloof from the kinds of sensory perceptions and lived experience that are central to ǀXam San cosmology.</p>
<p>!Aitsa investigates a modern pre-disposition that considers <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/200061">animistic knowledge</a> and reasoning as inherently flawed. Animism is the notion that any living thing has a distinct spiritual essence. It’s a mistake to dismiss ǀXam cultural expression as a mythology that is intrinsically animistic and therefore quaint.</p>
<p>The ǀXam and San people are known as “<a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/People_of_the_Eland.html?id=D_wwAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">the people of the eland</a>” and so, to illustrate the way their beliefs animate “things”, an eland antelope is a key character in !Aitsa. The animal’s presence compels the viewer to consider the importance of relationship and relatedness. </p>
<h2>Soundscapes</h2>
<p>Sound plays a crucial role in the film, and was another opportunity to showcase an element of |Xam San culture. The soundtrack (you can hear a preview <a href="https://soundcloud.com/s_i_l_v_a_n/aitsa-film-ost-preview">here</a>) draws on composer Simon Kohler’s musical creativity and the archaeoacoustic research I have done on lithophones, otherwise known as gong rocks, which produce sounds not dissimilar to that of a bell when it is struck.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-music-of-an-ancient-rock-painting-was-brought-to-life-185475">How the music of an ancient rock painting was brought to life</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Sound is the most ephemeral and transitory of presences but in the film the gong rock sound is a thread linking voices and images, past and present. Collecting the sound required two trips into the Karoo. There we recorded a variety of rock sounds – deep bass-vibrations through to light metallic tinkles. We brought these recordings back into the Cape Town sound studio where the sound was “composed” to create the soundtrack that viewers will hear throughout the film.</p>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.aitsafilm.com/">!Aitsa</a> had its world premiere at <a href="https://cphdox.dk/film/aitsa/">CPH:DOX</a> in Denmark in 2023, with sold out screenings and <a href="https://mubi.com/en/lists/cph-dox-2023-best-to-worst">rave reviews</a>. The film won the Grand Prize at Estonia’s <a href="https://www.chaplin.ee/">Pärnu International Film Festival</a> and was voted Best of the Fest at the Encounters Film Festival in Cape Town. !Aitsa is selected to screen in Canada at <a href="https://planetinfocus.org/">planetinfocus</a> and in October 2023 at the <a href="https://psff.cz/">Prague Science Film Fest</a> and is up for selection at the <a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en">idfa Festival</a> in the Netherlands in November.</p>
<p>In 2024 !Aitsa will go on a road trip, visiting remote places in the Karoo where the film will be screened to audiences who do not have the means for or access to cinemas. </p>
<p>We also hope to take the film to Australia so that the Wajarri Yamaji Aboriginal people can see, listen and connect with their counterparts in the Karoo. This is an important connection because the Wajarri Yamaji live in the Murchison region in Western Australia where the low-frequency component of the SKAO is <a href="https://www.skao.int/en/partners/skao-members/133/australia">currently under construction</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211604/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neil Rusch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
To the ǀXam and San people, being in the world as a person includes “the sky’s things” - an understanding of and deep connection with the cosmos.
Neil Rusch, Research Associate, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211273
2023-08-23T20:08:21Z
2023-08-23T20:08:21Z
This cave on Borneo has been used for 20,000 years – and we’ve now dated rock art showing colonial resistance 400 years ago
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542080/original/file-20230810-21-p2xl0t.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C2%2C1347%2C852&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Jalandoni</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The islands of South-East Asia record a long and dynamic human history of <a href="https://theconversation.com/worlds-earliest-evidence-of-a-successful-surgical-amputation-found-in-31-000-year-old-grave-in-borneo-189683">technological innovation</a>, migration and conflict. </p>
<p>The region’s rock art stretches back more than <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-found-the-oldest-known-cave-painting-of-animals-in-a-secret-indonesian-valley-153089">45,000 years</a>. It’s a unique source of information about this complex human past.</p>
<p>But rock art doesn’t just record ancient history. Researchers have identified artwork documenting the more recent past, including <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1469605314548940">Indigenous resistance</a> to colonial occupation, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327733403_Curiosity_Conflict_and_Contact_Period_Rock_Art_of_the_Northern_Frontier_Mexico_and_Texas">violent frontier conflicts</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-bandit-slaves-and-the-rock-art-of-resistance-165107">enslavement</a>. </p>
<p>Our new study, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0288902">published today</a>, shines a new light on rock art of Sarawak (a state of Malaysia on the island of Borneo). The rock art we have dated records resistance to colonial forces in Malaysian Borneo during the 17th to 19th centuries.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542052/original/file-20230810-23-pgmpvy.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The two rock art drawings that were dated and interpreted by our new research.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Digital tracing and design by Lucas Huntley.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/40-000-year-old-rock-art-found-in-indonesia-32674">40,000 year old rock art found in Indonesia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Rock art in Borneo</h2>
<p>Black drawings of people, animals, ships and abstract geometric designs <a href="https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/004d4697-50c7-4313-b778-c5b092921f9d/content">dominate caves throughout Borneo’s north-west</a>.</p>
<p>Gua Sireh is one of the region’s best-known rock art sites, attracting hundreds of visitors each year. The cave is about 55 kilometres south-east of Sarawak’s capital, Kuching. </p>
<p>Hundreds of charcoal drawings cover the walls of Gua Sireh. People are shown wearing headdresses. Some are armed with shields, knives and spears <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/680499">in scenes</a> of hunting, butchering, fishing, fighting and dancing.</p>
<p></p><div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><p></p>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/853195976?h=12c77f3375&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="Fly-through of Gua Sireh pointcloud" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p></p></div><p></p>
<p>Excavations in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s revealed people intermittently used Gua Sireh for around <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/110867">20,000 years</a>, before abandoning the site around 1900. The Indigenous people who used the cave were the ancestors of the contemporary Bidayuh (inland tribal people), also known as “Land Dayaks” in early ethnographic accounts. </p>
<p>Malayo-Polynesian Austronesian speakers (whose language originates in Taiwan) spread across Island South-East Asia and the Pacific starting around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Austronesian influence at Gua Sireh dates from about 4,000 years ago, indicated by the first appearance of charred rice and pottery.</p>
<p>The presence of Austronesian communities at Gua Sireh is a part of broader evidence for dynamic human migrations in the region over thousands of years.</p>
<p>Further cultural interactions at the site occurred around 2,000 years ago, with grave goods, such as glass beads, showing contact between the Bidayuh and coastal traders.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/linguistics-locates-the-beginnings-of-the-austronesian-expansion-with-indigenous-seafaring-people-in-eastern-taiwan-186547">Linguistics locates the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion – with Indigenous seafaring people in eastern Taiwan</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In the 17th to 19th centuries, there was a period of increasing conflict when Malay elites controlling the region exacted heavy tolls on local Indigenous tribes. Using <a href="https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28279/chapter/214425985?login=true">radiocarbon</a> dating, we have been able to date two large, elaborate human figures to this period. They were drawn between 1670 and 1830.</p>
<p>We interpreted our results informed by the <a href="https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/sea149a">oral histories</a> of the Bidayuh, who have continuing custodial responsibilities over the site today. </p>
<p>Our findings sit alongside other recent archaeological work that has highlighted <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-unearthing-queenslands-native-police-camps-gives-us-a-window-onto-colonial-violence-100814">Indigenous resistance to colonial occupation</a>. </p>
<h2>Carbon dating the images</h2>
<p>In addition to radiocarbon dating and oral history, another strand of evidence we used to interpret these new dates were the images themselves. </p>
<p>One figure we looked at in our carbon dating brandishes two short-bladed <a href="https://library.khmerstudies.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=8312&shelfbrowse_itemnumber=413">Parang Ilang</a>, the principal weapon used during the warfare that marked the first decades of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rajahs">white rule in Borneo</a>. We have dated this figure as drawn between 1670 and 1710 when Malay elites dominated the Bidayuh. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1343&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1343&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542060/original/file-20230810-27-lcpgo0.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1343&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bidayuh descendant Mohammad Sherman Sauffi William (Sarawak Museum Department) and Jillian Huntley harvesting a sample from the rock art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul S.C. Taçon</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In another image we studied, large human figures are shown holding distinctive weapons such as a Pandat – the war sword of Land Dayaks, including the Bidayuh. Pandat were used <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2842798">exclusively for fighting</a> and protection, never in agriculture or handicrafts, suggesting the drawing relates to conflict.</p>
<p>We have dated this figure to between 1790 and 1830. This was a period of increasing conflict between the Bidayuh and Iban (Indigenous peoples from the coast, also known as Sea Dayaks) and Brunei Malay rulers. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542273/original/file-20230811-19-hx8z7r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Pandat in this rock art was used exclusively for fighting and protection, suggesting the drawing relates to conflict.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Jalandoni</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During this period many Indigenous Sarawakians moved into the upland interior, including the Gua Sireh area, <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3721121">to escape persecution</a>. </p>
<p>Brunei rulers were known to not only bully and enslave people but also allowed expeditions of Ibans to attack the Bidayuh. The Ibans were said <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/Sarawak-Morrison-Hedda-Donald-Moore-Gallery/31168985070/bd">to keep the heads</a> of the people they slaughtered and handed over the “slaves” they captured to the Brunei authority.</p>
<p>An example from Bidayuh oral histories of the cave being used as a refuge during territorial violence comes from 1855. The British diplomat <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spenser_St._John">Spenser St John</a> was shown a skeleton in Gua Sireh. A local tribesman said he had shot this man years earlier, before the rule of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brooke">James Brooke</a>, which began in 1839. </p>
<p>The shooting resulted from a skirmish with a very harsh Malay chief who had demanded the Bidayuh hand over their children. They refused and retreated to Gua Sireh where they held off a force of 300 armed men. </p>
<p>Suffering some losses (two Bidayuh were shot, and seven were taken prisoner and enslaved), most of the tribe escaped through the far side of the cave complex, saving their children.</p>
<p>Oral histories combined with the figures holding weapons of warfare contextualise the ages we now have for the rock art. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542064/original/file-20230810-25-jfip6l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=587&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Plan of the Gua Sireh cave system showing passage through Gunung Nambi (limestone hill) via the connecting passage between Gua Sireh and Gua Sebayan. Blue indicates water.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The direct dates we have produced demonstrate distinct periods of drawing can be identified. </p>
<p>The ubiquity of black drawings across the region and their probable links to the migrations of Austronesian and Malay peoples opens exciting possibilities for further understanding the complexities of rock art production in Island South-East Asia.</p>
<p><em>This article was coauthored with Mohammad Sherman Sauffi William from the Sarawak Museum Department.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211273/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jillian Huntley receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Scientific Foundation of America. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Jalandoni receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emilie Dotte-Sarout receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fiona Petchey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
New dates for the rock art in the Gua Sireh cave in Malaysia reveal resistance to frontier violence between 1670 and 1830.
Jillian Huntley, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University
Andrea Jalandoni, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Cultural Research, Griffith University
Emilie Dotte-Sarout, ARC DECRA Research Fellow in Archaeology, The University of Western Australia
Fiona Petchey, Associate Professor and Director, Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, Te Aka Mātuatua - School of Science, University of Waikato
Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/202395
2023-06-21T14:57:56Z
2023-06-21T14:57:56Z
Unicorns in southern Africa: the fascinating story behind one-horned creatures in rock art
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535542/original/file-20230704-21-a05eoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Images of one-horned rain-animals have been found in the northern parts of the Eastern Cape province.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy David M. Witelson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One-horned creatures are found in myths <a href="https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/mythic-creatures/land/unicorns-west-and-east">around the world</a>. Although unicorns in different cultures have little to do with one another, they have multiple associations in European thought.</p>
<p>For example, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder <a href="https://mythicalcreatures.edwardworthlibrary.ie/unicorns/">wrote about unicorns</a> in the first century AD. The unicorn features in both <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/467642">medieval Christian</a> and <a href="https://www.theclanbuchanan.com/folklore">Celtic</a> beliefs, and is <a href="https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/the-unicorn-scotlands-national-animal#:%7E:text=With%20its%20white%20horse%2Dlike,strength%20of%20their%20healing%20power">Scotland’s national animal</a>. The unicorn’s prominence in European culture spread across the globe with colonisation. </p>
<p>In southern Africa, colonial European ideas encountered older indigenous beliefs about one-horned creatures. I’ve highlighted this in a recent research <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/revisiting-the-south-african-unicorn-rock-art-natural-history-and-colonial-misunderstandings-of-indigenous-realities/5875B2016D8EB1C598C95B21D720F862">article</a> about some of the region’s rock art.</p>
<h2>Unicorns in Africa?</h2>
<p>In the age of natural science, unicorns were gradually dismissed as mythical rather than biological creatures. But some thought that real animals with single horns might yet exist in the “unexplored wilds” of Africa.</p>
<p>A famous search for such evidence was carried out by the English traveller, writer and politician <a href="https://ulverstoncouncil.org.uk/education/sir-john-barrow-1764-1848/">Sir John Barrow (1764-1848)</a>. He’d heard rumours about “unicorns” from the colonists and local people he encountered on his southern African travels. </p>
<p>One of those rumours was that unicorns were depicted in the rock paintings made by the indigenous <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/San">San (Bushman)</a> inhabitants of the region. Barrow searched unsuccessfully for them. Then, in mountains in what’s now the Eastern Cape province, he found and copied an image of a unicorn (Figure 1).</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white drawing of the head and neck of a horse-like creature with a mane and one long pointed horn." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=652&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=652&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532936/original/file-20230620-26-qlotji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=652&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 1. Barrow’s unicorn.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">After the image published by Barrow</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But many were sceptical of his claims. His published copy resembles a European engraving rather than a San rock painting. More generally, critics have argued that rock paintings of unicorns were probably inspired by side-on views of <a href="https://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_oryx.html">gemsbok or South African oryxes</a> – antelope with long, straight horns – or by <a href="https://www.helpingrhinos.org/5-species-of-rhino/">rhinos</a> (which might have one horn in India, but have two in southern Africa).</p>
<p>My research concludes that these criticisms don’t take into account several factors that have since come to light. My paper provides further support for the <a href="https://www.magzter.com/stories/Animals-and-Pets/Farmers-Weekly/The-Search-For-The-South-African-Unicorn">claims</a> that some San rock paintings do indeed depict one-horned creatures.</p>
<h2>Multiple rock art depictions</h2>
<p>Early documented rock paintings of one-horned creatures are known from <a href="http://www.sarada.co.za/#/library/stow/images/IZI-GWS-01-25D">19th</a> and <a href="http://www.sarada.co.za/#/library/tongue/images/IZI-HT-01-71HC">20th</a> century copies by British geologist <a href="https://www.s2a3.org.za/bio/Biograph_final.php?serial=2746">George Stow</a> and South African teacher <a href="https://www.aluka.org/heritage/partner/XSTTONGUE">M. Helen Tongue</a>.</p>
<p>I draw attention to additional examples of rock paintings of one-horned creatures (Figures 2 and 3). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Rock art painting showing buck and fish." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532953/original/file-20230620-5458-5u3n7d.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 2. A pair of spotted one-horned animals surrounded by fish.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David M. Witelson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Collectively, these show that rock paintings of one-horned creatures can’t be dismissed as naturalistic profile views of two-horned creatures, one horn covering the other.</p>
<h2>Rain-animals</h2>
<p>The second way in which my research engages with early criticisms is to draw attention to previously overlooked indigenous beliefs concerning one-horned beings.</p>
<p>The evidence suggests that the “unicorns” in indigenous mythical beliefs and rock art are actually animal-like forms of rain, known as rain-animals.</p>
<p>Tongue’s colleague and co-worker, <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/researchers.html">Dorothea Bleek</a>, compared Stow’s and Tongue’s copies and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Bushman_Paintings_Copied_by_M_Helen_Tong.html?id=9HPVxAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">suggested</a> in 1909 that rock paintings of one-horned antelope were probably kinds of rain-animals, which she knew from <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/">|Xam San (Bushman) myths</a>.</p>
<p>Rain-animals feature prominently in <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/492703532">San ritual, myth and art</a>. They take many forms, ranging from <a href="http://www.sarada.co.za/#/library/rain/images/RARI-RSA-FLO3-1R">four-legged creatures</a> to <a href="http://www.sarada.co.za/#/library/serpent/images/RARI-RSA-WAD1-2R">serpents</a>. They were ritually captured and slaughtered by San rainmakers to cause rain to fall in specific places. <a href="https://archive.org/details/cu31924029904830">Many |Xam myths</a> tell of the dangerous male rain, sometimes personified as the “Rain”, who turned pubescent girls and their families into frogs when the girls did not correctly observe their initiation taboos.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white drawing of a buck with one horn, behind it three other buck heads emerge." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532954/original/file-20230620-25-yb22k8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 3. Digital drawing of original rock painting near the town of Dordrecht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David M. Witelson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Among other details, my paper highlights a fascinating and previously missed reference to a one-horned water creature. In one of the variants of a <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/stories/748/index.html">story</a> told by <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/xam.html">|Han≠kass’o or Klein Jantje</a> – a |Xam man who was an expert storyteller – a “water child” or juvenile rain-animal is said to have a single horn. The story was written down in phonetic script (to record the sounds of the San langauge) by <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/researchers.html">Lucy Lloyd</a> (Bleek’s aunt) and translated into English.</p>
<p>The girl in |Han≠kass’o’s story breaks the rules of her ritual puberty seclusion by going to a pond and catching (like fish) the children of the rain, which she cooks and eats. After a few times she struggles to catch another one: unlike the others, this last creature is <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/books/BC_151_A2_1_092/A2_1_92_07513.html">“a grown-up water”</a>.</p>
<p>We know what made it recognisably grown-up: unlike the others, it had a single horn that <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/books/BC_151_A2_1_092/A2_1_92_07513.html">poked out of the water</a>. We have, therefore, the actual |Xam San words (which translate as “horned rain-child”) used to describe this kind of rain-animal, which we find in the rock paintings in and around the Eastern Cape.</p>
<h2>An intersection of beliefs</h2>
<p>In the colonial period, indigenous people were exposed to European images of unicorns on crests, badges and buttons and through tales. In one of the <a href="https://archive.org/details/southafricacentu00barnuoft/page/76/mode/2up?q=unicorn">recorded instances</a>, indigenous people at the Cape saw the British royal coat of arms and commented on the unicorn in it. They recognised it as their “god”, but this description, translated into English from an unknown indigenous idiom, probably refers to the creature’s mythical nature rather than a genuine god-like status. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Buck with horns that point forward depicted in a rock painting with blue bodies and white spots." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=210&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=210&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=210&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532973/original/file-20230620-23-fy3zbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 4. Rain-animals with horns that point up or curve forward at a site near Indwe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David M. Witelson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Foreign unicorn images may have gradually influenced local ones. Some rock paintings of one-horned creatures – dated by associated human figures in European dress to the colonial period – show horns pointing upward or forward (Figure 4) like the European unicorn, rather than backwards like antelopes, such as the eland (Figure 5), on which many rock paintings of one-horned rain-animals are modelled.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A buck lying in the grass, its horns pointed up[wards and back." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532972/original/file-20230620-27-3f4pm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 5. The horns of the common eland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pxfuel</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One-horned animals depicted in rock art are not mere rhinos nor antelope, nor are they the creatures of European myth.</p>
<p>Indigenous beliefs help us to explain that the uncanny resemblance between European unicorns and South African “unicorns” was pure chance. The mixing of foreign beliefs with local ones in colonial South Africa has hidden the independent, indigenous creature.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202395/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David M. Witelson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand's Rock Art Research Institute (RARI). He receives funding from RARI and the University's Faculty of Science. </span></em></p>
Some explorers believed they had found unicorns depicted on rocks. The truth behind the paintings is far more interesting.
David M. Witelson, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/201394
2023-05-04T20:03:03Z
2023-05-04T20:03:03Z
Remarkable new tech has revealed the ancient landscape of Arnhem Land that greeted Australia’s First Peoples
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519170/original/file-20230404-21-omaerx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=793%2C0%2C4626%2C3794&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The view from the Arnhem Land escarpment over the floodplains that contain a hidden landscape.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many visitors to Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory are struck by the magnificent cliffs, stunning bird life and extraordinary rock art. Some may know this landscape includes the earliest evidence of human occupation in what is now Australia, at Madjedbebe, where signs of habitation have been dated to 65,000 years ago.</p>
<p>Most people, however, ignore the expansive floodplains surrounding these sites, especially when they are covered by water during the wet season.</p>
<p>Our research, recently published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283006">PLOS One</a>, shows these floodplains hide a complex landscape buried deep underground critical to understanding the deep history of the region. We have mapped the cliffs and rivers, more than 15 metres below the current surface, which would have greeted the first people to arrive here.</p>
<h2>Red Lily Lagoon</h2>
<p>This landscape has been transformed by a sea-level rise of more than 120 metres, which brought the coastline from more than 200 kilometres away to lap directly on the cliffs in the Red Lily Lagoon area in Western Arnhem Land. </p>
<p>Since then, the East Alligator River has filled this region with sediment and the coast has retreated 60 kilometres to the northeast, leaving the current landscape of jagged sandstone cliffs surrounded by flat floodplains, which are seasonally flooded.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519171/original/file-20230404-17-14454r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arnhem Land is home to an extraordinary array of rock art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The buried landscape we have mapped contains a sandstone escarpment, now buried underground, which has great potential to contain archaeological sites. This overlooked a deep valley that contained a river system, which is now buried by more than 15 metres of sediment. </p>
<p>Eventually, around 8,000 years ago, this river system was flooded by sea-level rise, leading to mangroves filling the valley and levelling it with marine sediments built up between the roots of the mangrove trees.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two photos: the top one shows a flat plain with a rocky escarpment in the background, the bottom shows the same view but with the foreground filled with brackish water and mangrove trees." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524276/original/file-20230504-20-my8xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A digital reconstruction shows a view of the Red Lily Lagoon area today (top) and the same view around 7,000 years ago (bottom), when the ocean lapped against the rocky escarpment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jarrad Kowlessar</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These major changes in the local environments are also visible through materials excavated from Madjedbebe and other sites in the area. </p>
<p>The excavations show people in the area ate land animals and freshwater fish before the valley flooded. But afterwards, diets changed to take advantage of the ample supply of shellfish.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/buried-tools-and-pigments-tell-a-new-history-of-humans-in-australia-for-65-000-years-81021">Buried tools and pigments tell a new history of humans in Australia for 65,000 years</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Modern maps of an ancient landscape</h2>
<p>Previous work in Arnhem Land using drilling has provided some information about the history of the landscape, but our research achieves much greater detail.</p>
<p>Our work used a technique called electrical resistivity tomography. This is when we pass an electrical current through the ground to measure the nature of the sediments and rocks beneath the surface. This method can map more than 50 metres below the surface, and because it doesn’t involve digging or drilling, we could work right up to existing archaeological sites.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519167/original/file-20230404-27-qweuse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Electrical resistivity tomography equipment used to image the subsurface of the floodplains near Red Lily Lagoon, Arnhem Land.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We combined this data with aerial mapping of the modern landscape undertaken with a drone and an airborne laser. This allows us to compare the subsurface results to the contemporary land surface and get a good understanding for just how much change has occurred up to the present day.</p>
<p>While geophysics techniques like these are often used to find and map archaeological sites, we instead focused on reconstructing the ancient landscape itself. Knowing how landscapes have changed provides important context for understanding choices people may have made about where to live, what to eat and how to move around.</p>
<h2>What lies beneath?</h2>
<p>This research paints a new picture of the landscape that greeted the First Peoples on their arrival. This older buried landscape, which is so different to the modern one, was occupied for most of the history of human activity in the area – starting over 60,000 years ago and lasting until just 8,000 years ago. </p>
<p>The past 8,000 years have seen dramatic changes, from a dry river valley to a mangrove forest to today’s seasonally inundated flood plains. These changes would have had important implications for people, including in terms of what they could eat and drink, and where they could live.</p>
<p>Some archaeologists have questioned the accuracy of the dates of occupation determined from the Madjebebe site. Criticism has focused on possible disturbance to the site by <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gea.21822">termite activity</a>, and also the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1808385115">lack of other sites of a similar age</a> in the region.</p>
<p>Our research shows why a lack of other sites may not be surprising: the most likely places for people to have lived when they first occupied this area are now buried more than 10 metres beneath the floodplain. </p>
<h2>‘We want people to see’</h2>
<p>Beyond Red Lily Lagoon, the methods we have used will give archaeologists a low cost, non-invasive way to understand ancient landscapes on a broad scale. Better models of how the environment has changed let us ask new questions about how people lived. </p>
<p>This is useful, not just as a tool for understanding why sites are where they are but also how people may have responded to the landscape around them. For example, we may have a different view of a rock art panel if we can understand what the artist could see around them when they painted it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519168/original/file-20230404-26-dp02ls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The research provides a new perspective on the history of the Arnhem Land region, which is important for First Nations people.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Moffat</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This research also has important implications for First Nations people. Alfred Nayinggul, a senior Erre Traditional Owner from Arnhem Land and co-author of this research, said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We want people to see and want people to know what’s been happening many thousand years ago in the past. We need to know where those other places in Australia are, and that it was different before, and how it was formed, and we didn’t know what it was. We need to know, us Bininj, and everyone in the world with this new technology, bringing that up to our country. I need to know, and the rest of the world would see, what was in the past.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201394/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jarrad Kowlessar receives funding from Flinders University. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daryl Wesley receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, National Geographic Research Scheme and Flinders University. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Moffat receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and Flinders University. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alfred Nayinggul does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Beneath the floodplains of Arnhem Land lies a hidden landscape that has been transformed over millennia as seas rose and fell.
Jarrad Daniel Kowlessar, Associate Lecturer, Flinders University
Alfred Nayinggul, Senior Erre Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge
Daryl Wesley, Senior research fellow, Flinders University
Ian Moffat, Associate Professor of Archaeological Science, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/202774
2023-04-03T13:58:22Z
2023-04-03T13:58:22Z
Archaeology shows how hunter-gatherers fitted into southern Africa’s first city, 800 years ago
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517897/original/file-20230328-18-wuvyra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Archaeologists excavate inside and outside Little Muck Shelter, in the Mapungubwe National Park, South Africa. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Tim Forssman</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Where the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers meet, forming the modern border between Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, lies a hill that hardly stands out from the rest. One could easily pass it without realising its <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Mapungubwe/">historical significance</a>. It was on and around this hill that what appears to be southern Africa’s <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416508000585?casa_token=P89TPB8OTZQAAAAA:z6ePLUM4rXsAeoe1cIT8Rlak97kN_WKb6U6WDUj3-CdoENgY51DhYgQjwZWa607Bt8zUqcM-xh0">earliest</a> state-level society and urban city, <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1099/#:%7E:text=Mapungubwe%20is%20set%20hard%20against,abandoned%20in%20the%2014th%20century.">Mapungubwe</a>, appeared around 800 years ago.</p>
<p>After nearly a century of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416508000585?casa_token=P89TPB8OTZQAAAAA:z6ePLUM4rXsAeoe1cIT8Rlak97kN_WKb6U6WDUj3-CdoENgY51DhYgQjwZWa607Bt8zUqcM-xh0">research</a>, we’ve learnt quite a lot about this ancient kingdom and how it arose among early farmer society and its involvement in global trade networks. However, before farmers settled the region, this terrain was the home of hunter-gatherer groups, who have hardly been acknowledged despite, as it seems, their involvement in the rise of Mapungubwe.</p>
<p>My <a href="http://harproject.co.za/">team</a> and I have been working in northern South Africa at sites that we believe will help us recognise the roles played by hunter-gatherers during the development of the Mapungubwe state in a bid to generate a more <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2023.2182572">inclusive representation of the region’s past</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-pXqChyJK_s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Our primary study site is called <a href="https://youtu.be/-pXqChyJK_s">Little Muck Shelter</a>. It is in the <a href="https://www.sanparks.org/parks/mapungubwe/">Mapungubwe National Park</a> and about 4km south of the Limpopo River. The shelter is fairly large with a protected area under a high ceiling and a large open space in front. It also has many paintings on its walls, including elephants, kudu, felines, people, and a stunning set of giraffes. This art was produced by hunter-gatherers and it is generally considered to refer to the spirit-world and the activities of shamans therein.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=243&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=243&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=243&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517893/original/file-20230328-418-niw4qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two beautifully painted giraffe are at the centre of the site in orange and red. These have been traced using digital software to limit contact with the art which may lead to damage.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The results from our research shows two things. First, hunter-gatherers lived in the area while the Mapungubwe Kingdom arose. Second, during this time they were part of the economy that assisted with the appearance of elite groups in society, and they had access to this wealth. When combined this tells us that we cannot think about Mapungubwe’s history without including hunter-gatherer societies. They were present and a part of these significant developments.</p>
<p>Why is this important? One of the foundational developments that took place that led to the rise of the Mapungubwe Kingdom was the accumulation of wealth. It drove the appearance of hierarchies in society and marked prestige. These trade goods were valuable items usually possessed by elite groups. And yet, hunter-gatherers, through exploiting their own skills, were able to obtain related goods at a time when these items were contributing to significant transformations in society. That they had access to wealth during this period likely shows us that their role in local society was valued and they were entrenched in the local economy in a way that we’ve not previous recognised.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rock-art-as-african-history-what-religious-images-say-about-identity-survival-and-change-198812">Rock art as African history: what religious images say about identity, survival and change</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Unearthing evidence of trade</h2>
<p>We were attracted to Little Muck Shelter because of previous work at the site in the late 1990s that showed intense trade between hunter-gatherers and farmers took place from the shelter. To understand this better, we needed a larger archaeological assemblage to verify, or refine, what we thought might be taking place. </p>
<p>We also wanted to more closely examine the depths that dated between AD 900 and 1300, during which the processes leading to Mapungubwe began and ultimately concluded, in order to clearly show a hunter-gatherer presence during this period as well as their participation in local economic networks.</p>
<p>To do this, we needed to dig. Archaeological excavations are a slow and meticulous process that involve the careful removal of layers of artefact-bearing deposits with a very strict control of depth and location within an excavation trench.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517895/original/file-20230328-490-ahjvsh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Field team member Siphesihle Kuhlase shows a broken bangle while others remove deposit in search of artefacts.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Following this is a lengthy period of analysis that adheres to rigorous protocols to ensure consistency in identifying artefact types, their production techniques or methods, how they were used, and what they were made from.</p>
<p>We then piece all this evidence together in our attempt to understand past ways of living. From our results, we were able to trace a hunter-gatherer history that intertwined with the rise of Mapungubwe. </p>
<p>Our first and important task was to show that hunter-gatherers were still around when Mapungubwe appeared. To date, we’ve examined about 15,000 stone tools from a sample of our excavations and identified a set of finished tools that are the same as those produced by hunter-gatherers for millennia before farmer groups appeared. We believe that this consistency in cultural material over such a long span of time clearly shows that hunter-gatherers were living in the shelter when farmers were in the area.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Stone tools, glass and shell beads, bone points, pieces of copper jewellery and pottery" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518128/original/file-20230329-18-sklool.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A range of artefact types found at hunter-gatherer sites like Little Muck Shelter. Stone scrapers (A) and backed tools (B), which were used for producing goods and hunting, respectively, glass beads (C), traded into central Africa from the east African coastline, and larger ostrich eggshell beads (D), bone points or needles (E), broken pieces of copper jewellery (F) and pottery (G), and a grooved stone used to either sharpen metal tools, round ostrich eggshell beads, or finish and polish bone tools (H).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tim Forssman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We then wanted to look more closely at the trading economy. From the moment farmer groups appeared in the region, during the early first millennium AD, hunter-gatherers shifted their <a href="https://harproject.co.za/?p=203">craft activities</a>. Rather than mostly producing goods made from hide, wood and shell, they began making mostly bone implements and did so until the end of the Mapungubwe Kingdom at AD 1300. This suggests that the interactions hunter-gatherers had with farmers from when they first arrived stimulated change in their crafted wares.</p>
<p>Why did they change their crafting activities? At the same time that these shifts took place, we recorded the appearance of trade wealth in the form of ceramics and glass beads, initially, and then metal. These goods were never made by hunter-gatherers and are common at farmer settlements, indicating exchange between these two communities. It indicates that hunter-gatherers responded to new market opportunities through emphasising their own skill sets.</p>
<p>Our work to identify more evidence that shows a hunter-gatherer involvement in these processes continues. We are trying to find out in what other ways they were involved and whether they themselves developed a more complex society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202774/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:tim.forssman@ump.ac.za">tim.forssman@ump.ac.za</a> receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust. </span></em></p>
Hunter-gatherers were an important part of the development of the Mapungubwe Kingdom in southern Africa – a fact that history has tended to neglect.
Tim Forssman, Senior Lecturer, University of Mpumalanga
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/198812
2023-02-22T15:32:01Z
2023-02-22T15:32:01Z
Rock art as African history: what religious images say about identity, survival and change
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510268/original/file-20230215-15-yt0qm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">After colonial contact, indigenous Africans acquired horses and guns, and raided settlers as a means of resistance.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Sam Challis</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>To “read” the history of times before writing, scholars have traditionally used excavated evidence. Remains like dwellings, burials and pots can reveal a lot about how people lived long ago. In southern Africa, there is another archive to “read” too: rock art. Rock art is primarily a record of spiritual beliefs – but also reflects the events that these beliefs made sense of.</p>
<p>Hunter-gatherers in the region, ancestors of today’s San or BaTwa, made rock art for thousands of years before African herders and farmers arrived from the north 2,000 years ago and European colonists followed by sea 350 years ago.</p>
<p>As a result of these contacts between groups of people, ethnic and economic boundaries became increasingly blurred. Rock art changed too, in technique and subject matter.</p>
<p>Rock art tells a tale of people meeting, negotiating, fighting, trading with and marrying one another. The tale is told not in simple narrative, but in spiritual beliefs. Our recent <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722260">paper in Current Anthropology</a> outlines the nature, scale and effects of contact between people in southern Africa, and the ways in which indigenous people produced images that engaged with change. It shows that contact and colonisation, in time, created a “disconnect” with the past that can be understood by looking at changes in rock art. </p>
<p>The disconnect apparent in the rock art reflects the disconnect in indigenous society more generally. It reveals the mixing and changing – and survival – of different people’s beliefs about the universe. It charts southern African history and, although it is “written” in terms of spiritual beliefs, it is the only record that shows what happened from the San perspective.</p>
<p>It often shows the struggle to resist subjugation, and it depicts beliefs about the forces that could be summoned to resist.</p>
<h2>Shifts in rock art</h2>
<p>What the San painted or engraved on rock was their vision of what happened in a trance state. The artists entered this trance state in order to establish <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/12/1099">connections with animals and spirits in the landscape</a>, to influence their movements, and to derive the power to make rain and heal the sick. </p>
<p>Rock art was never unchanging, but new traditions and styles appeared when African farmers arrived in southern Africa from about 2,000 years ago, and when pastoralism was later introduced. Further changes came with the <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134215">arrival of Khoe-speakers about 1,000 years ago</a>. These Khoe-speaking herders were themselves descended from earlier mixing between hunter-gatherers and east African pastoralists.</p>
<p>Changes appeared in the rock art’s content – for example the animals and materials portrayed – and in the artistic techniques used.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two images of antelope painted on rock surface" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=226&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=226&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507048/original/file-20230130-24-3evymd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=226&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eland antelope, painted (probably) before and after contact between San and other groups.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Sam Challis</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eland antelope (the one with the most spiritual power for the San) were once lovingly drafted and shaded. Later they appeared in bright, chalky and vivid colours, rendered in a posterlike and blocky fashion. The drop in pigment quality was likely due to the breakdown of trade networks brought about by marginalisation, then <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262547793_The_forgotten_killing_fields_San_genocide_and_Louis_Anthing's_mission_to_Bushmanland_1862-1863">slaughter</a>, of indigenous people, but still they called on the power of the eland to help them. </p>
<p>We see pictures of cattle and sheep appearing in rock art, and finger-painted and engraved patterns associated with girls’ initiation, common to pastoralist and hunter-gatherer societies. The images show that people’s identity (ethnicity) and the way they survived (economy) weren’t divided into clear groups. Hunters were not necessarily all San, and all San were not necessarily hunters. The blurring of boundaries between groups increased with time. </p>
<p>As time went on, all these people became subject to extermination policy, slavery and marginalisation. But rather than being passive receptors of change, they used their religion, comprising multicultural beliefs, to survive. This can be seen in the rock art they created.</p>
<h2>Spiritual concepts of water</h2>
<p>Conceptions of the rain, in the form of images of water bulls and water snakes, are particularly useful for examining cross-cultural influences. </p>
<p>For African farmers, snakes were associated with water. Hunter-gatherers and herders with whom they came into contact acknowledged this because they, too, already had beliefs about water and the animal entities embodied by it. </p>
<p>People from different language groups may have gathered together for girls’ initiation ceremonies at sites where the great water snake emerged. At these locations, this spiritual creature’s body, the <a href="http://www.driekopseiland.itgo.com/">undulating rock</a>, is covered with markings to appeal to it – the markings that also appear on the initiates’ tattoos, face paint, clothing and bags. </p>
<p>The control of water, to make rain for pasture and crops, was traded (bartered for cattle) between groups, very likely for centuries. Rock art images of water snakes, water bulls and domestic cattle intertwine and superimpose one another; sometimes water snakes have cattle horns. Often, water bulls or water snakes were depicted being killed to make their blood – the rain – fall. </p>
<p>Water was also extremely important to those wishing to combat the encroaching colonists. By this time the people of southern Africa, regardless of background, held many <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280623580_Binding_beliefs_the_creolisation_process_in_a_%27Bushman%27_raider_group_in_nineteenth-century_southern_Africa">beliefs in common</a>. The people or entities that lived underwater could be called upon to influence situations: torrential rain to wash away the tracks of stolen animals, for example. </p>
<h2>Raiding and escape</h2>
<p>By the time colonists arrived, hunter-gatherers had sheep, and <a href="https://dsae.co.za/entry/sintu/e06478">isiNtu-speakers</a> (African farmers) had adopted aspects of hunter-gatherer beliefs, and vice versa. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Painted image of human with some animal features" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/510269/original/file-20230215-4182-kb2qti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Xhosa warrior painted in the Windvogelberg mountains of the Eastern Cape, possibly as a ‘commission’ including war medicine obtained from the San.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Brent Sinclair-Thomson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>San were increasingly marginalised from well-watered pasture suitable for domestic herds of African herders and farmers. Some became herders themselves, some mixed with farmers and some became raiders. Then, with the expansion of settler farms in the 18th century (which they also raided) they were <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-bandit-slaves-and-the-rock-art-of-resistance-165107">decimated, hunted and enslaved</a>.</p>
<p>In the rock art, baboons became a symbol of protective power to enable raiders to escape unharmed. The root of a powerful medicine, <em>so-|oa</em> or <em>mabophe</em> – closely associated with baboons – enabled stock thieves to pass unnoticed, and “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2017.1487122">turned bullets to water</a>”. We see this in the paintings of people taking on the power and features of baboons, appearing alongside horses and cattle.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-bandit-slaves-and-the-rock-art-of-resistance-165107">South Africa's bandit slaves and the rock art of resistance</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Horses, the magical vehicles of violence, passage and escape, were kept and cared for by their new owners – the raider groups. They painted themselves in scenes before, during and after raids, not as a diary entry but as part of the [<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Challis/publication/280623828_Re-tribe_and_resist_the_ethnogenesis_of_a_creolised_raiding_band_in_response_to_colonisation/links/5efb0cf6299bf18816f37af0/Re-tribe-and-resist-the-ethnogenesis-of-a-creolised-raiding-band-in-response-to-colonisation.pdf">ritual</a>] of ensuring the outcome was favourable and the memory made positive. </p>
<p>We can now see changes in rock art, from “traditional” animals like rhebok and eland, to those showing rain bulls being killed, rain snakes captured, people with shields and spears, or riding horses alongside baboons, <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722260">in a new light</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198812/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Challis receives funding from the South African NRF African Origins Platform and is a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Rock Art Network</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brent Sinclair-Thomson received funding for this research from the South African National Research Foundation African Origins Platform. </span></em></p>
Changes in southern African rock art reflect the mixing of groups of people after they came into contact with each other.
Sam Challis, Senior Researcher, University of the Witwatersrand
Brent Sinclair-Thomson, Support staff, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/186330
2022-10-20T14:08:34Z
2022-10-20T14:08:34Z
Kenya’s Samburu warriors still practise a rock art tradition that tells their stories
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472309/original/file-20220704-22-twug26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An example of the rock art created by young Samburu men.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Ebbe Westergren</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-samburu-community-of-kenya-national-museums-of-kenya/JwWh0Lc7NlRtIQ?hl=en">Samburu</a> people in northern Kenya’s Marsabit county are pastoralists. They migrate from place to place in search of pasture and water for their cattle, goats, sheep and camels. As part of their lifestyle, Samburu boys go through an initiation period when they live in rock shelters, learning how to take care of their animals and how to become warriors. </p>
<p>During this time the young warriors – called lmurran – express themselves by painting images on the rocks. This is one of very few ongoing rock art traditions in the world, but it has gained almost no attention among rock art researchers. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=232&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=232&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=232&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487655/original/file-20221002-21-1psstw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marsabit county in northern Kenya is a semi-desert which frequently experiences drought. Photo: Ebbe Westergren.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rock art has been made for more than 60,000 years and it exists on every continent except the Antarctic. Papua New Guinea and parts of Australia are among the few other places where new rock art is still being created, maintained or repainted like at the Samburu sites.</p>
<p>Ancient rock art images offer glimpses of human thoughts and beliefs from times when no written records existed. But it is difficult to interpret these images since first hand information is lacking. The ongoing Samburu rock art tradition, therefore, presents a unique chance to know where, when and why rock art was created. </p>
<p>Linnaeus University in Sweden and the University of Western Australia initiated a community-led project together with the Samburu to learn about this tradition. The first outcomes of the project were recently published in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/i-have-done-hundreds-of-rock-paintings-on-the-ongoing-rock-art-tradition-among-samburu-northern-kenya/C68375C5B9570BD7C42A6DE2165561DC#fndtn-metrics">our research paper</a>. </p>
<p>Rock art researchers tend to think about images as representing rituals and myths. In contrast, our project has revealed that the current Samburu rock art tradition commemorates real-life events and is made as a leisure activity.</p>
<h2>Samburu warriors and rock art</h2>
<p>At the age of 15, Samburu boys leave their villages and go through initiation rituals which mark the passing from childhood to warriorhood. During the two month initiation period they learn about their protective duties. As young warriors, lmurran move from camp to camp and live in rock shelters or caves where they eat, relax, dance and sometimes arrange feasts. It is during these stays at the rock shelters that they create rock art. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487653/original/file-20221002-20-tolpdd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lmurran warriors. Photo: Ebbe Westergren.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The images they paint commemorate real-life events related to the warrior life-world and they express the wishes and expectations of the young men. It may be an animal they have seen or hunted, or a girl back home in the village. Dancing is an important part of Samburu culture and some paintings depict boys and girls dancing together.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487651/original/file-20221002-17-awfnir.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lererin Lempate and Sania Lempate at a rock art site close to Ngurunit community. Photo: Ebbe Westergren.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The images are made using red, white, yellow and black paint. Before the arrival of Europeans in the 1940s the artists preferred a pigment of red ochre, which was also used for smearing their hair and bodies. The white colour was animal fat, which turns light when it dries. To make black paint they used charcoal. As a binder, all pigments were mixed with fat from slaughtered animals. Today, commercial paint is also used along with more traditional pigments. </p>
<p>When speaking to Samburu today, they often downplay the importance of rock art. The paintings are not talked about but are done for leisure. By interviewing current and former lmurran we found out that they were well aware of rock art sites made by previous generations. The oldest rock art the elders remembered was more than 150 years old. </p>
<p>When visiting the rock art sites we saw an intriguing relationship between rock art made by different generations of warriors. Present warriors are inspired by older art, but add their own memories and style, and sometimes also the names of the artists. The images become an inter-generational visual culture that reflects and recreates a warrior identity and lifestyle.</p>
<h2>Samburu visual culture and rock art research</h2>
<p>Another thing we learned from Samburu rock art is that the artists always have specific people, animals and objects in mind when making their drawings. This is not clearly expressed in the drawings as they lack identifying details. Studying the images doesn’t reveal the artist’s intention: you need to talk to the artist to understand what they wanted their art to express. Many of the artworks reflect first hand experiences of the warriors.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487658/original/file-20221003-12-8fc0xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lmapili Lengewa and Leramis Lengewa with paintings of Lmapili’s brothers made in 2005. Photo: Ebbe Westergren.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One example comes from Mount Ng'iro at South Horr. Here at least five generations of lmurran have created rock art. The most recent was created by two older brothers of a participant in our research, Lmapili Lengewa (26). The brothers, Lpalani and Lejinai, were around 20 and 16 respectively when they made the paintings. Lmapili was present when the paintings were created, although he was too young at the time to be an lmurran. The brothers learned from studying older paintings, but their paintings were made to commemorate what they had experienced as newly inducted lmurran. A bull figure, for example, depicts a bull they slaughtered and ate. At the time there were about five or six people in the shelter; most of them focused on preparing the food, while the two brothers created rock art.</p>
<p>While there are indeed many rituals in Samburu culture, rock art is not part of such practices. Certainly there are norms guiding the creation of the rock art, but the artist is free to express himself as long as the images reflect young men’s experiences. </p>
<p>Being able to hear the artist’s own reflections, perspectives and stories about specific paintings is a unique opportunity for rock art researchers globally. Our ongoing community-led project aims to learn more about Samburu lmurran life-worlds and to bring their stories to the world, also benefiting the local Samburu communities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186330/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joakim Goldhahn holds the Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair at the Centre of Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia. This project is funded by the Swedish Institute, Creative Force.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Currently Linnaeus University, LNU, Kalmar, Sweden is running a two-year community building project, together with Empower Northern Frontier, ENF, an NGO in northern Kenya, on Samburu rock art, a unique heritage. The persons involved in the project are I, Peter, Joakim and Sada from LNU and Steven and Muchemi Njeru from ENF. The project is funded by the Swedish Institute, Creative Force.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Skoglund is working together with the NGO Empower the Northern Frontier (ENF) in a community-based project on Samburu rock art. He receives funding from The Swedish Institute. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Longoida Labarakwe is working together with the NGO Empower the Northern Frontier (ENF) in a community-based project on Samburu rock art. He receives funding from The Swedish Institute. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sada Mire does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Instead of displaying myths, Samburu rock art reveals real-life stories and is made as a leisure activity.
Joakim Goldhahn, Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair, The University of Western Australia
Ebbe Westergren, Honorary Doctor, Linnaeus University
Peter Skoglund, Professor in Archaeology, Linnaeus University
Sada Mire, Associate Professor in Archaeology, UCL
Steven Longoida Labarakwe, Director of Empower the Northern Frontier, Linnaeus University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/188476
2022-10-03T17:25:15Z
2022-10-03T17:25:15Z
In a Colombian national park, pictographs and pristine nature point the way toward a more hopeful future
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487321/original/file-20220929-24-db7fwn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C211%2C4031%2C2655&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chiribiquete National Natural Park and the _Serranía de la Lindosa_ buffer zone feature many flat-topped mountains known as _Tepuyes_.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Unesco</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Natural Park is a natural, historical and cultural wonder. Located in the northwestern part of the Colombian Amazon, it covers 43,000 square kilometres and contains what are probably some of the most ancient traces of human occupation in the Americas, with tens of thousands of pictographs in more than 50 rock shelters. The park also contributes significantly to climate regulation in the region, and so forms an important part of the Amazon ecological system. In addition, there are clues of the presence of isolated indigenous groups, whose protection is a national and international obligation.</p>
<p>In recognition of Chiribiquete’s inestimable environmental and cultural value, in 2018 the park was inscribed in the <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1174/">Unesco World Heritage List</a>. To protect the site and the peoples who live there, it has been closed to visitors since 1989. The Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia (PNNC), manager of the site along with <a href="https://www.icanh.gov.co/">Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History</a> (ICANH), has urged that the Chiribiquete be kept <a href="https://www.parquesnacionales.gov.co/portal/es/todos-podemos-ser-guardianesdechiribiquete/">closed to tourism</a>.</p>
<p>While tourists are not allowed to visit Chiribiquete itself, communicating the site’s importance is essential. Since the park’s closure, those wishing to visit have been reoriented to the buffer zone known as <em>Serranía de la Lindosa</em>, located on its northern side. It contains many of the park’s recognizable natural and cultural features, such as flat-topped mountains known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepui"><em>Tepuyes</em></a>, and many large and well-preserved rock art panels that may date back to more than 12,000 years ago. </p>
<p>To develop responsible tourism while protecting the site’s archaeological heritage, the <a href="https://www.icanh.gov.co/">Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History</a> (ICANH) has been working closely with the local communities of the <em>Serranía de la Lindosa</em> for the last six years. The goal is to
develop and maintain an efficient management strategy for the park.</p>
<h2>From conflict to cooperation</h2>
<p>Until the 1970s, Colombia’s government considered the area to be “uncivilized”, and so promoted the settlement by people from other regions. Those who came raised families and live by farming and ranching, known to be a cause of <a href="https://press.un.org/en/2005/envdev861.doc.htm">environmental degradation</a>. In the 1990s, illegal armed groups became active in the region and established drug-trafficking networks, creating uncertainty and turmoil. The <a href="https://www.peaceagreements.org/wview/1845/">2016 peace agreement</a> between Colombia’s national government and the FARC guerrilla organisation was a significant step forward, and enabled local communities to turn toward a more hopeful future.</p>
<p>While local communities had long been aware of Chiribiquete’s archaeological treasures, the peace agreement highlighted the importance of protecting them. It also opened up economic opportunities related to the protection of natural and cultural heritage rather than the old extractive models based on deforestation and livestock. Even before the agreement’s signature, area residents began to offer services in the <em>Serranía de la Lindosa</em>, including tourist guidance, transportation, and catering services. While still an “off the beaten path” destination, the area has a <a href="https://www.tripadvisor.es/Attraction_Review-g3493972-d17396750-Reviews-Serrania_la_Lindosa-San_Jose_del_Guaviare_Guaviare_Department.html">growing presence</a> on the international tourist circuit.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Pictographs on a stone wall in the Serranía de la Lindosa." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C20%2C6780%2C3785&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485922/original/file-20220921-8445-m88a16.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The <em>Serranía de la Lindosa</em> buffer zone contain sites that feature well-preserved ancient pictographs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Unesco</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The park’s 2018 inscription as a World Heritage Site not only brought international recognition of park’s importance, it also supported efforts by local communities to preserve and promote the site. Institutions such as the ICANH are also pitching in and work has included an analysis of the carrying capacity of the archaeological sites, the installation of the controlled pathways through sensitive areas, and the formulation of the tourist regulation plan. Projects to conserve the rock-art panels are also in progress, including museum exhibitions, books and other publications. International cooperation agencies such as the US <a href="https://eca.state.gov/cultural-heritage-center/ambassadors-fund-cultural-preservation">Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation</a> have also become involved. </p>
<p>Today, the <em>Serranía de la Lindosa</em> is a national example of resilience, and of how local communities decided to change their way of life for the better. New generations of young people are working to transition to a more sustainable way of life consistent with the protection of the cultural and natural heritage. Together, it’s a remarkable example of how cultural World Heritage can benefit local communities, improve people’s welfare, and encourage the protection of humankind and its collective heritage.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, the Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia, and the local communities of Serranía de la Lindosa who inspired this article and make possible the protection of the World Heritage Site.</em></p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485372/original/file-20220919-20-pguqfq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
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<p><em><a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/next50/">50th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention</a> (16 November 2022): World Heritage as a source of resilience, humanity and innovation.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188476/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Paloma Leguizamón travaille pour Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia - ICANH</span></em></p>
Local communities and national authorities are working to develop sustainable tourism in Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Natural Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2018.
Laura Paloma Leguizamón, Archaeologist and Heritage Manager (Unesco), Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH)
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/188454
2022-09-18T20:15:18Z
2022-09-18T20:15:18Z
From crumbling rock art to exposed ancestral remains, climate change is ravaging our precious Indigenous heritage
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484975/original/file-20220915-37506-40gf9m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=41%2C0%2C4608%2C3035&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Indigenous Rangers pointing to damaged rock art. Left to right: William Campbell, Meryl Gurruwiwi, Aron Thorn, Marcus Lacey, Djorri Gurruwiwi.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jarrad Kowlessar/courtesy of Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous Rangers</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Climate change is rapidly intensifying. Amid the chaos and damage it wreaks, many precious Indigenous heritage sites in Australia and around the world are being destroyed at an alarming rate.</p>
<p>Sea-level rise, flooding, worsening bushfires and other human-caused climate events put many archaeological and heritage sites at risk. Already, culturally significant Indigenous sites have been lost or are gravely threatened. </p>
<p>For example, in Northern Australia, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/nov/16/global-heating-is-destroying-rock-art-tens-of-thousands-of-years-old-experts-warn">rock art</a> tens of thousands of years old has been destroyed by cyclones, bushfires and other extreme weather events.</p>
<p>And as we outline below, ancestral remains in the Torres Strait were last year almost washed away by king tides and storm surge.</p>
<p>These examples of loss are just the beginning, unless we act. By combining Indigenous <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13549839.2015.1036414">Traditional Knowledge</a> with Western scientific approaches, communities can prioritise what heritage to save.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="rocky landscape and blue sky" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484803/original/file-20220915-17-6s854.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Australia’s ancient landscapes are a treasure trove of Indigenous heritage. Pictured: Mithaka Country in remote Queensland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shawnee Gorringe/courtesy of Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Indigenous heritage on the brink</h2>
<p>Indigenous Australians are one of the longest living cultures on Earth. They have maintained their cultural and sacred sites for millennia. </p>
<p>In July, Traditional Owners from across Australia attended a <a href="https://drm4heritage.wordpress.com">workshop</a> on disaster risk management at Flinders University. The participants, who work on Country as cultural heritage managers and rangers, hailed from as far afield as the Torres Strait Islands and Tasmania.</p>
<p>Here, three of these Traditional Owners describe cultural heritage losses they’ve witnessed, or fear will occur in the near future.</p>
<p><strong>- Enid Tom, Kaurareg Elder and a director of Kaurareg Native Title Aboriginal Corporation:</strong></p>
<p>Coastal erosion and seawater inundation have long threatened the Torres Strait. But now efforts to deal with the problem have taken on new urgency. </p>
<p>In February last year, king tides and a storm surge eroded parts of a beach on Muralug (or Prince of Wales) Island. Aboriginal custodians and archaeologists rushed to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-05/ancestral-remains-uncovered-torres-strait-due-to-climate-change/101387964">one site</a> where a female ancestor was buried. They excavated the skeletal remains and reburied them at a safe location.</p>
<p>It was the first time such a site had been excavated at the island. Kaurareg Elders now worry coastal erosion will uncover and potentially destroy more burial sites.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sacred-aboriginal-sites-are-yet-again-at-risk-in-the-pilbara-but-tourism-can-help-protect-australias-rich-cultural-heritage-188524">Sacred Aboriginal sites are yet again at risk in the Pilbara. But tourism can help protect Australia’s rich cultural heritage</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="here" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484797/original/file-20220915-26-h3xclx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Excavations of an ancestral burial eroded by king tides in the Torres Strait.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Westaway, UQ/ courtesy of Kaurareg Native Title Aboriginal Corporation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>- Marcus Lacey, Senior Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous Ranger:</strong></p>
<p>The Marthakal Indigenous Protected Area covers remote islands and coastal mainland areas in the Northern Territory’s North Eastern Arnhem Land. It has an average elevation of just one metre above sea level, and is highly vulnerable to climate change-related hazards such as severe tropical cyclones and sea level rise.</p>
<p>The area is the last remnant of the ancient <a href="https://users.monash.edu.au/%7Emcoller/SahulTime/">land bridge</a> joining Australia with Southeast Asia. As such, it can provide valuable <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42946-9">information</a> about the first colonisation of Australia by First Nations people.</p>
<p>It is also an important place for understanding <a href="https://artreview.com/fragmented-histories-the-yolngu-macassan-exchange/">contact history</a> between Aboriginal Australians and the Indonesian Maccassans, dating back <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/language/indonesian/en/article/deep-ties-between-indigenous-australians-and-indonesias-macassans-celebrated-through-song-and-dance/rg6x9g1l4">some 400 years</a>. </p>
<p>What’s more, the area provides insights into Australia’s colonial history, such as Indigenous rock art depicting the ships of British navigator Matthew Flinders. Sea level rise and king tides mean this valuable piece of Australia’s history is now being eroded.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shifting-seasons-using-indigenous-knowledge-and-western-science-to-help-address-climate-change-impacts-183229">Shifting seasons: using Indigenous knowledge and western science to help address climate change impacts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="rocky coastal area from above" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484794/original/file-20220915-25735-p3we31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The coastal area has an average elevation of just one metre above sea level.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jarrad Kowlessar, Flinders University/courtesy of Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous Rangers</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="flat piece of rock partially buried in sand" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484798/original/file-20220915-25814-pdjdqd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Slabs of rock containing ancient Indigenous art have fallen into the sand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jarrad Kowlessar, Flinders University/courtesy of Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous Rangers</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>- Shawnee Gorringe, operations administrator at Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation:</strong></p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="rubble on dry earth" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1076&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1076&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/484799/original/file-20220915-16744-n8xfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1076&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Remains of a traditional Indigenous fireplace currently at risk of destruction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shawnee Gorringe/courtesy of Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On Mithaka land, in remote Queensland, lie important Indigenous heritage sites such as <a href="https://anthropologymuseum.uq.edu.au/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/kirrenderri-heart-channel-country">stone circles</a>, fireplaces and examples of traditional First Nations water management infrastructure. </p>
<p>But repeated drought risks destroying these sites – a threat compounded by erosion from over-grazing.</p>
<p>To help solve these issues, we desperately need Indigenous leadership and participation in decision-making at local, state and federal levels. This is the only way to achieve a sustainable future for environmental and heritage protection.</p>
<p>Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation general manager Joshua Gorringe has been invited to the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt in November. This is a step in the right direction. </p>
<h2>So what now?</h2>
<p>The loss of Indigenous heritage to climate change requires <a href="https://www.icomos.org/images/DOCUMENTS/Secretariat/2022/TSP/ADCOMSC_202110_2-1_Trienial_Scientific_Plan_EN.pdf">immediate action</a>. This should involve rigorous assessment of threatened sites, prioritising those most at risk, and taking steps to mitigate damage.</p>
<p>This work should be undertaken not only by scientists, engineers and heritage workers, but first and foremost by the Indigenous communities themselves, using Traditional Knowledge.</p>
<p>Last year’s COP26 global climate conference included a <a href="https://www.cultureatcop.com">climate heritage agenda</a>. This allowed global <a href="https://unfccc.int/news/cop26-strengthens-role-of-indigenous-experts-and-stewardship-of-nature">Indigenous voices</a> to be heard. But unfortunately, Indigenous heritage is often excluded from discussions about climate change.</p>
<p>Addressing this requires doing away with the usual “top down” Western, neo-colonial approach which many Indigenous communities see as exclusive and ineffective. Instead, a “bottom up” approach should be adopted through inclusive and long-term initiatives such as <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/research_pub/benefits-cfc_0_2.pdf">Caring for Country</a>. </p>
<p>This approach should draw on Indigenous knowledge – often passed down <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/edge-of-memory-9781472943262/">orally</a> – of how to manage risk. This should be combined with Western climate science, as well as the expertise of governments and other organisations. </p>
<p>Incorporating Indigenous knowledge into cultural heritage policies and procedures will not just improve heritage protection. It would empower Indigenous communities in the face of the growing climate emergency.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/caring-for-country-means-tackling-the-climate-crisis-with-indigenous-leadership-3-things-the-new-government-must-do-183987">Caring for Country means tackling the climate crisis with Indigenous leadership: 3 things the new government must do</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188454/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna M. Kotarba-Morley receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Centre of Science (NCN) in Poland. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Enid Tom does not have any thing to disclose.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shawnee Gorringe has received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marcus Lacey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Cyclones, floods and other climate change-linked events are threatening Indigenous heritage tens of thousands of years old. Unless we act, they’ll be gone for good.
Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, Flinders University
Enid Tom, Kaurareg Elder and director of Kaurareg Native Title Aboriginal Corporation, Indigenous Knowledge
Marcus Lacey, Senior Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous ranger, Indigenous Knowledge
Shawnee Gorringe, Manager at Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, Indigenous Knowledge
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/188524
2022-08-26T05:37:43Z
2022-08-26T05:37:43Z
Sacred Aboriginal sites are yet again at risk in the Pilbara. But tourism can help protect Australia’s rich cultural heritage
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/480862/original/file-20220824-14-9q4zfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C0%2C1270%2C720&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Traditional Owner and co-author Clinton Walker</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">City of Karratha</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>An application from Traditional Owners to block the construction of a fertiliser plant near ancient rock art in the Pilbara <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/perdaman-fertiliser-traditional-owners-sacred-sites-rock-art/101363542">was denied</a> by the federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek this week. This decision is deeply concerning, and points to a much larger problem with Indigenous heritage management.</p>
<p>Plibersek says she went with the views of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation in making her decision, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-23/plibersek-will-not-block-perdaman-fertiliser-plant-/101360350">calling it</a> the “most representative organisation on cultural knowledge” in the region. Yet, she <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/environment-minister-won-t-intervene-on-burrup-plant/101359854">also acknowledged</a> that these views don’t represent all Traditional Owner perspectives in the area. </p>
<p>Save Our Songlines, a separate organisation of Murujuga Traditional Owners, oppose the fertiliser plant, which they say poses a threat to sacred rock art sites. <a href="https://www.saveoursonglines.org/post/tanya-plibersek-fails-to-protect-murujuga">They say</a> the minister’s decision is “based on faulty reasoning and false conclusions”. </p>
<p>In 2020, the world reacted in horror when Rio Tinto <a href="https://theconversation.com/rio-tinto-just-blasted-away-an-ancient-aboriginal-site-heres-why-that-was-allowed-139466">lawfully</a> destroyed Juukan Gorge – sacred Aboriginal rock shelters in the Pilbara some 46,000 years old. Broader community understanding of the value of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges for looking after Country can help us avoid repeating this tragedy. Tourism and community education is an important way to do that.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1561902261571203078"}"></div></p>
<h2>‘Enough is enough’</h2>
<p>The A$4.5 billion Perdaman fertiliser plant will be constructed in the World Heritage nominated <a href="https://exploreparks.dbca.wa.gov.au/park/murujuga-national-park">Murujuga National Park</a> in Western Australia. It is home to the world’s largest rock art gallery, with more than 1 million images scattered across the entire Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago.</p>
<p>As many as <a href="https://www.saveoursonglines.org/post/tanya-plibersek-fails-to-protect-murujuga">20 sacred sites</a> may be impacted by the plant, according to Save Our Songlines. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rio-tinto-just-blasted-away-an-ancient-aboriginal-site-heres-why-that-was-allowed-139466">Rio Tinto just blasted away an ancient Aboriginal site. Here’s why that was allowed</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/environment-minister-won-t-intervene-on-burrup-plant/101359854">an interview</a> with ABC Radio National, Plibersek said the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation have agreed that some of these rock carvings can be moved safely, and others can be protected on site even if the plant goes ahead. </p>
<p>However, the situation isn’t so clear cut. For example, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-26/aboriginal-custodians-concerns-in-letter-to-government/101370394?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=abc_news_newsmail_am_sfmc&utm_term=&utm_id=1930785&sfmc_id=281363065">the ABC revealed</a> on Thursday that the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation refused permission to move the rock art sites multiple times, preferring they remain undisturbed. Elders finally agreed after receiving advice that this wasn’t possible. </p>
<p>This isn’t the first time we’ve seen issues regarding consultation processes with Traditional Owners, such as during the notorious <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/environment/battle-for-the-kimberley-20120523-1z5fb.html">battle for the Kimberley</a> against a major gas plant in 2012.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChTMmG5gr3j/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Traditional Owner and co-author Clinton Walker has been sharing his intimate knowledge of the Pilbara with visitors through his tourism venture <a href="https://www.ngurrangga.com.au/">Ngurrangga Tours</a> for the past 11 years. He has the cultural authority and capacity to speak for his Country. </p>
<p>Clinton was a signatory on the <a href="https://www.saveoursonglines.org/post/open-letter-from-murujuga-custodians">open letter from Traditional Owners and Custodians of Murujuga</a> concerning threats to cultural heritage in the area. He describes the potential impact of the fertiliser plant:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This hill is a very very sacred site to my people. If they build their plant here we’re not gonna have the same access we do now to go visit our rock art and teach our kids and family their culture. </p>
<p>This impact is going to damage our culture and it will damage us as the Traditional Owners because we’re connected to these sites in a spiritual way. I want people to know how important these sites are. We need to protect them. Enough is enough.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_3AP4CdcyZg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>The need for consent</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/committees/reportjnt/024757/toc_pdf/AWayForward.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf">federal inquiry into the Juukan Gorge</a> disaster <a href="https://theconversation.com/juukan-gorge-inquiry-puts-rio-tinto-on-notice-but-without-drastic-reforms-it-could-happen-again-151377">highlighted</a> the need for free, prior and informed consent from any affected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander group.</p>
<p>The inquiry also <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/juukan-gorge-blast-inquiry-told-of-rio-tinto-gag-clauses-warning/12754100">called for</a> the removal of so-called “gag clauses” from land-use agreements, which prevent Aboriginal people from speaking out against developers.</p>
<p>Save Our Songlines Traditional Owners say principles from the inquiry aren’t being upheld, and are concerned <a href="https://www.nit.com.au/the-six-clauses-traditional-owners-say-gag-them-from-raising-murujuga-concerns/">gag clauses</a> are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/24/indigenous-elders-in-wa-say-gag-clause-denies-them-a-say-in-industrial-developments-on-their-land">silencing members of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation</a>. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1495543150898601984"}"></div></p>
<p>We find it deeply problematic that Plibersek did not acknowledge these concerns around gag clauses in announcing her approval of the fertiliser plant. It is the role of the government to keep industry accountable for their obligations to abide by <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C00937">Indigenous heritage laws</a> and to ensure proper consultation processes are undertaken. </p>
<p>This decision is also not in line with the federal government’s vocal commitment to the environment and to <a href="https://alp-assets.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/documents/ALP_FIRST_NATIONS_PEOPLES_2022.pdf">Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs</a> prior to winning the election.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.majala.com.au/news/lawful-but-awful">submission to the United Nations</a> about how to “decolonise our legal system”, Nyikina Warrwa Indigenous leader and respected researcher <a href="https://www.notredame.edu.au/research/nulungu/staff/Anne-Poelina">Professor Anne Poelina</a> said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the Lawful Laws which are awful, are enabled as lawful, what chance do Indigenous people and our lands, water, lifeways, and livelihoods stand against destruction? </p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/juukan-gorge-inquiry-puts-rio-tinto-on-notice-but-without-drastic-reforms-it-could-happen-again-151377">Juukan Gorge inquiry puts Rio Tinto on notice, but without drastic reforms, it could happen again</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Understanding Indigenous connection to Country</h2>
<p>Non-Indigenous people need to better understand the <a href="https://theconversation.com/although-we-didnt-produce-these-problems-we-suffer-them-3-ways-you-can-help-in-naidocs-call-to-heal-country-163362">importance of Country</a> for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Classrooms are a good place to start.</p>
<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1177180120929688">Deficits in the Australian education system</a> have led to poor knowledge and frequent and pervasive misunderstandings of Aboriginal people, places and cultures. A <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/white-australias-hangover/">psychological hangover</a> from White Australia’s assimilation policies persists.</p>
<p>When school education doesn’t provide accurate and truthful accounts of Australian histories, <a href="https://www.reconciliation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/State-of-Reconciliation-2021-Full-Report_web.pdf">harmful stereotypes are left unchallenged</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/742919367" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Clinton Walker describes a common response from visitors on his tours showcasing the culture, Country and history of the Pilbara:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>People say ‘how the hell don’t we know that? Why have we never learnt this stuff?’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Improvements in education have been slow. For example, the Australian Institute for Teacher and School Leadership only released their report “<a href="https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/intercultural-development/building-a-culturally-responsive-australian-teaching-workforce">Building a culturally responsive Australian teaching workforce</a>” in June this year.</p>
<p>Resources to support teachers are said to be scheduled for release in the coming months.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-nations-students-need-culturally-safe-spaces-at-their-universities-175521">First Nations students need culturally safe spaces at their universities</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Learn about Country through tourism</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.welcometocountry.com/">Tourism is one context</a> where the visibility and recognition of Indigenous people as knowledge-holders can be promoted and celebrated. </p>
<p>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tourism operators are delivering truthful accounts of Australian history and telling their stories of their connection to Country and culture. <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468797620987688">This work is an emotional labour</a> as they challenge entrenched colonial narratives. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/ChoUeN_vM-p/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Indigenous tourism operators are <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-a-word-practising-reconciliation-through-indigenous-knowledge-sharing-in-tourism-158563">agents of reconciliation</a>. Operators speak about wanting to educate visitors to build awareness of social and environmental issues facing their communities. The potential destruction of cultural sites at Murujuga is one such issue. </p>
<p>Ongoing research from lead-author Nicole Curtin involves conversations with Aboriginal tourism operators and their visitors. It finds that deep listening is required for visitors to interrogate their own biases and privileges during their tourism experience. Visitors must be willing to “go and sit and learn” about Indigenous sovereignty and knowledges in their own lives. </p>
<p>Indeed, an enhanced sense of connection to our local communities may help to drive people to speak out about the destruction of sites of environmental and cultural significance.</p>
<p>Raising community awareness to fuel social momentum is one way of exerting pressure on decision makers to protect Australia’s rich cultural heritage and environment.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/although-we-didnt-produce-these-problems-we-suffer-them-3-ways-you-can-help-in-naidocs-call-to-heal-country-163362">'Although we didn’t produce these problems, we suffer them': 3 ways you can help in NAIDOC's call to Heal Country</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p><em>We acknowledge the Bininj, Larrakia, Noongar, Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi and Yawuru peoples as the Traditional Owners of Country where this article, and our research, was conducted and written. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188524/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole Curtin is an associate member of the Western Australian Indigenous Tourism Operators Council. She is also a member of Reconciliation WA. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clinton Walker is the owner of Ngurrangga Tours. He is a board member of Brida and the Western Australian Indigenous Tourism Operators Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tracy Woodroffe is affiliated with Charles Darwin University and a lecturer in the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts & Education (CIFEA). Tracy is an associate supervisor for the author Nicole Curtin.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruth Wallace is affiliated with Charles Darwin University and the Director of the Northern Institute, a social and policy research institute in the Northern Territory. Ruth is an associate supervisor for the author Nicole Curtin. </span></em></p>
A major fertiliser plant is set to be constructed in the Pilbara, potentially impacting as many as 20 ancient rock art sites.
Nicole Curtin, PhD Candidate, Charles Darwin University
Clinton Walker, Tourism operator, Indigenous Knowledge
Tracy Woodroffe, Lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges, Charles Darwin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/176886
2022-03-24T19:03:33Z
2022-03-24T19:03:33Z
Friday essay: ‘this is our library’ – how to read the amazing archive of First Nations stories written on rock
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453478/original/file-20220322-21-pip6lo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=111%2C38%2C3573%2C2722&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Josie Maralngurra touching her hand stencil made when she was around 12. In the background are three white barramundi fish figures with red line-work also created by her father Djimongurr. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Fiona McKeague, copyright Parks Australia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.</em></p>
<p>First Nations peoples have lived in north Australia some 65,000 years at least, according to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/buried-tools-and-pigments-tell-a-new-history-of-humans-in-australia-for-65-000-years-81021">archaeological evidence</a>. Their history is among the oldest of any in the world. Until recently, though, academics deemed the pasts of Australian Indigenous people did not really count as history. These pasts were of some other quality, they were not the kind that determined world events and shaped the future.</p>
<p>It might seem strange today for some peoples’ pasts to consist only of “myth” or “memory” but others to have the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-do-first-nations-people-continue-to-be-historys-outsiders-162762">dignity of “history”.</a>’ But when the academic disciplines we know today were taking shape, writing became the dividing line between whose pasts were studied by which academic experts. The historians took writing. Archaeologists took the rest.</p>
<p>In a way, this division made sense, at least from the perspective of European scholars. The study of written records held in an archive requires one kind of expertise, the study of material culture requires another. </p>
<p>The written record was the domain of historians, and whatever came before writing fell to archaeologists. Historians called their times “history”, and archaeologists (except for “historical archaeologists”) studied the newly-coined “prehistory”.</p>
<p>“Prehistory” covered the entire human past up until Mesopotamians started writing things down, about 5,200 years ago. After that, it gets complicated, as different peoples in different parts of the world adopted written literacies, or not, at various times. “History” had different start dates, depending on the particularities of whether and why people wrote, or encountered others who wrote about them.</p>
<p>Of course, this implicitly meant, for many peoples, that “history” began when European colonisers arrived, bringing their writing with them. And so cultures that used literacies other than written script to know their pasts – oral traditions, art and song – were mistakenly deemed not to have history at all.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/threat-or-trading-partner-sailing-vessels-in-northwestern-arnhem-land-rock-art-reveal-different-attitudes-to-visitors-161586">Threat or trading partner? Sailing vessels in northwestern Arnhem Land rock art reveal different attitudes to visitors</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Archives on stone</h2>
<p>Australia’s First Nations people have been saying, quite clearly, repeatedly and for some time, that they do have archives. For many reasons, colonial archives have not been welcoming or accessible to many Indigenous people (although they are now being reclaimed and repatriated by Indigenous communities).</p>
<p>But First Nations people have their own vast repositories of knowledge of the past, if only more historians cared to listen and understand them as such. One such record is rock art.</p>
<p>As Carol Chong (Wakaman), once declared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rock art is our record and our keeping place of our knowledge, lore and culture. Rock art is a powerful link between our country, our past and our people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Patrick Lamilami (Maung) has similarly reported:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our rock art sites are like history books to us that have stories to pass on to future generations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rock art comes in many forms. Some was left by Creative Beings, like the <a href="https://mowanjumarts.com/">Wandjina</a> in the Kimberley. Most was created by the Old People, the Ancestors. As documents created by observers of happenings, rock art provides evidence about the past. The stunning galleries of art, curated and preserved in rock shelters or across plateaus are therefore also archives. They are collections of records, selectively produced, preserved and maintained. </p>
<p>This archive has its own creators, curators and interpreters, playing a role in the keeping of memory for the community. It can be “read” by those who understand such a text. Like a written archive, it reflects the interests and concerns of that community. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=212&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=212&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=212&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453541/original/file-20220322-20-99d5v0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Canari painting a black bream in Kakadu in 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul S.C. Taçon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>History on the rock – Quilp’s horse</h2>
<p>Of course, rock art is not the only archive holding records of long Aboriginal pasts. It is only a surface manifestation of the richer archive that is Country itself. The landscape holds the song-lines and stories of the continent. Rock art simply makes this deeper record visible. Indeed, some rock art is itself a manifestation of the Ancestors.</p>
<p>Our forthcoming book is about understanding rock art as an archive, a source of historical knowledge. So, for example, we take this painting near to the Gunbalanya community as a source.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446168/original/file-20220214-24893-1ykm5ua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A horse painted by Quilp. Photograph by George Chaloupka, courtesy of Traditional Owner Kenneth Mangiru.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The artist depicted a delicate, light riding horse rather than a heavy working horse. You can see the convex bridge of the horse’s nose and the long head. The carefully outlined eyes and ears give an intimate feeling. This is not a generic horse, but a known horse. The position of the ears may indicate that it is listening backwards, maybe paying attention to her rider.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445842/original/file-20220210-26283-f1lxpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Quilp during the early mission era of Oenpelli in the late 1920s. Photograph by Alf Dyer.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The western Arnhem Land community knows and remembers the artist who painted this work: Quilp. He was a Wardaman man, kidnapped by buffalo-shooter Paddy Cahill as a boy after his family was massacred, and taken to west Arnhem. He survived and persisted through the violent colonial period because he was good with horses.</p>
<p>When the rock art is read alongside the colonial archive, with an attentiveness to the presence of horses in the artists’ life, we see a story emerge of Aboriginal people using the colonisers’ animals to carve out opportunities for themselves. We see an affinity, even an intimacy with the strange new beasts, together navigating relationships with the “white boss”, as a form of resilience and, <a href="https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/handle/10072/410186">in Quilp’s case, survival</a>.</p>
<p>Reading rock art is not without challenges. Like other complex and sophisticated sources, it requires cultural expertise. Rock art, ultimately, can never fully be “read” and understood without the guidance and permission of its owners, and outsiders could never presume to be the experts. Consider this buffalo painted at Djarrng in west Arnhem Land, for instance. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446182/original/file-20220214-25032-1dmeldb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Painted water buffalo at Djarrng in west Arnhem Land. Photograph by George Chaloupka, taken in the late 1970s.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Timorese water buffalo arrived in Arnhem Land in the mid 19th century after the British brought them to their settlements on the Cobourg Peninsula and Melville Island. When their poorly planned settlements collapsed, they left, releasing buffalo, which quickly multiplied.</p>
<p>For the historian interested in Aboriginal records of the past, it is tempting to read the paintings of the buffalo as a depiction of what was supposedly a disruptive and singular event: the release of the buffalo and their expansion through Aboriginal lands. Could we not assume that an encounter with these beasts provoked Aboriginal artists to record what must have been a bewildering experience?</p>
<p>But those who can read the paintings will tell you something else. Traditional owners see the yellow colour and understand that the artist was expressing belonging in their kinship system; the yellow meant the Yirridjdja moiety. </p>
<p>Yellow ochre itself is the transformed bodily fat of Yirridjdja Ancestral Beings, imbuing the painting with power. So the buffalos are not presented as intruding newcomers to Country. Rather, they are revealed as already embedded in Indigenous ways of relating to Country. The rock art is evidence of a history, but it is not the story one might expect.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453539/original/file-20220322-27-13s63vx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kenneth Mangiru at Djarrng in 1992 with two large buffalo still visible in the rock art behind him.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul S.C. Taçon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some art is even invisible. Two Leg Rock in Kakadu National Park is shaped like a pair of human legs. At its pelvis, over the right hip, there is a painting of an important Ancestral Being in the form of a kangaroo. The painting is depicted in bright, stark white pigment – <em>delek</em>. But visitors to Two Leg Rock today will not see it. </p>
<p>Exposed as it was to the elements – with monsoonal rain passing every year – the painting has faded altogether. But the painting is not gone. Those who can “read” and understand the archive that is the rock art of western Arnhem Land assure us that <a href="https://theconversation.com/our-dads-painting-is-hiding-in-secret-place-how-aboriginal-rock-art-can-live-on-even-when-gone-157315">it remains as present</a> as it was the day Billy Miargu traced its outline in 1972. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/our-dads-painting-is-hiding-in-secret-place-how-aboriginal-rock-art-can-live-on-even-when-gone-157315">'Our dad's painting is hiding, in secret place': how Aboriginal rock art can live on even when gone</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This hidden painting exists in a different kind of time to that of the researchers who charted its linear lifespan of creation and subsequent fading away. Many First Nations people experience and relate to time in different and more complex ways than the linear time assumed by academic disciplines. Rock art exists in times that are unchanging, permanent and always alive and active in the present. This is not the chronology of western archives.</p>
<h2>Transcending academic concepts of time</h2>
<p>The western process of archiving presumes a linear notion of time in its record-keeping practices. Documents are said to progress through a “lifecycle”. The metaphor is cyclical but the concept assumes linearity; there is no rebirth in this cycle. </p>
<p>The documents move from their initial use for which they were created and either transform into “records” as they enter the archive or are destroyed. The creation of the document is disconnected from its use as a record. The researcher is always temporally disconnected from that which they seek to know. </p>
<p>The disciplines of history and archaeology, likewise, presume this kind of time. Archaeology is interested in origins and history, of charting “developments” and “innovation”, “cultural evolution” along a linear timescale. </p>
<p>Academic history, likewise, presumes the times of historicism, where historical “developments” – with cause leading to effect – occur over a linear timeline that is both uniform and universal. Any event in the world can, supposedly, be plotted onto this timeline, like pearls on a string.</p>
<p>Settler observations of the unique Indigenous articulations and ways-of-being in time has led some to conclude that Australia’s First Nations cultures are “timeless”. That is, Indigenous relationships with time supposedly exclude the possibility of a cultural self-awareness that might be called an “historical consciousness”. Such ideas have been grounds on which Indigenous knowledges of the past were excised from “history” and labelled “myth”. </p>
<p>But this is not how Traditional Owners describe and experience time, nor the relationship of rock art to time. The rock art is not timeless but rather connects time, drawing the generations and Ancestors together. They insist that this is history on the rocks, not simply “tradition” or “myth”.</p>
<p>As Wergaia Traditional Owner Ron Marks explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here, this is our library – this is our art gallery. It warms the heart to know that for thousands of years – stories have been written on rock.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453517/original/file-20220322-19-tevgoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bobby Nganjmirra painting on Injalak Hill. Photograph by Gunther Deichmann.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Sharing knowledge across generations</h2>
<p>Josie Maralngurra, (see lead photo), is not a rock art artist herself. Nonetheless, her life story reveals the multilayered ways in which rock art is a “vehicle of memory” and touchstone of her community’s profound historical consciousness.</p>
<p>Josie was born in 1952 in the “bush” (that is, not at a mission or settlement). Her father, Old Nym Djimongurr, was working for buffalo shooters in what today is Kakadu National Park. In the 1950s, when Maralngurra was little, the family worked at Russ Jones’ Arnhem Timber Camp. Maralngurra was also close to the famous rock art artist <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/nayombolmi-31703">Nayombolmi</a>, and called him grandfather.</p>
<p>Maralngurra and her family, along with Nayombolmi and his wife, walked Country throughout her childhood. When not staying in stringy-bark huts, they took shelter in the rocks. Maralngurra described her father and grandfather’s habitual painting in rock shelters where the family stayed. </p>
<p>The men “wanted to sit and do paintings all the time,” she said. Painting was part of daily life in the wet season when the family camped in rock shelters. As a child, she witnessed the creation of rock art across numerous sites. </p>
<p>Today, Maralngurra still remembers these journeys and the painting. She tells of when her family visited these sites, how old she was and where she slept. She can remember who came with them, how long they stayed, what they ate. She remembers the details and stories associated with the rock art.</p>
<p>Children like Maralngurra were often present at the creation of rock art. Sometimes they worked to prepare the pigments themselves. Sometimes the process of painting was their entertainment. Maralngurra tells of her work grinding pigment and gathering food and water.</p>
<p>As she helped the old men, she asked them to tell her the stories of their artworks. So she learned the stories of Country, the Ancestors and their exploits, as well as the protocols of how she and her kin must live today. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00293652.2020.1779802">The process of creation of the artwork was her education</a>. </p>
<p>According to traditional western understandings of archives, they should ideally be “by-products” of human activity. That is, they should not be created with their future as a record in mind. It is this unselfconsciousness that enables them to provide rich evidence for past human activity – they are documents created without thought to influencing future historians.</p>
<p>Although it might be assumed that Aboriginal rock art is often created to record events for posterity, that is not often its main function. </p>
<p>Much of the rock art at Kakadu is the residue of education and knowledge sharing. It is also evidence of how Josie’s ancestors passed the time, telling stories as they painted. Some paintings were originally ways for artists to develop their technical skills. Some were painted simply for fun. Other art was created in a ritual context and may be the remains of ceremonial secret knowledge. Either way, the art at Kakadu was created primarily for its immediate uses.</p>
<p>Yet some of the art is future-oriented, created with the express purpose of embedding memory. Sometimes, for instance, the very bodies of children like Maralngurra were represented on the rocks. In some places, Maralngurra’s own hands joined the painting on the rocks. The outline of her child-sized hands are there, along with those of others. They were created by her father Djimongurr by blowing <em>delek</em> – white pigment – onto her hand and rock, leaving a negative shadow print of her hand on the panel.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446162/original/file-20220214-115872-59kcni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Four of Josie’s hand stencils. Photograph by the Pathway project.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hand stencils are present in rock art around the world. Sometimes they were made to record one’s connection to the place, sometimes they are like a signature, “signing the land”. Sometimes they have been altered to form memorials for people who have died. Sometimes they are located in hard to reach places; surely evidence of the agility and daring of the artist. Whatever their intent, they declare to generations thereafter, “we were here”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-climate-change-is-erasing-the-worlds-oldest-rock-art-159929">How climate change is erasing the world’s oldest rock art</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Literally embodying the rocks drew connections between people and landscape, emphasising belonging, and preparing children for their future responsibilities. One generation’s hand-stencils are later witnessed by those to come. </p>
<p>Maralngurra’s life history and experience – the memory of placing her hands on the rockface as a little girl – was inscribed into the landscape, becoming a touchstone for memory. </p>
<p>Rock art is invaluable as an archive for a First Nations history that stretches back millennia. Until now, however, it has not been recognised as such, at least, by non-Indigenous scholars. That is because this Aboriginal archive is a different kind of repository, for a different kind of history, grounded in a different kind of time than the limited pasts many Australians (and academics) are used to knowing.</p>
<p>By their very nature, and by design, these repositories can only be read by and with Traditional Owners to guide. So much the better. We hope that by seeing history on the rocks, history itself might become ever richer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176886/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Rademaker receives funding from the Australian Research Council. This research was supported by Ann McGrath’s ARC Laureate (FL170100121).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joakim Goldhahn receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Rock Art Australia (<a href="https://rockartaustralia.org.au/">https://rockartaustralia.org.au/</a>). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). This research was funded as part of an ARC Laureate Fellowship (FL160100123).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally K. May receives funding from the Australian Research Council. This research was supported by Parks Australia (Kakadu). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabriel Maralngurra and Kenneth Mangiru do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Australia’s stunning galleries of rock art are vast repositories of knowledge that can teach us much.
Laura Rademaker, ARC DECRA Research Fellow, Australian National University
Gabriel Maralngurra, Co-manager, Injalak Arts, Indigenous Knowledge
Joakim Goldhahn, Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair, The University of Western Australia
Kenneth Mangiru, Danek Senior Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge
Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
Sally K. May, Associate Professor, University of Adelaide
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164552
2021-08-23T05:03:33Z
2021-08-23T05:03:33Z
Aboriginal art on a car? How an Indigenous artist and an adventurer met in the 1930 wet season in Kakadu
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/413013/original/file-20210726-15-1nfbpkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C5%2C3492%2C2111&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Adventurer Francis Birtles in his car with a man identified as Indigenous artist Nayombolmi.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-149653944/view">National Library of Australia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Histories of Indigenous Australia are filled with stories of cross-cultural encounters. Many of these were harsh and brutal, leaving inter-generational wounds that are still healing. Other encounters can be framed around mutual curiosity.</p>
<p>Our recent research just published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2021.1956336">History Australia</a> has illuminated one such story, a fascinating encounter between two Australian icons: adventurer <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/birtles-francis-edwin-5244">Francis Birtles</a> and prolific Aboriginal artist <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00293652.2020.1779802">Nayombolmi</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414704/original/file-20210805-23-10wpgzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1107&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Francis Birtles in Arnhem Land, late 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>An early celebrity</h2>
<p>Born in 1881, Birtles has been described as one of Australia’s first homegrown superstars. </p>
<p>In the early 1900s, he crossed the continent, first on bicycle and later by car. He presented his adventures in books featuring his own photographs and made movies, which were screened in major Australian towns. </p>
<p>A rugged explorer, he presented white Australians with a new understanding of the outback. Biographer <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/warren-brown/francis-birtles-australian-adventurer">Warren Brown</a> writes: “This young, fit, bronzed adventurer seemed to embody the excitement and optimism of a new country flourishing in a new century.”</p>
<p>Birtles’ <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4670629.Francis_Birtles">books</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0083797/">movies</a> include many stories about encounters with Indigenous Australians. In the beginning he made use of a <a href="http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p21521/pdf/ch055.pdf">colonial trope</a> that pictured them as “primitive savages”. Some of his works gave audiences the impression Birtles was escaping danger. Our new research presents another picture.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414706/original/file-20210805-27-oavq7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nayombolmi in 1966.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Lance Bennett. Copyright: Estate of Lance Bennett, courtesy of Barbara Spencer.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A skilled artist</h2>
<p>While Birtles is well known, few people know about Nayombolmi. In fact, the identification of him as the Aboriginal person posing on Birtles’ car in the discussed photography, has never been formally acknowledged until now. </p>
<p>Nayombolmi was born in today’s Kakadu National Park. He had a traditional upbringing and is remembered as a fully initiated man of “High Degree”. First and foremost though, Nayombolmi is known as a skilled artist. </p>
<p>One of his <a href="http://collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/set/2707">bark paintings</a> was included in the National Museum of Australia’s Old Masters exhibition in 2013.</p>
<p>He also created some of Australia’s most famous rock art, such as the <a href="https://parksaustralia.gov.au/kakadu/do/walks/nourlangie-rock-walk/">Anbangbang shelter</a> in the Burrungkuy (Nourlangie) area in Kakadu. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="rock art" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414707/original/file-20210805-13-2xfmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Angbangbang shelter with some of Nayombolmi’s many artworks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Jalandoni</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/our-dads-painting-is-hiding-in-secret-place-how-aboriginal-rock-art-can-live-on-even-when-gone-157315">'Our dad's painting is hiding, in secret place': how Aboriginal rock art can live on even when gone</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A very long drive</h2>
<p>The two men met during the wet season of 1929–1930 in today’s Kakadu. </p>
<p>Birtles had just returned from an adventure that made him the first person to drive a car from London to Melbourne — his famous <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2201643850163522">“Sundowner”</a> Bean Car, now on display at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.</p>
<p>After a well-earned rest, he took off for Arnhem Land together with his dog Yowie in a brand new Bean car. Having lost his savings in the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, he went bush to try to find gold. As explained in his 1935 memoirs:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One day in an undulating ridge I found that which I had spent months seeking — gold. […] I worked there during the whole of the wet season, from October to April. From a party of blacks, travelling through that part of the country, I obtained some tea, [giving] them some tobacco in exchange. It was a lonely camp. […] The little tribe, passing through on a pilgrimage from one hunting-ground to another, were the only human beings I saw during the months I was there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our new research about known rock art artists in Kakadu has shown that the “pilgrims” included Nayombolmi and his closest kin. From Birtles’ photographs the encounter appears to have been a relaxed one.</p>
<p>One photograph shows Birtles having tea with Yowie. Aboriginal spears are placed on the side of Birtles’ car and a dead wallaby on its bonnet. On the rear of the car are unmistakable Aboriginal paintings that seem to have been there for some time. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of outback camp" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414719/original/file-20210805-13-gjudtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Birtles has tea with his dog Yowie. Traditional Aboriginal spears hang on his car and a dead wallaby is draped over the bonnet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another photograph shows the owner of the spears. An Aboriginal man with scarification across his chest holding a recent kill — a bush turkey. He has a pipe in his mouth. </p>
<p>In the background, another Aboriginal man we believe to be Nayombolmi sits on the rear of the car. The photographs seem to confirm Birtles’ account of the exchange of tea and tobacco.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of figures in outback" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414720/original/file-20210805-15-1bpzep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Birtles’ car with the spears, Yowie and two of the ‘pilgrims;’ the one to the right we believe is Nayombolmi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Francis Birtles/National Library Australia</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Car as canvas</h2>
<p>The most fascinating photograph (the lead image above) shows <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03122417.2018.1543095">Birtles’ car</a> decorated with 19 traditional Aboriginal rock art images depicting an emu, a fresh water crocodile, two long-necked turtles, a saratoga (fish), a hand-and-arm stencil and 14 dancing and crawling human-like figures. </p>
<p>On the rear end of the car, Nayombolmi sits on a dead kangaroo holding a dog in his lap. Birtles sits in the driver’s seat holding a live magpie goose. </p>
<p>The identification of Nayombolmi — sometimes described as the most prolific known rock art artist in the world — was recorded by Dan Gillespie in the early 1980s during oral history with Nayombolmi’s kin brother, George Namingum. </p>
<p>Shown the photograph of the painted car, Namingum identified Nayombolmi as the artist. He declared: “Oh yeah. That’s my brother” and added that Nayombolmi “used to painting everything”. </p>
<p>The identification has since been confirmed by Nayombolmi’s closest kin, who knew him when they were young. </p>
<p>After the unexpected encounters between Nayombolmi and Birtles, a gold mine known as Arnhem Land Gold Development Company – No Liability was established through Birtles’ agency. Nayombolmi, his family and other local Aboriginal people worked at the mine — though were paid with food, tobacco and alcohol rather than cash. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/introducing-the-maliwawa-figures-a-previously-undescribed-rock-art-style-found-in-western-arnhem-land-145535">Introducing the Maliwawa Figures: a previously undescribed rock art style found in Western Arnhem Land</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Birtles quickly sold his mine shares and became rich, allowing him to possess things he “always wanted”; as he wrote later: “The sort of things a man of my tastes dreams of owning when he hasn’t a cracker”. </p>
<p>Nayombolmi and his kin — despite the friendly encounter captured on film, decorating Birtle’s car, and the fact they were instrumental to the mining operations — were left with nothing.</p>
<p>We do not know what happened to the car that Nayombolmi painted. The photographs are all that remain. </p>
<p><em>Our research has been undertaken in close collaboration with Djok Senior Traditional Owner Jeffrey Lee and Parks Australia (Kakadu).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164552/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joakim Goldhahn received founding from the Australian Research Council and Rock Art Australia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally K. May receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>
One was a celebrity adventurer, the other was a skilled Indigenous artist who painted everything in sight. A new look at old photographs confirms their meeting.
Joakim Goldhahn, Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair, The University of Western Australia
Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
Sally K. May, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/165107
2021-08-20T10:23:56Z
2021-08-20T10:23:56Z
South Africa’s bandit slaves and the rock art of resistance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416584/original/file-20210817-28-s73s3v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Painting of a raider on horseback (bottom right) with a musket and domestic stock. A ‘rain-animal’ (top right) was likely summoned to wash away the raiders’ tracks. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Not all South African rock art is ancient; some dates back to the colonial period – and was created by runaway slaves. It tells a remarkable story.</p>
<p>With the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-settlement">founding of the Cape Colony</a> in 1652, European colonists were forbidden from enslaving the indigenous Khoe, San and African farmers. They had to look elsewhere for a labour force. And so <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/slavery-south-africa">slaves</a>, captured and sold as property, were <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01440390308559155">unwilling migrants</a> to the Cape, transported – at great expense – from European colonies like Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, the East Indies (now Indonesia), India and Sri Lanka. </p>
<p>Far cheaper was the illegal trade in indigenous slaves that grew in the borderlands of the colony. <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/khoisan">Khoe-San people</a> were forced into servitude as colonists took both land and livestock. Together with immigrant slaves they were the <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Shaping-of-South-African-Society%2C-1652%E2%80%931840.-Elphick-Giliomee/40b8daf62d3261f8275032b2feaeb233b0733069">labour force</a> for the colonial project.</p>
<p>Desertion was their most common form of rebellion. Runaway slaves escaped into the borderlands and mounted a stiff resistance to the colonial advance from the 1700s until the mid-1800s. In most cases the fugitives joined forces with groups of <em>skelmbasters</em> (mixed outlaws), who themselves were descended from San-, Khoe- and <a href="https://dsae.co.za/entry/sintu/e06478">isiNtu-speaking</a> Africans (hunter-gatherers, herders and farmers). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two images of historical black figures, one in an elaborate hat and coat as part of a bronze sculpture and the other simply dressed and peasant-like and holding a gun." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416343/original/file-20210816-14-ctdqhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Louis van Mauritius (a) led a rebellion of 300 enslaved people in 1808 and ‘Portrait of Júli, a Faithful [Khoe-San]’ (b) by William Burchell, 1822.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Barry Jackson and the National Heritage Project Company/Library of the University of the Witwatersrand</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Thus, we find recorded examples of <a href="https://www.academia.edu/4102013/Re_tribe_and_resist_the_ethnogenesis_of_a_creolised_raiding_band_in_response_to_colonisation_In_C_Hamilton_and_N_Leibhammer_eds_Tribing_and_Untribing_the_Archive_Identity_and_the_material_record_in_southern_KwaZulu_Natal_in_the_Late_Independent_and_Colonial_periods_282_299_2016">mixed bandit groups</a> hiding out in mountain rock shelters, within striking distance of colonial farms. Using guerrilla-style warfare they raided livestock and guns. In their refuge, they made rock art, images within their own belief systems that relate to escape and retaliation. </p>
<p>These sites can be reliably dated, because they include rock art images of horses and guns. In our most recent <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2020.1841979">study</a> of rock art in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, we see that this art also provides us with the raiders’ perspective. Our fieldwork enables us to view something of the slave and indigenous resistance from outside the texts of the colonial record. </p>
<h2>The paintings</h2>
<p>These mountainous regions house many rock shelters with paintings of the traditional corpus of ‘<a href="https://theconversation.com/an-ancient-san-rock-art-mural-in-south-africa-reveals-new-meaning-157177">San rock art</a>’ (antelope and dances) that have become world famous. But owing to almost 2,000 years of contact with incoming African herders and farmers, the hunter-gatherer art changed in appearance, if not in the essence of its meaning. The ‘disconnect’ was most stark, however, during colonisation. The artists’ societies were deeply affected, disrupted and decimated. Where any art continued it was that of the mixed outlaws, often referred to simply as ‘Bushmen’ but who were actually a composite of many cultural backgrounds.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Paintings showing very simple images of humans and the animals in black paint." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=234&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=234&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416763/original/file-20210818-19-1na0lci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=234&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In the colonial borderlands, paintings with (a) horses and guns and (b) ostriches and baboons.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The paintings themselves are also mixed – some brush-painted, some finger-painted – but are united by subject matter pertaining to spiritual beliefs concerning escape and protective power. Certain motifs, including baboons and ostriches, continued to be used, but now appearing alongside motifs such as horses and guns. This suggests some continuity in the recognition of these animals, mystical or otherwise, as subject matter pertinent to people’s changed circumstances. </p>
<p>Despite these changes, bandit groups, however mixed they were, held onto, and even highlighted, some specific traditional beliefs. </p>
<h2>Ritual specialists</h2>
<p>The location of one band of mixed outlaws, in the Mankazana River Valley in today’s Eastern Cape, comes from <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/narrative-of-a-residence-in-south-africa/oclc/9115428">the record</a> of the 1820 settler, poet and abolitionist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Pringle">Thomas Pringle</a>. During our fieldwork in this area we found rock paintings of horses, riders with guns and cattle raids that can be reliably dated to approximately when Pringle was writing. </p>
<p>That diverse groups of bandits painted depictions of cattle raids suggests that raiding was a fundamental concern for these groups. If we have learnt anything from the last five decades of southern African rock art research, it is that images are not the mere depictions of what the artists saw around them. Rather, they are of what ritual specialists see while travelling through the spirit world. </p>
<p>In the case of bandit groups, the ritual specialist often performed the role of war-doctor, who supplied traditional medicines to ensure protection in dangerous situations, including cattle raids and the flight from servitude.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Paintings, in red and in black, of horses with baboons, very simple and using a finger-paint technique." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=209&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=209&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=209&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417008/original/file-20210819-21-1givc5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=263&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Finger-painted and fine-line horses attest to the mixed nature of bandit groups, note the baboons beneath the black horse.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is telling that these images also include motifs relating to protection during raids as can be seen in the appearance of certain animals, especially baboons and ostriches.</p>
<p>Baboons are associated with protection across Khoe-San and African farmer society. The |Xam San people of the 1800s claimed that the baboon chewed a stick of <em>so-/oa</em>, a root medicine which would alert the user (animal or human) to approaching danger and keep it safe. Among the Xhosa there is a cognate belief in <em>uMabophe</em> – arguably the same root medicine. Like <em>so-/oa</em>, <em>uMabophe</em> was supplied by ritual specialists to those who wished to exert supernatural influence over projectile weapons, including turning ‘<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2017.1487122">bullets to water</a>’. </p>
<h2>Protective animals</h2>
<p>Many of these images are painted with a fine-line, unshaded technique. But there are also images that are finger-painted in black or bright orange pigment, which have a distinctly Khoe-speaker inflection. In technique they strongly resemble the art of the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228635204_The_magical_arts_of_a_raider_nation_Central_South_Africa%27s_Korana_rock_art">Korana raiders</a>, to the north of the colony, who were known to take in runaway slaves. </p>
<p>Further into the hinterland, as if to mark the fighting retreat of bandit groups as the colonial frontier expanded, we discovered rock shelters in the Stormberg and Zuurberg that exhibit yet more features of an indigenous resistance idiom. In one are images of people with horses and guns, as well as baboons and ostriches. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/an-ancient-san-rock-art-mural-in-south-africa-reveals-new-meaning-157177">An ancient San rock art mural in South Africa reveals new meaning</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.academia.edu/10768936/Birds_in_the_life_of_KhoeSan_with_particular_reference_to_healing_and_ostriches">The ostrich</a> was recognised by Khoe-San groups as particularly adept at escaping danger. It could outrun most predators and leap over hunters’ nets. Khoe-San would, and still do, tie the tendons from ostrich legs to their own legs to combat fatigue. Ostrich eggshell was recognised as a medicine that could be ground and consumed as a fortifying tonic. In the art of bandits, images of ritual specialists transforming into ostriches or baboons attest to them drawing on the powers of protective animals to ensure their own escape from former captors or following stock raids. </p>
<h2>The bandit’s view</h2>
<p>Although never officially recognised as slaves, the Khoe-San were uprooted from their land and lifeways by European settlers and forced into bondage. This brought them into contact with immigrant slaves, alongside whom they often escaped. In defiance they raided their former captors and other settlers and in rocky hideouts they painted their concerns. </p>
<p>The rock art of bandit groups is bound up with beliefs in the ability to call upon the protection of the supernatural. Baboons and ostriches, painted with images of livestock and people on horseback with firearms, were heralded for their associated powers pertaining to escape and protection while raiding. For these runaway slaves, rock art was one of several crucial ritual observances performed to prevent the likelihood of ever returning to a life of oppression.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165107/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Challis receives funding from the NRF African Origins Platform and is a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Rock Art Network</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brent Sinclair-Thomson receives funding from the National Research Foundation African Origins Platform. </span></em></p>
Runaway slaves joined indigenous Khoe-San people and raided colonial farms. The rock art they left in their hideouts tells a fascinating story.
Sam Challis, Senior Researcher, University of the Witwatersrand
Brent Sinclair-Thomson, Support staff, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164952
2021-08-13T22:21:30Z
2021-08-13T22:21:30Z
Light and shade: how the natural ‘glazes’ on the walls of Kimberley rock shelters help reveal the world the artists lived in
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415981/original/file-20210813-21-28293z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C155%2C5160%2C3003&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Kimberley region is host to <a href="https://theconversation.com/this-17-500-year-old-kangaroo-in-the-kimberley-is-australias-oldest-aboriginal-rock-painting-154181">Australia’s oldest known rock paintings</a>. But people were carving engravings into some of these rocks before they were creating paintings. </p>
<p>Rock art sites on Balanggarra Country in the northeast Kimberley region are home to numerous such engravings. The oldest paintings are at least 17,300 years old, and the engravings are thought to be even older — but they have so far proved much harder to date accurately.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414463/original/file-20210804-20-17dho34.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cupules, or circular man-made hollows, ground into a dark mineral coating at a rock art site on the Drysdale River, Balanggarra country.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Damien Finch</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But in research <a href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf3632">published today in Science Advances</a>, we report on a crucial clue that could help date the engravings, and also reveal what the environment was like for the artists who created them. </p>
<p>Some of the rocks themselves are covered with natural, glaze-like mineral coatings that can help reveal key evidence. </p>
<h2>What are these glazes?</h2>
<p>These dark, shiny deposits on the surface of the rock are less than a centimetre thick. Yet they have detailed internal structures, featuring alternating light and dark layers of different minerals.</p>
<p>Our aim was to develop methods to reliably date the formation of these coatings and provide age brackets for any associated engravings. However, during this process, we also discovered it is possible to match layers found in samples collected at rock shelters up to 90 kilometres apart. </p>
<p>Radiocarbon dating suggests these layers were deposited around the same time, showing their formation is not specific to particular rock shelters, but controlled by environmental changes on a regional scale. </p>
<p>Dating these deposits can therefore provide reliable age brackets for any associated engravings, while also helping us better understanding the climate and environments in which the artists lived.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414914/original/file-20210805-27-fl3od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marsupial tracks scratched into a glaze like coating at a rock art shelter in the north east Kimberley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Cecilia Myers/Dunkeld Pastoral Company; illustration by Pauline Heaney/Rock Art Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Microbes and minerals</h2>
<p>Our research supports <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gea.1021">earlier findings</a> that layers within the glaze structure represent alternating environmental conditions in Kimberley rock shelters, that repeated over thousands of years. </p>
<p>Our model suggests that during drier conditions, bush fires produce ash, which builds up on shelter surfaces. This ash contains a range of minerals, including carbonates and sulphates. We suggest that under the right conditions, these minerals provided nutrients that allowed microbes to live on these shelter surfaces. In the process of digesting these nutrients, the microbes excrete a compound called oxalic acid, which combines with calcium in the ash deposits to form calcium oxalate. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414950/original/file-20210806-19-18wbcl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A: dark coloured, smooth mineral coating at a Kimberley rock shelter; B: alternating layering, as seen in the field; C: alternating layering as seen in a cross-sectioned coating under a microscope.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photos by Cecilia Myers; microscope image by Helen Green</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As this process repeats over millennia, the minerals become cemented together in alternating layers, with each layer creating a record of the conditions in the rock shelter at that time.</p>
<p>Samples of the glazes were collected for analysis in close collaboration and consultation with local Traditional Owners from the Balanggarra native title region, who are partners on our research project. Using a laser, we vaporised tiny samples from the coatings to study the chemical composition of each layer. The dark layers were mostly made of calcium oxalate, while lighter layers contained mainly sulphates. We propose darker layers represent a time when microbes were more active and lighter layers represent drier periods. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-climate-change-is-erasing-the-worlds-oldest-rock-art-159929">How climate change is erasing the world’s oldest rock art</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Linking the layers</h2>
<p>These dark calcium oxalate layers also contain carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere and digested by the microbes that created these deposits. This meant we could use a technique called <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-radiocarbon-dating-and-how-does-it-work-9690">radiocarbon dating</a> to determine the age of these individual layers. </p>
<p>Using a tiny drill, we removed samples from distinct dark layers in nine glazes collected from different rock shelters across the northeast Kimberley.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414912/original/file-20210805-15-jsprpt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A: micro-drilling samples from individual layers for radiocarbon dating; B: Laser ablation maps showing the distribution of the element calcium within the different layers; C: radiocarbon dating of individual layers identified four key growth periods.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Andy Gleadow; illustration by Pauline Heaney</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite coming from different locations, these layers all seem to have been deposited at the same time, during four key intervals spanning the past 43,000 years.</p>
<p>This suggests the formation of each layer was determined mainly by shifts in environmental conditions throughout the Kimberley, rather than by the distinct conditions in each particular rock shelter.</p>
<p>The records held by these glazes over such a large time period - including the most recent ice age - means they could help us better understand the environmental changes that directly affected human habitation and adaptation in Australia.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414952/original/file-20210806-17-bkibgr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hypothetical example of how layered mineral coatings can be used to date engraved rock art in Kimberley rock shelters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pauline Heaney</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Stories in stone</h2>
<p>Research we <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01041-0">published earlier this year</a> shows how the subjects painted in early Kimberley rock art changed from mostly animals and plants around 17,000 years ago, to mostly decorated human figures about 12,000 years ago. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/this-17-500-year-old-kangaroo-in-the-kimberley-is-australias-oldest-aboriginal-rock-painting-154181">This 17,500-year-old kangaroo in the Kimberley is Australia's oldest Aboriginal rock painting</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618216305018?via%3Dihub">Other</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.11.030">researchers</a> have discovered that during this 5,000-year period there were rapid rises in sea level, in particular around 14,500 years ago, as well as increased rainfall. </p>
<p>We interpret the change in rock art styles as a response to the social and cultural adaptations triggered by the changing climate and rising sea levels. Paintings of human figures with new technologies such as spear-throwers might show us how people adapted their hunting style to the changing environment and the availability of different types of food.</p>
<p>By dating the natural mineral coatings on the rock surfaces that acted as a canvas for this art, we can hopefully better understand the world in which these artists lived. Not only will this give us more certainty about the position of particular paintings within the overall <a href="https://rockartaustralia.org.au/rock-art/rock-art-sequence/">Kimberley stylistic rock art sequence</a>, but can also tell us about the environments experienced by First Nations people in the Kimberley. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>We thank the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Centre for Accelerator Science at the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral Co for their collaboration on this research.</em>_</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164952/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Rock Art Australia, The Ian Potter Foundation and an Australian Postgraduate Award and the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering .</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Damien Finch receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Rock Art Australia, an Australian Postgraduate Award and the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering .</span></em></p>
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.
Helen Green, Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne
Damien Finch, Research fellow, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/161586
2021-06-28T19:51:43Z
2021-06-28T19:51:43Z
Threat or trading partner? Sailing vessels in northwestern Arnhem Land rock art reveal different attitudes to visitors
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405242/original/file-20210609-23-1a5udcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rock paintings from the main gallery at Djulirri in Namunidjbuk clan estate, showing traditional Aboriginal motifs as well as European boats, airplanes, and more.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Sally K May.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The rock art of northwestern Arnhem Land is world-renowned and represents one of the world’s most enduring artistic cultures. Rock art is a continuing tradition. It includes images of “outsiders”: people and objects brought to Australian shores by <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p241301/html/ch01.xhtml?referer=294&page=3">Macassans</a> from southeast Asia and, later, by Europeans.</p>
<p>Paintings of sailing vessels, smoking pipes, firearms, domesticated animals and other exotic items dot the landscape in Arnhem Land, often overlaying earlier works. Comparatively recent paintings feature more common images too, such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/our-dads-painting-is-hiding-in-secret-place-how-aboriginal-rock-art-can-live-on-even-when-gone-157315">kangaroos</a>, emus, and hand stencils. </p>
<p>While most Australians know about the history of European arrivals, few are familiar with the ongoing visits by people from southeast Asia to the region. Our latest research shows artists depicted early trading sailing vessels less often and differently to European ships — suggesting they viewed these encounters with other cultures in contrasting ways.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402870/original/file-20210526-13-p0pwbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Macassans at Victoria Settlement (Port Essington), 1845 by H.S.Melville.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Published in The Queen, 8 February 1862</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-indigenous-songs-recount-deep-histories-of-trade-between-australia-and-southeast-asia-123867">Friday essay: how Indigenous songs recount deep histories of trade between Australia and Southeast Asia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Visitors to our shores</h2>
<p>Far from the generally accepted notion of an isolated shoreline, the north Australian coast was teeming with sailing vessels engaged in trade for hundreds of years before European exploration and settlement. </p>
<p>Most commonly referred to as <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p241301/html/ch01.xhtml?referer=&page=3">Macassans</a> (because they’d made the crossing from the port of Makassar in southern Sulawesi) these early traders came in fleets of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/prau">praus</a> with their signature tripod masts, to harvest trepang (sea cucumber) and for materials such as turtle shell, beeswax, and iron wood. </p>
<p>Working with Aboriginal Traditional Owners, especially members of the Lamilami family, our new <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.1932243">research</a> focuses on the Namunidjbuk clan estate within the Wellington Range in the Northern Territory. We looked closely at one particular type of rock art — boats in the form of Macassan praus and European ships.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402794/original/file-20210526-13-16f67v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A photograph of a prau (Macassan boat) from Djulirri that is found underneath beeswax pellets forming a female human figure. Radiocarbon analyses of the beeswax on top of the boat figure showed that the prau was painted in the late 1770s. Photo by Paul S.C. Taçon.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sailing vessels are among the most common new subjects in rock art made during the last 500 years in northwest Arnhem Land. Yet, there is a perplexing inconsistency in how Aboriginal artists of this region treated Macassan prau and European ships.</p>
<p>The earliest dated prau depiction is from the first half of the 1600s. No depictions of European ships are thought to be older than the early 1800s. </p>
<p>Yet we counted many more rock art images of European ships: 50 examples in the study area, compared to only six prau (five images feature elements of both).</p>
<p>These extraordinary works illustrate the maritime history of this region. They range in detail from basic outlines of hulls to detailed depictions of European ships. Some even illustrate cargo.</p>
<p>Others reveal ship features found under the waterline such as anchors and propellers. Southeast Asian prau are recognisable because of their unique tripod masts and sails. Some paintings of European ships show the crew smoking pipes and with their hands on their hips.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403118/original/file-20210527-15-1wcc7uj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Painting of a European ship at Djulirri.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Sally K. May</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-rock-art-is-threatened-by-a-lack-of-conservation-32900">Australian rock art is threatened by a lack of conservation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The missing Macassans</h2>
<p>When people are portrayed on or next to watercraft in our study area, it is always in association with European ships, with no depictions associated with prau at all. </p>
<p>So, why did Aboriginal artists feel the need to paint so many European ships, and sometimes their crew — but very few relating to southeast Asian visits?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405249/original/file-20210609-15-sqo5za.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Praos bouguis a la voile, Baie Raffles ; Voiture chinoise, Ile Banda’. Depiction of a Macassan prau in Raffles Bay, Northern Territory 1839 by L. Le Breton 1839.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Australia: nla.obj-136471948</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We argue the proliferation of European-related imagery signals the threat they posed to Indigenous sovereignty. Communicating this threat (via rock art and other means) to family and neighbouring clans was an essential tool for inter-generational education, inter-clan communication, resistance and survival.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403120/original/file-20210527-19-1jgouqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This example of a European sailing vessel painted at Djulirri shows great attention to detail.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tracing: Virginia das Neeves</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The lack of praus does not suggest a lesser cross-cultural relationship between Macassans and Aboriginal people. In fact, nearby in Anuru Bay is one of the largest Macassan trepang processing complexes in the NT. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405250/original/file-20210609-27-1wkzohe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aerial view of Malarrak, where some of the paintings of watercraft are found.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Daryl Wesley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-our-new-archaeological-research-investigates-dark-emus-idea-of-aboriginal-agriculture-and-villages-146754">Friday essay: how our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu's idea of Aboriginal 'agriculture' and villages</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But visits by the Macassans were seasonal, while the Europeans came to stay. Cross-cultural contact between Aboriginal people and Macassans in this region is generally thought to be characterised by mutual respect and exchange. Contact with Europeans was more violent, with historically known killings and <a href="https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php">massacres</a> of Aboriginal people. </p>
<p>Importantly, our findings in northwest Arnhem Land are the opposite of research undertaken in other parts of northern Australia, such as Groote Eylandt, where there are many depictions of Macassan prau and crew. This reminds us that one size does not fit all in the history of invasion and cross-cultural contact in northern Australia. </p>
<p><em>For decades R. Lamilami (1957-2021) worked to protect his Country and to educate outsiders on the cultural significance of the Namunidjbuk clan estate and, more broadly, the Wellington Range. With this article we pay tribute to his life’s work and his firm belief that rock art is an irreplaceable history book for Australia.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161586/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally K. May receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daryl Wesley receives funding from Australian Research Council</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joakim Goldhahn receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Rock Art Australia</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>
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.
Sally K. May, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University
Daryl Wesley, Senior research fellow, Flinders University
Joakim Goldhahn, Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair, The University of Western Australia
Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/159929
2021-05-13T19:56:06Z
2021-05-13T19:56:06Z
How climate change is erasing the world’s oldest rock art
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400229/original/file-20210512-18-1f30o5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C817%2C544&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">This Warty Pig is part of a panel dated to more than 45,500 years in age.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Basran Burhan/Griffith University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, ancient peoples marked the walls with red and mulberry hand stencils, and painted images of large native mammals or <a href="https://theconversation.com/indonesian-cave-paintings-show-the-dawn-of-imaginative-art-and-human-spiritual-belief-128457">imaginary human-animal creatures</a>. </p>
<p>These are the oldest cave art sites yet known — or at least the oldest attributed to our species. One painting of a Sulawesi warty pig was recently dated as at least <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-found-the-oldest-known-cave-painting-of-animals-in-a-secret-indonesian-valley-153089">45,500 years old</a>.</p>
<p>Since the 1950s, archaeologists have observed these paintings appear to be blistering and peeling off the cave walls. Yet, little had been done to understand why. </p>
<p>So our research, <a href="http://nature.com/articles/s41598-021-87923-3">published today</a>, explored the mechanisms of decay affecting ancient rock art panels at 11 sites in Sulawesi’s <a href="https://www.worldheritagesite.org/tentative/id/5467">Maros-Pangkep</a> region. We found the deterioration may have gotten worse in recent decades, a trend likely to continue with accelerating climate change.</p>
<p>These Pleistocene (“ice aged”) cave paintings of Indonesia have only begun to tell us about the lives of the earliest people who lived in Australasia. The art is disappearing just as we’re beginning to understand its significance.</p>
<h2>Australasia’s rock art</h2>
<p>Rock art gives us a glimpse into the ancient cultural worlds of the artists and the <a href="https://youtu.be/3OLaNtKoJFk">animals</a> they may have hunted or interacted with. Even rare clues into early people’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/indonesian-cave-paintings-show-the-dawn-of-imaginative-art-and-human-spiritual-belief-128457">beliefs in the supernatural</a> have been preserved.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mNiqamYP3Sc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Climate change could erase ancient Indonesian cave art.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We think humans have been creating art of some kind in Australasia — which includes northern Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia — for a very long time. <a href="https://theconversation.com/buried-tools-and-pigments-tell-a-new-history-of-humans-in-australia-for-65-000-years-81021">Used pigments</a> are among the earliest evidence people were living in Australia more than 60,000 years ago. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/buried-tools-and-pigments-tell-a-new-history-of-humans-in-australia-for-65-000-years-81021">Buried tools and pigments tell a new history of humans in Australia for 65,000 years</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Tens of thousands of distinctive rock art sites are scattered across Australasia, with Aboriginal people creating many <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/first-rock-art">styles of rock art</a> across Australia. </p>
<p>Until as recently as 2014, scholars thought the earliest cave art was in Europe — for example, in the Chauvet Cave in France or <a href="https://cuevas.culturadecantabria.com/el-castillo-2/">El Castillo</a> in Spain, which are 30,000 to 40,000 years old. We now know people were painting inside caves and rockshelters in Indonesia at the same time and even earlier. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400487/original/file-20210513-21-ie5v2q.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hand stencils in one of the study sites at Leang Sakapao cave.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Linda Siagian</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ongoing surveys throughout Australasia turn up new rock art sites every year. To date, more than 300 painted sites have been documented in the limestone karsts of Maros-Pangkep, in southern Sulawesi. </p>
<p>Cave paintings in Sulawesi and <a href="https://theconversation.com/borneo-cave-discovery-is-the-worlds-oldest-rock-art-in-southeast-asia-106252">Borneo</a> are some of the earliest evidence we have that people were living on these islands.</p>
<p>Tragically, at almost every new site we find in this region, the rock art is in an advanced stage of decay. </p>
<h2>Big impacts from small crystals</h2>
<p>To investigate why these prehistoric artworks are deteriorating, we studied some of the oldest known rock art from the Maros-Pangkep region, scientifically dated to between at least 20,000 and 40,000 years old.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400234/original/file-20210512-17-1811e0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Expanding and contracting salt crystals are causing rock art to flake off the cave walls.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Linda Siagian</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Given these artworks have survived over such a vast period, we wanted to understand why the painted limestone cave surfaces now appear to be eroding so rapidly. </p>
<p>We used a combination of scientific techniques, including using high-powered microscopes, chemical analyses and crystal identification to tackle the problem. This revealed that salts growing both on top of and behind ancient rock art can cause it to flake away. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/indonesian-cave-paintings-show-the-dawn-of-imaginative-art-and-human-spiritual-belief-128457">Indonesian cave paintings show the dawn of imaginative art and human spiritual belief</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Salts are deposited on rock surfaces via the water they’re absorbed in. When the water solution evaporates, salt crystals form. The salt crystals then swell and shrink as the environment heats and cools, generating stress in the rock. </p>
<p>In some cases, the result is the stone surface crumbling into a powder. In other instances, salt crystals form columns under the hard outer shell of the old limestone, lifting the art panel and separating it from the rest of the rock, obliterating the art. </p>
<p>On hot days, geological salts can grow to more than three times their initial size. On one panel, for example, a flake half the size of a hand peeled off in under five months.</p>
<h2>Climate extremes under global warming</h2>
<p>Australasia has an <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027737911200529X?via%3Dihub">incredibly active atmosphere</a>, fed by intense sea currents, seasonal trade winds and a reservoir of warm ocean water. Yet, some of its rock art has so far managed to survive tens of thousands of years through major episodes of climate variation, from the cold of the last ice age to the start of the current monsoon.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Limestone karsts in a field" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400437/original/file-20210513-23-abkixy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Limestone karsts of Maros and Pangkep Regencies, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In contrast, famous European cave art sites such as Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France are found in deep caves, in more stable (temperate) climates, so threats to rock art are different and generally weathering is less aggressive. </p>
<p>But now greenhouse gases are magnifying climatic extremes. In fact, global warming can be up to <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-will-the-tropics-eventually-become-uninhabitable-145174">three times higher in the tropics</a>, and the wet-dry phases of the monsoon have become stronger in recent decades, along with more numerous La Niña and El Niño events.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-will-the-tropics-eventually-become-uninhabitable-145174">Climate explained: will the tropics eventually become uninhabitable?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The net effect is that temperatures are higher, there are more hot days in a row, droughts are lasting longer, and other extreme weather such as storms (and the flooding they cause) are more <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/">severe and frequent</a>. </p>
<p>What’s more, monsoonal rains are now captured in rice fields and aquaculture ponds. This promotes the growth of art-destroying salt crystals by raising humidity across the region and especially in nearby caves, prolonging the shrink and swell cycles of salts.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three people hold a torch to cave wall" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400446/original/file-20210513-17-ahrr86.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Makassar’s culture heritage department, Balai Pelestarian Cagar Budaya, undertaking rock art monitoring in Maros-Pangkep.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rustan Lebe/Griffith University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What happens now?</h2>
<p>Apart from the direct threats associated with industrial development — such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/rio-tinto-just-blasted-away-an-ancient-aboriginal-site-heres-why-that-was-allowed-139466">blasting away archaeological sites</a> for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/21/worlds-oldest-art-under-threat-from-cement-mining-in-indonesia-sulawesi">mining and limestone quarrying</a> — our research makes it clear global warming is the biggest threat to the preservation of the trpoics’ ancient rock art.</p>
<p>There’s a pressing need for further research, monitoring and conservation work in Maros-Pangkep and across Australasia, where cultural heritage sites are under threat from the destructive impacts of climate change.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rio-tinto-just-blasted-away-an-ancient-aboriginal-site-heres-why-that-was-allowed-139466">Rio Tinto just blasted away an ancient Aboriginal site. Here’s why that was allowed</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In particular, we urgently need to document the remaining rock art in great detail (such as with 3D scanning) and uncover more sites before this art disappears forever.</p>
<p>If humans are ultimately causing this problem, we can take steps to correct it. Most importantly, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-1-5-global-warming-limit-is-not-impossible-but-without-political-action-it-soon-will-be-159297">we need to act now</a> to stop global temperature increases and drastically cut emissions. Minimising the impacts of climate change will help preserve the incredible artworks Australasia’s earliest people left to us.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/indonesian-cave-paintings-show-the-dawn-of-imaginative-art-and-human-spiritual-belief-128457">Indonesian cave paintings show the dawn of imaginative art and human spiritual belief</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159929/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jillian Huntley receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Brumm receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adhi Oktaviana is a PhD student at Griffith University and researcher at Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional, Indonesia. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Basran Burhan is a PhD student at Griffith University</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maxime Aubert receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Geographic Society.</span></em></p>
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.
Jillian Huntley, Research Fellow, Griffith University
Adam Brumm, Professor, Griffith University
Adhi Oktaviana, PhD Candidate, Griffith University
Basran Burhan, PhD candidate, Griffith University
Maxime Aubert, Professor, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/157315
2021-04-07T20:16:27Z
2021-04-07T20:16:27Z
‘Our dad’s painting is hiding, in secret place’: how Aboriginal rock art can live on even when gone
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390075/original/file-20210317-13-1m1ezb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">December 1972: Billy Miargu, with his daughter Linda on his arm, and his wife Daphnie Baljur. In the background, the newly painted kangaroo.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by George Chaloupka, now in Parks Australia's Archive at Bowali.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Aboriginal rock art unfolds stories about the present-past and emerging worlds, often described by an outsider as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreaming">Dreamtime</a>. Some rock art, it is believed, was put in place by spiritual and <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/first-rock-art">mythological beings</a>. Many of these Ancestral Beings travelled vast distances, and their journeys link places, clans and different rock art paintings.</p>
<p>Other images were created to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00293652.2020.1779802">educate children</a> about cultural protocols, or just made to tell an amusing story. The <a href="https://www.academia.edu/40790433/This_is_my_fathers_painting_A_first_hand_account_of_the_creation_of_the_most_iconic_rock_art_in_Kakadu_National_Park">artists who created the works</a> are also important. Some artists were prolific and appreciated. A person <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00293652.2020.1779802">who made a hand stencil</a> could often be identified by the hand’s shape. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/introducing-the-maliwawa-figures-a-previously-undescribed-rock-art-style-found-in-western-arnhem-land-145535">Introducing the Maliwawa Figures: a previously undescribed rock art style found in Western Arnhem Land</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Our <a href="https://www.academia.edu/45530029/_Our_dads_painting_is_hiding_in_secret_place_Reverberations_of_a_rock_painting_episode_in_Kakadu_National_Park_Australia">new research</a> into a 1972 painting made by Billy Miargu in today’s Kakadu National Park shows how rock art can act as an intergenerational media — even when no longer visible to the eye.</p>
<p>In December 1972, Robert Edwards and George Chaloupka, two acclaimed rock art researchers, came across Miargu camping at Koongarra in the heart of Kakadu. They took a photograph of his family. In the background, there was a newly made painting of a kangaroo. The researchers did not think much about this image, describing it as a “<a href="https://www.academia.edu/45530029/_Our_dads_painting_is_hiding_in_secret_place_Reverberations_of_a_rock_painting_episode_in_Kakadu_National_Park_Australia">poor naturalistic representation</a>.”</p>
<p>When Paul S.C. Taçon revisited the painting only 13 years later, it was gone (probably due to exposure to wind and rain). In 2018, we used state-of-the-art digital documentation methods to try to detect remnants of the kangaroo, but all in vain. We can no longer see the white kangaroo, as shown in the photograph below.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390100/original/file-20210317-21-i6w8ff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 2019 image of the rock canvas Miargu painted his kangaroo on back in 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Iain Johnston</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Revisiting Koongarra</h2>
<p>In June 2019, we returned to Koongarra with three of Miargu’s daughters, two of his granddaughters and a great-granddaughter. </p>
<p>We wanted to learn about the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/45530029/_Our_dads_painting_is_hiding_in_secret_place_Reverberations_of_a_rock_painting_episode_in_Kakadu_National_Park_Australia">artist and what meaning this place holds today for his family</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390096/original/file-20210317-13-1wgq9jg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Some of Billy Miargu’s children, grand children and great-grandchildren, from left to right: Julie Blawgur, Linda Biyalwanga, Linda’s daughter Ruby Djandjomerr, Linda’s granddaughter Keena Djandjomerr (on the ledge), Julie’s daughter Syanne Naborlhborlh and Joanne Sullivan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Joakim Goldhahn.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We learned that Miargu was born in central Arnhem Land. He moved west to Kakadu around the time of the second world war to work at cattle stations — shooting buffalo, cutting timber — and emerging tourist venues. His clan was Barrbinj and his wife, Daphnie Baljur, was Barrappa. Together, they had six children: five daughters and a son.</p>
<p>Miargu and his wife were camping at Koongarra in 1972 while participating in a fact-finding survey on behalf of the Commonwealth government and the Australian Mining Industry Council for a planned uranium mine. They collected mammals and reptiles for this study.</p>
<p>Our conversations revealed that the place where Miargu painted the kangaroo had a special meaning for him. It is situated in his mother’s clan Country, and he had a ceremonial obligation to this place. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391627/original/file-20210325-13-8fdma3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Billy Miargu with his daughter Linda on his arm in December 1972. The newly made kangaroo figure is seen in the background.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by George Chaloupka, now in Parks Australia's Archive at Bowali.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The original kangaroo painting referenced a local ceremony. Depicting this Ancestral Being in his mother’s Country shows that Miargu had undergone this ceremony and was keen to care for this Country. Today, his son and daughters have inherited some of these obligations.</p>
<p>Even though Miargu’s painting of the kangaroo can no longer be detected, this place holds a special meaning to his descendants. In fact, for the family, they say “our dad’s painting is hiding, in secret place”. They address the painting as if it is still there, visible or not.</p>
<p>Miargu passed away in 1990. This is the only place the family knows where he created rock art. His daughter Linda Biyalwanga said, “we don’t know any other paintings. Only one painting, that’s why we bring our children to show them this painting.”</p>
<p>And she explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My daddy, story, memory, like memories, memory for us, and [he] make [the rock art] for the grandchildren, yeah. He said when I passed away, then my daughters will come around and maybe my granddaughter, and grandsons, great-great-grandchildren come and have look at […] rock art […] When they have kids, they can show them the painting.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/destruction-of-juukan-gorge-we-need-to-know-the-history-of-artefacts-but-it-is-more-important-to-keep-them-in-place-139650">Destruction of Juukan Gorge: we need to know the history of artefacts, but it is more important to keep them in place</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Defying Western notions of time</h2>
<p>The tangible place, the intangible rock painting, and the family’s recollection of the happy times they spent together with their parents at this special place seem to have merged into a present-past and future which embrace Western concepts of space, but defy similar notions of time.</p>
<p>In an inexplicable but noteworthy way, Miargu’s painting seems more present today because it is absent.</p>
<p>To visit Koongarra and the rock art figure he created is vital for his family. It evokes cherished memories about their parents and feelings, but also sorrow and the loss of “the Old People who finished up”.</p>
<p>Joanne Sullivan, another of Miargu’s daughters, expressed this when she said: “I wish my dad sit here.” </p>
<p>When asked if there are other places where they can connect to their parents in this way, Linda Biyalwanga answered: “It’s the only place. It’s the only place we think about, like, his spirit, mum’s spirit.”</p>
<p>When we left the place, Miargu’s daughters called out to their parents’ spirits and asked them to remember them and take care of them. Even though the rock painting “is hiding”, it is still crucial — it lives on even when gone…</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/392153/original/file-20210329-17-2tu2dy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In the front row, Billy Miargu’s daughters, collaborators and co-authors: Joanne Sullivan, Linda Biyalwanga and Julie Blawgur.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Joakim Goldhahn.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p><em>This research was undertaken in collaboration with the family members of Billy Miargu and Daphnie Baljur.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157315/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research was led by Dr Sally K. May at Griffith University as a part of Professor Paul S.C. Taçon's ARC Laureate project "Australian rock art: History, conservation and Indigenous well-being". We thank all Traditional Owners, the staff at Parks Australia, and our research team who participated in our fieldwork.
Joakim Goldhahn's research was sponsored by Rock Art Australia. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>
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.
Joakim Goldhahn, Kimberley Foundation Ian Potter Chair in Rock Art, Centre of Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia
Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/157177
2021-03-31T13:28:26Z
2021-03-31T13:28:26Z
An ancient San rock art mural in South Africa reveals new meaning
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail of the ceiling paintings of the San people in the Drakensberg, South Africa.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy © Stephen Townley Bassett</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The indigenous <a href="https://www.kalaharipeoples.org/the-san">San</a> communities of southern Africa were originally hunting and gathering peoples. One of the greatest testaments to San history is the rock art found throughout the subcontinent.</p>
<p>The oldest rock art in southern Africa is around <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/jaa/8/2/article-p185_3.xml">30,000 years old</a> and is found on painted stone slabs from the <a href="https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/art-music/rock-art/apollo-11-plaque">Apollo 11</a> rock shelter in Namibia. Where our study took place – the <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/985/">Maloti-Drakensberg</a> mountain massif of South Africa and Lesotho – rock paintings were made from about <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/earliest-directly-dated-rock-paintings-from-southern-africa-new-ams-radiocarbon-dates/B071E61BE2B9640E5B9A430E1464F980">3,000 years ago</a> right into the 1800s.</p>
<p>For decades, people thought that one guess about the art’s meaning was as good as another. However, this ignored the San themselves.</p>
<p>We can deepen our understanding if we try to view rock art in terms of San shamanistic beliefs and experiences. Advances in ethnography (literature produced by anthropologists who work with San people) help convey San worldview to rock art researchers.</p>
<p>By locating new sites – thousands are still to be found – and revisiting known ones in the light of developing insights, we can go much further than guessing. </p>
<h2>New insights from old images</h2>
<p>We <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2020.1868757">re-investigated</a> such a site in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountains. It was first described in the 1950s and is recorded as RSA CHI1. At first glance, the ceiling panel seems a confusing collection of paintings of antelopes and human figures, some of which are painted on top of others, in shades of earthy reds, yellow ochres and white.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The RSA CHI1 Rock shelter." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391743/original/file-20210325-21-1fdoksc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The RSA CHI1 rock shelter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rock Art Reseach Institute and www.sarada.co.za</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2009 and working under challenging circumstances, South African artist and author <a href="https://www.stb-rockart.co.za/">Stephen Townley Bassett</a> produced a documentary copy of the ceiling panel. It shows the art’s beauty and mystery. </p>
<p>When we looked at his copy, we found that the significance of some images on the site’s ceiling panel had been missed by other researchers. This allowed us to examine the meaning of these images more closely.</p>
<p>Importantly, our realisation was not a technological or methodological advance. Instead, it was a conceptual development that occurred by turning our attention to a well-known site and viewing it again in the light of everything we have learned so far about San rock art. </p>
<p>Our re-investigation allowed us to arrive at a new understanding of specific elements of San belief.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=273&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=273&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=273&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390094/original/file-20210317-21-povuk7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Detail of the ceiling painting.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy © Stephen Townley Bassett</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Deeply religious art</h2>
<p>Two sources of San ethnography are especially important in rock art research and our understanding of the ceiling panel. In the 1870s, the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his co-worker and sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd interviewed a series of |Xam San people, some of whom had been brought from the Northern Cape to Cape Town as convicts. </p>
<p>Remarkably, <a href="http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/">Bleek and Lloyd</a> recorded over 12,000 pages of texts in the |Xam language, which is no longer spoken, and transliterated most of it line-by-line into English. Much of this material remains relevant to our understanding of the art. </p>
<p>More recently, in the twentieth century, a number of anthropologists worked with San groups in Namibia and Botswana with a focus on a range of topics from hunting and gathering to folklore and childcare. The <a href="https://www.kalaharipeoples.org/resources">Kalahari ethnography</a> compliments the Bleek and Lloyd archive.</p>
<p>We know from the ethnography that the San believe in a universe with spiritual realms above and below the level on which people live. Decades of research has shown that the rock art is deeply religious and situated conceptually in the same multilevel universe.</p>
<h2>Re-reading the ceiling</h2>
<p>In San rock art, the <a href="https://www.awf.org/wildlife-conservation/eland">eland</a> is a connecting element. It is the most commonly depicted antelope in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg paintings. It features in several San rituals and was believed to be the creature with the most <em>!gi:</em> – the |Xam word for the invisible essence that lies at the heart of San belief and ritual. </p>
<p>At RSA CHI1, there are many depictions of eland, but we focused on the one with its head sharply raised. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391746/original/file-20210325-13-4y1zly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Detail of the eland with the raised head.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephen Townley Bassett</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Depictions of this posture, though not common, recur in other sites. The eland’s raised head suggests that it is smelling something, most probably rain. Both smell and rain are supernaturally powerful in San thought. </p>
<p>The unique feature in this paintings is, however, the way in which a line runs up from an area of rough rock, breaking at the eland’s front legs, and then on to another area of rough rock. The painter, or painters, must have depicted the eland first and then added the line to develop the significance of its raised head. We argue that both the raised head and the line emphasise contact with the spirit realm, though in different ways.</p>
<p>The way in which the painted line emerges from and continues into areas of rough rock is comparable to the way in which numerous San images were painted to give the impression that they are entering and leaving the rock face via cracks, steps and other inequalities. But what lay behind the rock face?</p>
<h2>Behind the rock face</h2>
<p>We have noted already that the San universe is divided into different realms. Contact between these often interacting realms is sometimes depicted in the art by long lines that link images or sometimes appear to pass through the rock face. San shamans or medicine people (called <em>!gi:ten</em> in |Xam) move along or climb these ‘threads of light’ as they journey between realms to heal the sick, make rain and perform other tasks. The |Xam called these out-of-body journeys <em>|xãũ</em>. They obtained the power needed to accomplish them by summoning potency from strong things, such as the eland.</p>
<p>The inter-realm nature of the line is further evidenced by the three creatures depicted moving along it. The two moving upward are quadrupeds or four-legged animals: one is non-specifc and one has a tail and human arms. These images may depict the sort of bodily changes that <em>!gi:ten</em> say they experience during out-of-body journeys.</p>
<p>The faint white creature moving down the line was for us the climax of our work. It is clearly birdlike (<em>!gi:ten</em> often speak of flying). But closer inspection revealed that, though faint, it has a rhebok antelope head with two straight black horns, a black nose and mouth.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Rhebok therianthrope." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391747/original/file-20210325-23-1cgkzj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Photograph of the rhebok-headed image moving down the line.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rock Art Reseach Institute and www.sarada.co.za</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It also has two ‘wings’ emanating from its shoulders. In short, it is a hybrid form – part bird and part buck. In addition, it has two white lines coming out of the back of its neck. It was from this spot that <em>!gi:ten</em> expelled the sickness that they drew out of the bodies of sick people.</p>
<p>For many people, the detail and the complexity of the images at this site come as a surprise. Yet they are typical. San rock art ranks among the best in the world if we consider its beauty, its intricacy and the rich sources of explanation on which we can draw.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157177/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David M. Witelson is a PhD student at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. He has a bursary with the Rock Art Research Institute. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Lewis-Williams has received funding from a NRF A-grade grant. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Challis hold an NRF African Origins Platform Grant as well as a joint Wits/Edinburgh University seed fund. He is a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Rock Art Network and the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Pearce does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
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.
David M. Witelson, PhD candidate, University of the Witwatersrand
David Lewis-Williams, Emeritus professor, University of the Witwatersrand
David Pearce, Associate professor, University of the Witwatersrand
Sam Challis, Senior research scientist, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/153089
2021-01-13T19:12:19Z
2021-01-13T19:12:19Z
We found the oldest known cave painting of animals in a secret Indonesian valley
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378226/original/file-20210112-17-bcb7xi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=370%2C726%2C3634%2C2106&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Adhi Oktaviana</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The dating of an exceptionally old cave painting of animals that was found recently on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is reported in our <a href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd4648" title="Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi">paper</a> out today.</p>
<p>The painting portrays images of the Sulawesi warty pig (<em>Sus celebensis</em>), which is a small (40-85kg) short-legged wild boar endemic to the island. </p>
<p>Dating to at least 45,500 years ago, this cave painting may be the oldest depiction of the animal world, and possibly the earliest figurative art (an image that resembles the thing it is intended to represent), yet uncovered.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-wAYtBxn7E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Ice age art in Indonesia</h2>
<p>Sulawesi is host to abundant cave art, the existence of which was first reported in the 1950s.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/indonesian-cave-paintings-show-the-dawn-of-imaginative-art-and-human-spiritual-belief-128457">Indonesian cave paintings show the dawn of imaginative art and human spiritual belief</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Until recently, the prevailing view was this art was the handiwork of Neolithic farmers who arrived around 4,000 years ago from southern China rather than the hunter-gatherers who had lived on Sulawesi for tens of thousands of years.</p>
<p>We now know that this is not correct.</p>
<p>In 2014, we <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13422" title="Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia">reported</a> the first dates for the South Sulawesi rock art.</p>
<p>Based on uranium-series analysis of mineral deposits (calcite) that formed naturally on the art we showed that a stencilled image of a human hand found in one cave was created at least 40,000 years ago. This is compatible in age with the famous ice age cave art in Europe.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZVEqkVDn6Y4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ice age art in the tropics.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then, in 2019, we <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1806-y" title="Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art">dated</a> a spectacular painting at another cave that portrays hybrid human-animal figures hunting Sulawesi warty pigs and dwarf buffalos (anoas). This hunting scene is at least 43,900 years old and it features what may be the oldest depictions of supernatural beings.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gx8ohlEAfy4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In our latest study we push the age of Sulawesi’s rock art a little deeper into the past. </p>
<h2>The secret valley</h2>
<p>In December 2017 we conducted the first survey of an isolated valley set in mountainous terrain a stone’s throw from one of Indonesia’s largest cities, Makassar. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A lush green valley landscape." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=203&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=203&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=203&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378222/original/file-20210112-13-12qnkdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The limestone karst valley in which Leang Tedongnge is located.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David P McGahan</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite its proximity to a major urban centre, there is no road to this valley. The small community of local Bugis farmers live a secluded existence, although they are widely reputed for the sublime quality (and potency) of their palm wine (ballo). </p>
<p>According to them no Westerner had ever set foot in their valley before.</p>
<p>This secret valley is a pristine environment and a place of resplendent natural beauty. There is hardly any rubbish in the tiny village in the centre of the valley. Being there feels like stepping back in time.</p>
<p>The valley harbours a limestone cave known as Leang Tedongnge and inside it we found a rock painting the locals claimed they had never noticed before.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Inside the cave is a painting of warty pigs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378444/original/file-20210112-15-b12tdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adhi Agus Oktaviana in front of the Leang Tedongnge rock art panel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Adhi Agus Oktaviana</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The painting was produced using a red mineral pigment (ironstone haematite, or ochre). It depicts at least three Sulawesi warty pigs engaged in social interaction of some kind.</p>
<p>We interpret the surviving elements of this artwork as a single narrative composition or scene, a mainstay of how we tell stories using images today but an uncommon feature of early cave art.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Leang Tedongnge rock art panel enhanced to make the artwork clearer." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378223/original/file-20210112-13-1d6fvd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The top image has been enhanced (in DStretch) to make the artwork clearer. The bottom image shows a tracing of the art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Adhi Agus Oktaviana</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Unlocking the age of the art</h2>
<p>Dating rock art is very difficult at the best of times. But at Leang Tedongnge we were fortunate to identify a small calcite deposit (known as “<a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/what-is-cave-popcorn.htm">cave popcorn</a>”) that had formed on top of one of the pig figures (pig 1).</p>
<p>We sampled the calcite and analysed it for uranium-series dating. Amazingly, the dating work returned an age of 45,500 years ago for the calcite, meaning the painting on which it formed must be at least this old. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A closer image of one of the wild pigs and two hand stencils" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378220/original/file-20210112-21-18klrdt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A close up of the dated warty pig painting at Leang Tedongnge.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maxime Aubert</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Early art in Wallacea</h2>
<p>Our discovery underlines the global importance of Sulawesi, and the wider Indonesian region, for our understanding of where and when the first cave art traditions developed by our species arose.</p>
<p>The great antiquity of this artwork also offers hints at the potential for other significant findings in this part of the world.</p>
<p>Sulawesi is the largest island in Wallacea, the zone of oceanic islands located between mainland Asia and the ice age continental landmass of Australia-New Guinea.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-pocket-sized-artworks-from-ice-age-indonesia-show-humanitys-ancient-drive-to-decorate-132187">First pocket-sized artworks from Ice Age Indonesia show humanity's ancient drive to decorate</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Modern humans are said to have crossed through Wallacea by watercraft at least <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22968" title="Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago">65,000 years ago</a> in order to reach Australia by that time. </p>
<p>But the Wallacean islands are poorly explored and presently the earliest excavated archaeological evidence from this region is much younger. </p>
<p>We believe further research will uncover much older rock art in Sulawesi or on other Wallacean islands, dating back at least 65,000 years and possibly earlier.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153089/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Brumm receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Geographic Society.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adhi Agus Oktaviana is a researcher at Indonesia's Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (National Archaeological Research Center), Ministry of Education and Culture, and is a PhD student at Griffith University. Research focus on prehistory and rock art in Indonesia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Basran Burhan is a freelance researcher currently pursuing his PhD at Griffith University</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maxime Aubert receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Geographic Society.</span></em></p>
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.
Adam Brumm, Professor, Griffith University
Adhi Oktaviana, PhD Candidate, Griffith University
Basran Burhan, PhD candidate, Griffith University
Maxime Aubert, Professor, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/149981
2021-01-03T18:58:18Z
2021-01-03T18:58:18Z
Why Aotearoa New Zealand’s early Polynesian settlement should be recognised with World Heritage Site status
<p>Aotearoa New Zealand likes to think it punches above its weight internationally, but there is one area where we are conspicuously falling behind — the number of sites recognised by the <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/convention/">UNESCO World Heritage Convention</a>.</p>
<p>Globally, there are <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/">1,121</a> recognised World Heritage Sites, both cultural and natural. Each has had to satisfy at least one of ten possible <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/">selection criteria</a>, adjudicated by the World Heritage Committee, meaning it possesses “outstanding universal value”.</p>
<p>With each such listing comes global recognition, cultural pride and economic rewards. But despite Aotearoa New Zealand’s rich and celebrated natural and cultural wonders, we have contributed <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/nz">only three</a> to the international list: <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/551/">Te Wahipounamu</a> in the South Island, <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/421/">Tongariro National Park</a> in the North Island, and New Zealand’s <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/877/">sub-Antarctic islands</a>.</p>
<p>While there is a good <a href="https://www.doc.govt.nz/ourworldheritage">tentative list</a> of potential submissions, we believe it is now out of date and the country needs to go further. Mostly, we need to be thinking in much broader terms about the reasons we value our heritage.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Milford Sound from the sea" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373706/original/file-20201208-21-121tmmu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The dramatic entrance to Milford Sound, Te Wahipounamu, the World Heritage Site in the south-west of Aotearoa New Zealand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Valuing our early human history</h2>
<p>First, some context. It’s a given that people are amazed when they see the best of humanity’s Neolithic sites, such as <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/373/">Stonehenge</a> in England or <a href="https://www.newgrange.com/images.htm">Newgrange</a> in Ireland. We are mesmerised by the ancient <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/rocktart/">rock art</a> of Australia, Africa and Europe. As cultural sites, they meet one or various world heritage selection criteria:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>they are masterpieces of human creative genius</p></li>
<li><p>they exhibit an important interchange of human values in landscape design or type of landscape that illustrates a significant stage in human history</p></li>
<li><p>they bear a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition that is living or has disappeared</p></li>
<li><p>they are an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land use or sea use, representative of human interaction with the environment.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>There is no doubt the existing World Heritage Sites fulfil these criteria — but we believe a number of sites in New Zealand would too, and be of outstanding universal value to all humanity.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-environmental-crisis-how-20th-century-settler-writers-foreshadowed-the-anthropocene-150727">The forgotten environmental crisis: how 20th century settler writers foreshadowed the Anthropocene</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In particular, those areas where humans first touched these lands and left some mark or record of their presence deserve world heritage status. For example, sites such as <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/interactive/31749/wairau-bar-archaeological-site">Te Pokohiwi</a> (Wairau Bar) and <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/380369/moturua-island-archaeological-dig-unearths-tools-structures">Moturua Island</a>, as well as some of the early sites of <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori-rock-art-nga-toi-ana">Māori rock art</a>, potentially meet the criteria.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Neolithic building" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373704/original/file-20201208-16-1o6cw0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland: built during the Neolithic period, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A Pacific-wide campaign</h2>
<p>To pursue this would require a lot of expert analysis (traditional and academic), as well as consent to ensure the proper engagement and involvement of local communities. </p>
<p>But if that happens, such sites could form the basis of a national nomination. In turn, this could be built into a Pacific-wide nomination recognising the astonishing feats of those <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/encounters/polynesian-voyaging">early Polynesian navigators</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/weve-developed-a-framework-to-help-world-heritage-sites-manage-invasive-species-147804">We've developed a framework to help World Heritage Sites manage invasive species</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The Pacific covers roughly 30% of the Earth’s surface. It is the biggest and deepest of the planet’s ocean basins. Using an extraordinary understanding of ocean patterns, air currents and astronomy, Indigenous peoples successfully navigated this vast body of water in ways that could not be replicated for nearly 500 years.</p>
<p>Their remarkable exploration spread humanity throughout the Pacific. Aotearoa New Zealand became the <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/when-was-new-zealand-first-settled/print">last landmass on the planet to be inhabited</a>. It also cemented a Māori world view and cosmology as a crucial source of identity, interconnectedness and custom. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Walkers trekking in deserted landscape" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373703/original/file-20201208-14-s6zjmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Walkers trekking across Campbell Island, part of the Sub-Antarctic Islands World Heritage Site .</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Not easy, but possible</h2>
<p>We would argue Aotearoa New Zealand fulfils both sides of the World Heritage site equation: the idea and practice of one of humanity’s most spectacular achievements, and the physical locations where the feet of those early navigators first trod.</p>
<p>The country should now be focusing its efforts on building the case for recognising the unique human achievements contained within the heritage of this land. We do not pretend such a nomination would be easy, but we do think it is possible.</p>
<p>Nor are we saying this should push the other heritage we value to one side. Rather, this would add to it, helping us think more deeply about what we value and why. Such a project would promote traditional knowledge and intercultural dialogue, pride and understanding at local, national and global levels.</p>
<p>Most of all, it would be the right thing to do.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149981/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Aotearoa New Zealand is falling behind in world heritage sites. Is it time we lobbied for recognition of our unique cultural history?
Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato
Valmaine Toki, Associate Professor of Law, University of Waikato
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/146211
2020-10-14T19:11:12Z
2020-10-14T19:11:12Z
Can a mining state be pro-heritage? Vital steps to avoid another Juukan Gorge
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361538/original/file-20201005-24-1p42tfq.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=240%2C4%2C1102%2C810&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Participants in the Wintawari Guruma Rock Art Research Project record rock art near Tom Price in the Pilbara region.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jo McDonald, CRAR+M Database, Photo reproduced with permission WGAC</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The destruction of 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge sites in the Pilbara has created great distress for their traditional owners, seismic shockwaves for heritage professionals and appalled the general public. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/corporate-dysfunction-on-indigenous-affairs-why-heads-rolled-at-rio-tinto-146001">fallout for Rio Tinto</a> has been profound as has the groundswell of criticism of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/02/western-australia-revamps-indigenous-heritage-laws-after-juukan-gorge-destruction">Western Australia’s outdated heritage laws</a>. A path forward must ensure a pivotal role for Indigenous communities and secure Keeping Places for heritage items. More broadly, we need more Indigenous places added to the <a href="https://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national-heritage-list">National Heritage List</a>, ensuring them the highest form of heritage protection. </p>
<p>In a state heavily dependent on mining, the model for this could follow the successful seven-year heritage collaboration I have been part of on-country with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC) and Rio Tinto in the Dampier Archipelago (Murujuga).</p>
<p>As Director of the <a href="https://www.crarm.uwa.edu.au/">Centre for Rock Art Research and Management</a> at the University of Western Australia, I am funded to undertake research supported by <a href="https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/pages/4b63db66-1d8e-4427-91d1-951aff442414/files/ca-hamersley.pdf">Rio Tinto’s conservation agreement</a> with the Commonwealth.</p>
<p>This Rio Tinto funding enables research documenting the significant scientific and community values of the archipelago, feeding into the management of this estate by MAC, who represent the local coastal Pilbara groups. It also resources Indigenous rangers and trains undergraduate students. </p>
<p>The Murujuga conservation agreements, made between the Commonwealth and both Rio Tinto <a href="https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/pages/4b63db66-1d8e-4427-91d1-951aff442414/files/ca-woodside.pdf">and Woodside</a>, were negotiated when the archipelago’s one million-plus engravings and stone features were added to Australia’s <a href="https://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/dampier-archipelago">National Heritage List</a> in 2007. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-why-the-rock-art-of-murujuga-deserves-world-heritage-status-102100">Explainer: why the rock art of Murujuga deserves World Heritage status</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Murujuga is one of only seven Indigenous rock art places on the National Heritage List. There are 118 listings in total in Australia (only 20 of them Indigenous). Murujuga is the only listed Indigenous site here with a conservation agreement requiring industry to fund heritage protection.</p>
<p>Rio Tinto does not have a similar agreement with the traditional owners of Juukan Gorge, the Puutu Kunti Kurruma Pinikuru (PKKP) peoples — nor do any of the other Pilbara resource extraction companies with their host native title communities. These mining tenements are managed by a range of royalty agreements, which recognise native title rights but are flexible and require transparency.</p>
<p>Despite working closely with Rio Tinto, I have been dismayed by the Juukan incident and the fault lines it has revealed in Rio Tinto’s historically significant investment in heritage management and agreement-making with Aboriginal people.</p>
<p>PKKP this week <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/12/devastated-indigenous-owners-say-rio-tinto-misled-them-ahead-of-juukan-gorge-blast">expressed their distress</a> at the company’s <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/juukan-gorge-blast-inquiry-told-of-rio-tinto-gag-clauses-warning/12754100">behavior</a>. Clearly, there is much for Rio Tinto to improve. But similarly, the regulation process is seriously flawed. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/363071/original/file-20201013-15-153vt6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A screenshot of a supplied video taken in 2015 showing one of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in Western Australia before they were destroyed by Rio Tinto in May 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PKKP AND PKKP Aboriginal Corporation.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rio-tinto-just-blasted-away-an-ancient-aboriginal-site-heres-why-that-was-allowed-139466">Rio Tinto just blasted away an ancient Aboriginal site. Here’s why that was allowed</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Conserving Aboriginal heritage</h2>
<p>Many of the changes in the WA Government’s new <a href="https://www.dplh.wa.gov.au/aha-review">Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill 2020</a> are welcome: in particular, the recognition of native title, allowing “stop work orders” if an Indigenous community says mining work was begun without their permission, and increased penalties for damaging heritage.</p>
<p>But Aboriginal groups, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-08/juukan-gorge-repeat-possible-under-proposed-wa-law-leaders/12639846?fbclid=IwAR3YWPfDUc-uIRM0MfjN384ey5RiMEOfDA1T8CSoBFfmNPJpoteCeo-biSg">including many in the Kimberley and south-west WA</a>, fear the onus for this regulatory process will be passed onto them and — despite being the appropriate people to manage their own heritage — they will not be adequately resourced to do so.</p>
<p>The number of heritage sites <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/21/rio-tinto-expected-to-destroy-124-more-aboriginal-sites-inquiry-told">likely to be at risk</a> in the future will number in the thousands, given the current footprint of mining is a mere 1% of the planned expansion over the next century. A new paradigm is needed in managing heritage. There needs to be a process of identifying regionally significant landscapes <a href="https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/8582db94-6daa-4097-b77e-079a797ef67d/files/dhawura-ngilan-vision-atsi-heritage.pdf">and earmarking them for conservation</a> before future development footprints are determined. </p>
<p>And there need to be more conservation agreements like the Murujuga one, with industry-funding heritage and conservation rather than just mining clearance work.</p>
<p>In the Pilbara, for instance, there are three national parks, Karajini, Millstream-Chichester and Murujuga, where mining cannot occur. But more are needed in other native title areas. They need to be resourced so Aboriginal heritage rangers can manage them, with appropriate <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-26/murujuga-national-park-reopens-rock-art-new-boardwalk/12598186?fbclid=IwAR0ZNXw657rmewpB_8QNhyM-xb8dcnhLon9L6gIqVTGM6CG27H5NvIHQBFA">facilities for tourists</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/362792/original/file-20201011-15-1y9bz86.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Members of the Wintawari Guruma Rock Art Project recording contemporary values with traditional custodians, university researchers and Rio Tinto heritage personnel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jo McDonald CRAR+M Database reproduced with permission of Wintawari Guruma Aboriginal Corporation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mining compliance surveys, which “manage harm” to heritage are a significant economy for many Aboriginal communities. </p>
<p>But a number of Pilbara Aboriginal Corporations, including Wintawari Gurama, with whom I have developed a rock art research project, don’t want to just participate in the mining economy, which is tantamount to destroying their heritage. </p>
<p>They want to train local rangers, and document, record and manage their own heritage estates, enabling elders and young people to earn a living on country.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361462/original/file-20201004-15-8wh3bx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Murujuga Ranger recording rock art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jo McDonald CRAR+M Database reproduced with permission of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This approach is equally required in places like the Kimberley, where <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-07-16/bennett-resources-submits-fracking-plan-for-canning-basin/12458082">fracking could be the next resources</a> “boom”. </p>
<h2>Aboriginal communities need Keeping Places.</h2>
<p>Across the Pilbara, items <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/28/calls-for-high-level-personnel-changes-at-rio-tinto-after-juukan-gorge-destruction">such as the 7,000 heritage items salvaged</a> from Juukan Gorge, are being housed in locked shipping <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/former-top-rio-adviser-calls-for-root-and-branch-renewal/12372454">containers</a>. Secure air-conditioned Keeping Places are an urgent requirement. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/destruction-of-juukan-gorge-we-need-to-know-the-history-of-artefacts-but-it-is-more-important-to-keep-them-in-place-139650">Destruction of Juukan Gorge: we need to know the history of artefacts, but it is more important to keep them in place</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>These, too, could be funded by industry, becoming the focus of heritage tourism and ranger training, and hosting collaborative research on heritage, biodiversity and conservation.</p>
<p>Murujuga, which has been added to the <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6445/">World Heritage Tentative List</a>, has a tourism management plan. <a href="https://www.murujuga.org.au/our-work/conzinc-bay-tourism-precinct/">A Living Knowledge Centre</a> is planned, and <a href="https://parks.dpaw.wa.gov.au/site/ngajarli-deep-gorge">additional interpretation</a> facilities. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360146/original/file-20200927-18-ypjidh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ngajarli (Deep Gorge) bird track panel on Murujuga with evidence of industry visible in the background.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jo McDonald CRAR+M Database reproduced with permission of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The state government and industry stakeholders are funding the <a href="https://www.der.wa.gov.au/images/documents/our-work/programs/burrup/Murujuga_Rock_Art_Strategy.pdf">Murujuga Rock Art Strategy</a>, which will monitor and assess emissions from nearby industry. There are, however, concerning plans to introduce new industry in the adjacent Burrup Industrial Estate. This is an issue, too, for the federal government, which has ultimate oversight of heritage on the national list.</p>
<p>In WA, the state government asserts that heritage can co-exist with industry. But this will only be possible if the state recognises heritage is non-renewable — just like the mineral wealth of this country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146211/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo McDonald receives funding from The Australian Research Council, and holds the endowed Rio Tinto Chair in Rock Art Studies, funded by their Conservation Agreement with the Commonwealth. She sits on the State-based Murujuga Stakeholder Reference Group and the Murujuga Heritage Committee. </span></em></p>
Heritage is non-renewable — just like the mineral wealth of this country.
Jo McDonald, Director, Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.