Chronometric ages for Australian Aboriginal rock art

Abstract

The Kimberley region in north-western Australia is home to one of the world's richest rock art provinces. Extensive fieldwork by earlier researchers, since the 1990's, led to the development of a detailed stylistic sequence through to date back to the Pleistocene, A key objective of two Australian Research Council Linkage projects, led by the University of Melbourne, was to develop a geochronological dating techniques to derive absolute, robust, time scale for this sequence of Aboriginal rock art.

One of the techniques developed uses radiocarbon dating of mud wasp nests, occasionally found overlying or underlying rock paintings. The ages determined for the was nests then serve as maximum and minimum age constraints for the rock art. Initial results, based upon a dated wasp nests, were published in 2020 and 2021. they provided substantial evidence of Pleistocene antiquity for the two oldest phases of painted rock art in the Kimberly stylistic sequence: the Irregular Infill Animal period and the Gwion period. Since then, a further 360 wasp nests in contact with Kimberly rock art have been dated. Nest samples were collected from 103 rock art shelters up to 100 kilometers apart in Balanggarra country in the far north of Western Australia. The dates are being used to estimate the age span of each of the five main Kimberley rock painting styles that extend back from modern times to the Last Glacial Maximum. Statistical analysis of the dataset explores the reliability of such estimates, give the sample sizes for each stylistic period.

Such a large number of geochronometric ages provides unique insights in the evolution of the artistic styles under the influence of major environmental changes in the region.