Aboriginal Rock Art and the Telling of History

Offers new insights into the medium of rock art by bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practices.

Laura Rademaker (Author), Sally K. May (Author), Gabriel Maralngurra (Author), Joakim Goldhahn (Author)

9781009523318, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 December 2024

204 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.46 kg

The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and most fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as archives and libraries for Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.

List of figures
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
List of abbreviations
1. Rock beats paper: 'prehistory', rock art and archives
2. Change and tradition in West Arnhem land rock art
3. The counter-archive of First Nations biography
4. Reading the writing on the wall: rock art and the written word
5. Touchstones for memory, bedrocks for history
6. Timelessness and permanence: rock art and time
Conclusions
Afterword
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Archaeology by period / region [HDD]