Ken Mulvaney, Victoria Wade, Sarah de Koning, Jo McDonald
In this chapter we describe our documentation of Murujuga’s rock art. We explore the conventions of our classificatory typology and the digital collection processes which we created during the project. The chapter concludes with a broad summary our new knowledge of this region’s rock art, highlighted in more detail in each of the different island’s survey chapters.
Our motif classification recognises a basic hierarchy of figurative forms: anthropomorphs (human-like) and zoomorphs (animal-like), as well as geometric motifs (defined shapes) and tracks (human and various animals). Our digital recording forms use this classification system.
Our sample areas include representative landscapes from a range of different geologies, islands of different sizes and of differing accessibility from the stabilised Holocene shoreline. Our recording work reveals high density art produced in almost all areas surveyed.
We have confirmed the stylistic variability across the archipelago, and confirmed that this cultural landscape includes a myriad of different art signatures and records of deep time and more recent art production and occupation.
We also have another category - ‘other’ - for a variety of other ‘human-made marks’ which do not adhere to that hierarchical taxonomy. This includes grooves, graffiti and grinding patches which are not thought to be deliberate story-telling through imagery.
Grinding patches result from economic activities, and graffiti (presumed to be made by outsiders) falls outside our motif taxonomy for this deep-time record.
We have recorded rock art across the entire archipelago, as well as demonstrating that rock art continued to be produced after islandisation and even through the contact period.
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All photographs within this monograph were taken by CRAR+M researchers, partners and students, and have been given cultural approval for publication by Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation. Future use of imagery would require additional permissions from Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and CRAR+M.
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