A novel technique developed by a team of researchers in Australia has made it possible to produce some of the first reliable radiocarbon dates for Australian rock art.
Aboriginal rock art from western Arnhem Land depicts style known as Northern Running Figures. Image credit: Tristen Jones.
“Indigenous Australian rock art is very interesting, it is believed to be among the most ancient in the world but it is one of the least dated,” said Dr. Vladimir Levchenko, a researcher at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and co-author of the paper reporting the results in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports.
The team’s approach involved extracting calcium oxalate from a mineral crust growing on the surface of rock art from sites in western Arnhem Land.
“Generally speaking, radiocarbon dating cannot readily be used to date Australian indigenous rock art directly, because it is characterized by the use of ochre, an inorganic mineral pigment that contains no carbon,” the researchers said.
The new approach has produced an upper and lower limit of dates for a regional art style known as Northern Running Figures (NRF), or Mountford Figures, believed to have been created in Australia during the early to mid-Holocene (10,000 – 6,000 years ago).
The authors suggested the maximum age is likely to be far older.
“We present nine radiocarbon age determinations producing a minimum age and a minimum age range for a regionally distinct rock art style known as the Northern Running Figures from Red Lily Lagoon, western Arnhem Land Australia,” the researchers said.
“These radiocarbon determinations provide age constraints for both Pleistocene and early Holocene rock art in western Arnhem Land.”
The limited distribution of the NRF style and its unclear relationship to earlier and later art styles has posed challenges for rock art researchers.
“With the ages we acquired using carbon-14 on our accelerators, we showed effectively that the age ranges hypothesised for the NRF art style are generally correct,” Dr. Levchenko said.
The team reports that the minimum age of the NRF rock art style is reported to be 9,034 – 9,402 years before present, which also produces a minimum age for other art styles that occur in the ‘Middle Period’ sequence.
“The results are exciting as although they generally support the chronology and assumed antiquity for the NRF art style, they provide minimum ages which suggest that the art style is actually a few thousand years older than what was anticipated,” said lead author Tristen Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at the Australian National University.
“They also demonstrate that the art style was painted over a considerably long period. Most excitingly the results also provide the chronometric data to support a Pleistocene antiquity for the earliest known figurative art styles, such as Dynamic Figures, in Arnhem Land.”
_____
Tristen Jones et al. 2017. Radiocarbon age constraints for a Pleistocene–Holocene transition rock art style: The Northern Running Figures of the East Alligator River region, western Arnhem Land, Australia. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 11: 80-89; doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.11.016
This article is based on a press-release from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.
