Kyrgyzstan: Saving Archaeological Sites
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Kakadu National Park: Rock Art
Key Issues
Sally Kate May1 and Paul S. C. Tacon2 1 School of Archaeology and Anthropology and Rock Art Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia 2 PERAHU, School of Humanities, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, QLD, Australia
Characteristics It is estimated that there are over 15,000 rock art sites of varying ages within Kakadu. While this is only a fraction of Australia’s rock art, sites contained within Kakadu represent a highly significant and diverse suite within a protected national park. The rock art is overwhelmingly paintings; however, stencils also feature heavily. Less frequent are prints, engraved motifs including cupules, and beeswax figures pressed onto the rock surfaces. Paintings, stencils, and prints are made using natural ochers and white pipe clay sourced locally and traded across Kakadu and neighboring regions. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Reckitt’s Blue washing powder was occasionally used to depict traditional and new subject matter.
Introduction Kakadu National Park, located in the top end of the Northern Territory of Australia, covers 19,804 km2 of diverse tropical ecosystems. This vast area includes mangroves, mudflats and floodplains, major rivers, savanna woodlands, monsoon forests, sandstone escarpments, and rocky plateaus. Most importantly, Kakadu is an Aboriginal living cultural landscape. There are many different clan groups within Kakadu with each caring for their “country” and sharing in joint management of the park with the Commonwealth Government of Australia. Kakadu is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s great rock art provinces. Internationally recognized through UNESCO World Heritage List for both its cultural and natural heritage, Kakadu has one of Australia’s largest concentrations of rock art sites. Rock art played a vital role in Kakadu, achieving world heritage status, with particular mention made of the antiquity, concentration, temporal span, and diversity of the art as well as its links to continuing cultural traditions (Fig. 1).
Chronology Rock art dating is one of the biggest challenges in rock art research so few images have been directly dated. Consequently, we do not know how old much of the art is, but there is a range of evidence to suggest that the oldest surviving rock art, including paintings of large naturalistic animals, is over 15,000 years of age and possibly as much as 30,000 years. G. Chaloupka has argued some rock art could be even older and that Kakadu has “the world’s longest continuing art tradition” (Chaloupka 1993: 15). Certainly, the rock art illustrates significant environmental, technological, and stylistic change over time and
C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2, # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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Kakadu National Park: Rock Art
Kakadu National Park: Rock Art, Fig. 1 Most rock art in Kakadu adorns the surfaces of open-air rockshelters rather than cave systems such as those in Spain
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