Content area
Full Text
Abstract. This paper explores the complex and challenging relationship between archaeology, rock art studies and ethnography. It examines how particular sites that may be deemed archaeological, because they contain rock art, are still part of the ethnographic present in regards to what continues to be known about them by Indigenous people. In this paper, we present a case study of rock art from Yanyuwa Country in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. This is a context in which a Dreaming and kincentric ontology determines the presence and nature of imagery and shapes this imagery as an element of Country which carries its own agentic will. In this instance, the imagery is not rock art, but something altogether more richly configured through a relational ontology that stretches through time, past, present and future. The Yanyuwa example presses us to consider how our research of 'rock art' can be led through ethnographic understandings, rather than seeking ethnographic insights to support already constituted disciplinary understandings.
Introduction
This paper explores the challenging relationship between archaeology, rock art studies and ethnography. It builds on existing Australian and international literature in this area (e.g. Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005; Colwell and Ferguson 2014; Flood and David 1994; Keyser et al. 2006; Morwood and Hobbs 1992; Merlan 1989; McDonald 2013; Young 1988; York et al. 1993) and offers new insights into how particular sites that may be deemed archaeological, because they contain rock art, are still part of the ethnographic present. The geographical, cultural and temporal range over which rock art studies are undertaken requires culturally attuned, often sensitive methodologies that can move with, be led by and responsive to the specificities of landscapes and seascapes, identities and political motivations.
In the context of this paper, it is Yanyuwa people from northern Australia's southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (Fig. 1) who own the land upon which the rock art and rock art sites discussed here are found. It is their lives, thoughts, personalities and memories that populate the ethnographic present. This ethnographic present is not a 'distinctive hyper cultural space', it is everyday life. It is the profoundly relational contexts in which meanings in and of the world are made, sustained, refashioned and changed. The gloss of meaning that comes with the...