SEMINAR: Archaeological Seminar Series Semester 1, 2011

Rock art research has been prolific in Australia for a number of decades, and many years have been spent investigating how Indigenous responses to contact and colonialism are expressed through rock art in the landscape. What is often referred to as graffiti reflects some of the European expression of their place, responses and affiliations in the same landscape. Europeans were not reticent about making their mark on the landscape. They painted and engraved; they wrote their names, and named ships and military corps with which they were affiliated. They marked the land where rock art had already established an Indigenous presence, and changed it forever. Using two case studies from remote rock art sites in Australia, a new classification system was developed and Harris Matrices were used to explore non-chronological aspects of superimposition. This new approach opened the door to answering research questions about how Europeans interacted with new and challenging landscapes.

The study of historical inscriptions at remote sites provides a new approach to classification and analysis, so why not a new approach to studying graffiti an archaeological artifact?