SEMINAR: Desert Rock Art: A Tale of Two Continents - Winthrop Professor Jo McDonald

Occupation of the Australian arid zone started soon after 50,000 years ago. Since this time, hunter-gatherers across this driest continent on earth have demonstrated all of the modern-human hallmarks: resilience and aesthetics. People’s movement into an ecologically diverse continent and the development of social networks through both time and radical environmental change, is recorded by diverse and early regional rock art production systems supported by a range of other archaeological signatures. Work with colleagues has resulted in a model for changing rock art production over time in the Western Desert of Australia (McDonald and Veth 2013, McDonald et al. 2014).

Understanding the peopling of the Americas is currently undergoing a paradigm shift. Until recently the unshakeable idea endured that around 12,000 years ago a small hardy band of Clovis-wielding big-game hunters crossed the Bering. Now both genetics and archaeological finds demonstrate that humans were using the unglaciated landscapes of North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. Dates from Mexico and South America suggest that this could have occurred as early as 30,000 years ago. Models for North American rock art have been tempered by the Clovis-First paradigm, and most Great Basin rock art models see this as an Early Holocene phenomenon. In this seminar I make some preliminary observations about hunter-gatherer responses to landscape and rock art in the Great Basin through time, and propose a model for how rock art might be perceived in terms of broader models of human occupation and settlement systems though time. The movement of people into the arid zone and their use of rock art as an information strategy are discussed as global phenomena.