EVENT: Archaeology Seminar Series

Murujuga (the Dampier Archipelago, Western Australia) is one of the most enigmatic archaeological landscapes in the world. The islandscape hosts the largest open-air rock art galleries in the world, home to over a million engravings. These engravings provide insight into the sociocultural dynamics of the people that lived within this changing landscape for over 30,000 years. Previously located approximately 200km inland and now a coastal location, Murujuga is an ideal place to study the intricacies of these sociocultural dynamics: can we identify them in the rock art? For the first time systematic surveys across Murujuga have provided researchers with detailed datasets of the rock art corpus. In this paper we mobilize this large dataset to understand how the spatial distribution of the rock art across the landscape informs our understanding of symbolic behaviour and landscape use throughout time, focusing on two sites: Happy Valley and Queen Vic Valley.

Current research (Clayton Martinez in prep) has identified changes in the spatial distribution of a sample of the rock art at Happy Valley, which have been tentatively linked to archaeological phases outlined by Mulvaney (2010), and McDonald and Veth (2013). We will apply spatial analyses to the assemblage at Queen Vic Valley, and compare the results with Happy Valley. Our aim is to see whether the spatial distribution of rock art at Happy Valley is a pattern shared with Queen Vic Valley. Previous studies have analysed what was being depicted in the rock art, but here we focus more on where rock art is being depicted. While we cannot claim to know for what purpose the sites were used, changes in spatial distribution provide an insight into how the sites were used, and whether this use changed over time.