Aboriginal Rock Art and the Telling of History
Aboriginal Rock Art and the Telling of History
Sally K. May, University of Adelaide
Gabriel Maralngurra, Injalak Arts
Joakim Goldhahn, University of Adelaide
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USDThe rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and most fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as archives and libraries for Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.
- Provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of rock art
- Uses accessible and non-technical language
- Offers arguments from historians' perspectives
Product details
November 2024Adobe eBook Reader
9781009523301
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- List of figures
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- 1. Rock beats paper: 'prehistory', rock art and archives
- 2. Change and tradition in West Arnhem land rock art
- 3. The counter-archive of First Nations biography
- 4. Reading the writing on the wall: rock art and the written word
- 5. Touchstones for memory, bedrocks for history
- 6. Timelessness and permanence: rock art and time
- Conclusions
- Afterword
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index.
