Figure 1 - uploaded by Sally K May
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
The introduction of new animals into hunter-gatherer societies produces a variety of cultural responses. This article explores the role of rock art in western Arnhem Land, Australia, in helping to mediate contact-period changes in Indigenous society in the nineteenth century. The authors explore etic and emic perspectives on the 're-emergence' of w...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... this article we highlight one such case: the artistic practices associated with the 're-emergence' of Timorese water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) into western Arnhem Land, Australia ( Figure 1). We use the word re-emergence because, following the local ontological perception, water buffalo were not a 'new' animal for Aboriginal people. ...
Context 2
... this article we highlight one such case: the artistic practices associated with the 're-emergence' of Timorese water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) into western Arnhem Land, Australia ( Figure 1). We use the word re-emergence because, following the local ontological perception, water buffalo were not a 'new' animal for Aboriginal people. ...
Citations
... From oral history, we know that Nayombolmi was involved in buffalo shooting in western Arnhem Land (see Feakins 2019; May et al. 2021c). This is said to have started sometime after the Great War when Nayombolmi was about twenty years old. ...
This article presents a broad overview of the life and artworks of Badmardi Aboriginal artist Nayombolmi (c. 1895-1967) from today's Kakadu National Park, the Northern Territory in Australia. The article pictures his life through oral history, photographs and some of his many artworks in the form of rock paintings, beeswax figures and bark paintings. It touches on how Nayombolmi and his father used rock art as an educational medium in the in-tergenerational transmission of traditional lore and law. Nayombolmi made close to 800 rock art figures, justly earning him the epithet 'the most prolific known rock art artist in the world'.
By investigating the materiality of colonial encounters, specifically the consumption of introduced commodities by Indigenous peoples, archaeologists can explore questions concerning value, agency, consumer choice and localization. This has the significant capacity to broaden understandings of intercultural encounters and challenge colonial narratives. Glass beads represent one of the earliest foreign material culture introductions to the Indigenous peoples of Australia. The rock-shelter site of Madjedbebe, best known for yielding the oldest evidence to date for human occupation in Australia, also contains one of the largest assemblages from an Indigenous site context in Australia—51 glass beads and associated fragments. We present here an analysis of these objects—through attribute and microwear analysis—in concert with the archival record, to reveal the ways in which Bininj (Aboriginal people) incorporated glass beads into their own lifeways.
This Element volume focuses on how archaeologists construct narratives of past people and environments from the complex and fragmented archaeological record. In keeping with its position in a series of historiography, it considers how we make meaning from things and places, with an emphasis on changing practices over time and the questions archaeologists have and can ask of the archaeological record. It aims to provide readers with a reflexive and comprehensive overview of what it is that archaeologists do with the archaeological record, how that translates into specific stories or narratives about the past, and the limitations or advantages of these when trying to understand past worlds. The goal is to shift the reader's perspective of archaeology away from seeing it as a primarily data gathering field, to a clearer understanding of how archaeologists make and use the data they uncover.
From 1912, British anthropologist W. Baldwin Spencer and buffalo-shooter Paddy Cahill collected 163 bark paintings made by artists who also painted in rock shelters in western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Spencer made detailed notes about the bark paintings, secret/sacred objects, and other material culture he collected and some rock art, as well as genealogies and other details of the Aboriginal people he encountered but did not record the names of the artists. In general, the names and life stories of the individuals who made most Aboriginal archaeological artefacts or ethnographic objects and paintings now in museums across the world are not known. We have recently begun to address this for western Arnhem Land contact period art and in this paper focus on an elder, Majumbu ('Old Harry'), who made numerous rock paintings as well as at least eight of the Spencer-Cahill bark paintings. We use his work to begin a new interpretation of the importance of the Spencer-Cahill Collection in relation to land-based religion and show that knowing the names of the artists behind the collection, as well as related rock paintings, puts their work and the entire collection in new meaningful contexts. Link to Open Access free download full publication: Full article: Majumbu ('Old Harry') and the Spencer-Cahill bark painting collection (tandfonline.com)
Depictions of mythical beings appear in many different forms of art world-wide, including
rock art of various ages. In this paper we explore a particular type of imagery, back-to-back figures, consisting of two human-like figures or animals of the same species next to each other and facing in opposite directions. Some human-like doubles were joined at the back rather than side-by-side, but also face opposite directions. In this paper, we report on new research on rock art, bark paintings and recent paintings on paper and chart a 9000-year history of making aesthetically, symbolically and spiritually powerful back-to-back figures in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia.
Rock art created in the recent past has often been interpreted as a passive reflection of Indigenous curiosity at newly introduced phenomena. However, more recent analyses have tried to refigure such depictions as active and innovative artworks with social and cultural roles to play. Likewise, most contact rock art studies identify and interpret contact rock art within the clan or group context — as representations of a whole. In this paper, we broaden the conceptual framework around contact rock art to, where possible, embrace analyses of particular artists, their life biographies and legacies. By focusing on one known artist and his painting of a horse in western Arnhem Land, we draw together rock art studies, ethnography and Aboriginal life biographies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of Australian history.
