Bradshaw Art Of The Kimberley

"Those Lucky enough to encounter a Bradshaw rock painting often describe the moments powerful enough to unfold magical effects that touch and hold the observer for a lifetime" (Reto Weiler). Hauntingly beautiful, world heritage status rock art images from the Kimberley intrigues its origins and the identity of its artists. Despite decades of independent research by dedicated 'Kimberley' based individuals, and the recent plethora of funded research it has resisted all efforts to decipher this very early Bradshaw Period of rock art. Radiometric dating techniques have failed to produce conclusive dates of its origins or age. In the present study, superimposition of the five different evolutionary styles produces an ordinal time line that was then calibrated by absolute dates from biological markers. The research for this book revealed a Pleistocene floodplain culture that may have thrived with boabs on the shore from around 50-60 kya, while visiting the rocky plateau for religious and artistic pursuits. Cultural evolution was punctuated by the dramatic tidal recessions of the Pleistocene, and terminated by the 120 -140 metre inundation that marked the end of the Pleistocene and the creation of the present Kimberley coastline.

A description of Kimberley rock art, focusing on Bradshaw and Wandjina paintings. Contains 148 photographs, drawings and charts.

This is a photographic examination of the many and varied stylistic variations apparent in the Bradshaw Rock Art. It provides and insight into the spatial distribution of the 4 main stylistic variations determined through an archaeological appraisal.

A follow-up to Tim Bowden's Penelope Goes West, this time covering the intriguing adventures of Tim, Ros, Penelope (the car) and The Manor (the caravan) as they travel across the grandeur and spectacle of Broome, the Kimberleys and various points south and west. Bowden's fascination with rarely seen Aboriginal rock art is a major theme in his continuing love affair with Australia. On their journey Tim and wife, Ros, explore the Kimberley by land and sea, where dramatic 12-metre tides guard coastal locations unchanged by time - still as 17th-century buccaneer William Dampier first described them. For three months, Tim and Ros and their trusty four-wheel-drive, Penelope, travelled from the improbably sculptured Bungle Bungles to the Pilbara and the wildflower-filled Mid West.

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery. Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists’ descendants, the contemporary San people.

Australia has one of the largest inventories of rock art in the world with pictographs and petroglyphs found almost anywhere that has suitable rock surfaces – in rock shelters and caves, on boulders and rock platforms. First Nations people have been marking these places with figurative imagery, abstract designs, stencils and prints for tens of thousands of years, often engaging with earlier rock markings. The art reflects and expresses changing experiences within landscapes over time, spirituality, history, law and lore, as well as relationships between individuals and groups of people, plants, animals, land and Ancestral Beings that are said to have created the world, including some rock art. Since the late 1700s, people arriving in Australia have been fascinated with the rock art they encountered, with detailed studies commencing in the late 1800s. Through the 1900s an impressive body of research on Australian rock art was undertaken, with dedicated academic study using archaeological methods employed since the late 1940s. Since then, Australian rock art has been researched from various perspectives, including that of Traditional Owners, custodians and other community members. Through the 1900s, there was also growing interest in Australian rock art from researchers across the globe, leading many to visit or migrate to Australia to undertake rock art research. In this volume, the varied histories of Australian rock art research from different parts of the country are explored not only in terms of key researchers, developments and changes over time, but also the crucial role of First Nations people themselves in investigations of this key component of their living heritage.

Of all avian groups, birds of prey in particular have long been a prominent subject of fascination in many human societies. This book demonstrates that the art and materiality of human engagements with raptors has been significant through deep time and across the world, from earliest prehistory to Indigenous thinking in the present day. Drawing on a wide range of global case studies and a plurality of complementary perspectives, it explores the varied and fluid dynamics between humans and birds of prey as evidenced in this diverse art-historical and archaeological record. From their depictions as powerful beings in visual art and their important roles in Indigenous mythologies, to the significance of their body parts as active agents in religious rituals, the intentional deposition of their faunal remains and the display of their preserved bodies in museums, there is no doubt that birds of prey have been figures of great import for the shaping of human society and culture. However, several of the chapters in this volume are particularly concerned with looking beyond the culture–nature dichotomy and human-centred accounts to explore perspectival and other post-humanist thinking on human–raptor ontologies and epistemologies. The contributors recognize that human–raptor relationships are not driven exclusively by human intentionality, and that when these species meet they relate-to and become-with one another. This 'raptor-with-human'-focused approach allows for a productive re-framing of questions about human–raptor interstices, enables fresh thinking about established evidence and offers signposts for present and future intra-actions with birds of prey.