The following account is about the discovery of a magnificent rock shelter in Arnhem Land, Australia, with an overwhelming amount of beautiful rock art. Of course, this ‘discovery’ only means that Western culture has finally seen it, the original inhabitants of the country always knew of it. Now that we have seen it, however, we can share its beauty with the world.
“In June 2006, RLW
and pilot Chris Morgan sighted an unusually large rockshelter during a routine
aerial survey on the Arnhem Land plateau. They landed the helicopter and on
walking into the open, double-ended shelter, found themselves in a stunning
gallery with hundreds of rock paintings.
Anthropological work with senior Elders Wamud Namok and Jimmy Kalarriya enabled the Jawoyn to learn the name of the site – Nawarla Gabarnmang (nawarla=‘place of ’, gabarnmang=‘hole in the rock’). The two men had visited the shelter when they were children, and been told it was an important site where people camped en route to ceremonies on Jawoyn country. They also identified the Jawoyn clan Buyhmi as the relevant traditional owners of the site. When Buyhmi traditional owner and Elder Margaret Katherine was taken to the site, she cried out to her ancestors and wept for a place and family she had never known.” (David et al. 2011)
This is doubtless the result of decades of Western culture’s attempts to eradicate indigenous practices and beliefs. Now that these policies have changed the aboriginal people are recovering portions of their cultural heritage that have lain dormant.
The roof,
supported my many rock pillars provided a nicely sheltered place for people to
stop at for a period of time. “Originally the rock pillars were not widely spaced. They were
typically about one metre apart. We know this because this is how they are
found in other parts of the site that people did not frequent. We can also see
where missing pillars once stood, for their very tops remain adhered to the
ceiling and their bases have survived on the floor in those parts of the site
where the pillars are now more widely spaced. In some areas, pillars are now
eight metres apart where once they stood side by side.” (David 2018)
This site has been in use for a very long time. “Fifty thousand years ago, Aboriginal people started to camp at the site, first at the edge and then gradually further within. Living amid the pillars was not possible at first, for they were too closely spaced. But sometime between 35,000 and 23,000 years ago – the exact timing is uncertain as more research is required – individual pillars began to be toppled. This required planned, structured dismantling, for the weight of the roof would not allow the rock pillars to be simply pushed aside. First, the pillars’ top layer was flaked away or, in some cases, vertically sectioned and removed as a block, all with stone tools, creating a space between pillar and ceiling. That space then allowed the pillars to be pushed aside and dismantled piece by piece. The overlying ceiling now lacked local support, so individual layers of ceiling rock began to collapse. Where pillars had gone, the ceiling level was now higher than in surrounding areas. The individual toppled pillar fragments and ceiling slabs were flaked into typically forty-centimetre-long pieces and carried away to the shelter’s outer edges, so that today hundreds if not thousands of regularly shaped tabular blocks abound at the rock-shelter’s northern and southern entrances. A few of those tabular pieces were left on the shelter floor and moved around. They each show signs of use, sometimes from the grinding of ochre to make paints in shades of white, red, pink, yellow and black. Others were used as anvils to rest higher-quality stone for the flaking of stone tools. It is these tabular pieces remaining on the shelter floor that local Aboriginal Elders refer to as “pillows,” demarcating where in the past people rested. The extant pillar walls and ceiling rock surfaces are heavily decorated with paintings, so much so that in some places more than thirty layers of paint have been identified, motif over motif in a time sequence that represents centuries of changing styles. And how are we to think of the accumulated slabs at the shelter’s northern and southern entrances: rejected debris to clear the site or a cache of useable tools and furniture? In some cases, slabs were overlaid in multiple tiers to make stools for artists to stand on when painting the ceiling.” (David 2018) So this location was not only painted, but first it was physically modified to fit the populations preconceptions and then decorated. This did not, of course, happen in a frenzy of deconstruction and decoration, but it seems they did have what amounts to a plan over a long period of time.
“Nawarla Gabarnmang is a spectacular site, one of the world’s great archaeological rock-shelters. Yet it is more than this. The stone workings – the systematic dismantling of the pillars, the removal of blocks to create more open spaces, their strategic disposal at both site entrances and the decoration of the remaining pillar walls and ceiling – all speak not of a natural cave but of an engineered and furnished architectural space.” (David 2018) Having finally created the space that they were satisfied with, the people then proceeded to decorate it with magnificent paintings.
“The glorious murals of the Nawarla Gabarnmang cave are vivid testimony to the cultural heritage community, social cohesion, and spirituality of the early Aboriginal settlers of Australia, who managed to create enormous beauty in a hostile environment of blistering heat and parched land, some 23,000 years before the erection of the Egyptian Pyramids or the Stonehenge Stone Circle.” (Visual Arts Cork)
This space has been painted, and repainted for millennia, but one piece of fallen stone has given a date that is truly impressive. This one dated piece “consists of a charcoal drawing made on a piece of rock, some 3 centimetres by 3 centimetres that fell from the roof during prehistory. The drawing itself comprises 2 crossed lines: one is straight, while part of the other is slightly curved. The area formed by the curved part has been filled in with a heavier (thus darker) application of charcoal, but the rest of the drawing is faded beyond recognition. The stone fragment is aged between 28,000 and 45,600 years old, while the charcoal drawing is dated to 26,000 BCE. The drawing is broadly contemporaneous with the Fumane Cave paintings in Italy (c.35,000 BCE) and the Chauvet Cave paintings in France (c.30,000 BCE), both painted during the era of Aurignacian in Europe. Despite its advanced age, Gabarnmang's charcoal drawing is unlikely to be northern Australia')s most ancient art. This honour is likely to go to the cupule art or hand stencils of the Kimberley region, which are believed to date to at least 30,000 possibly 40,000 BCE.” (Visual Arts Cork)
The studies indicated that people have occupied Nawarla Gabarnmang for a very long period of time indeed. “Initial results at Nawarla Gabarnmang have revealed secure evidence of people some 45,000 years ago. Ongoing excavations are aimed at tracking the >45,000 year old levels, dating the rock art and further investigating the site’s geomorphology (including anthropogenic modifications to the ceiling and pillars).” (David 2011)
So, at roughly the same period of prehistory that humans were painting the natural caves of Europe, the people of Arnhem Land, Australia, were, in effect, creating their own cave before painting it extensively.
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
David, Bruno et al., 2011, Nawarla Gabarnmang, a 45,180±910 cal BP Site in Jawoyn Country, Southwest Arnhem Land Plateau, Australian Archaeology, No. 73 (December 2011), pp. 73-77. Accessed online 31 December 2023.
David, Bruno et al., 2018, Nawarla Gabarnmang, 25 September 2018, Landscape Australia, https://landscapeaustralia.com/articles/nawarla-gabarnmang/. Accessed online 31 December 2023.
Gunn, Robert et al., 2017, The past 500 years of rock art at Nawarla Gabarnmang, central-western Arnhem Land, pp. 303-328, from The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia, edited by Bruno David, Paul Tacon, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, and Jean-Michel Geneste, Australian National University Press, Canberra, Australia.
Visual Arts Cork, Nawarla Gabarnmang Charcoal Drawing (26,000 BCE), http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/nawarla-gabarnmang.htm.
Accessed online 31 December 2023.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment