Abstract
Rock art researchers throughout the world have explicitly or implicitly invoked ritual as an activity associated with the production of rock art but the articulation between the structure and composition of rock art assemblages and ritual behaviour remains poorly understood. Anthropologist, Roy Rappaport (1999) argued that all ritual, whatever the content or focus, has a universal structure. We review this proposition in the context of ritual studies and propose a method aimed at assessing the potential for identifying ritual structure in rock art assemblages. We discuss an archaeological analysis undertaken on the rock art assemblages in arid Central Australia, which aimed at distinguishing such a ritual structure among engraved assemblages, likely to have a Pleistocene origin, as well as more recent painted, stencilled and drawn assemblages. This analysis, despite its limitations, provides the foundation for developing a model, which will enhance the understanding of the relationship between the production of rock art and ritual.
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Acknowledgments
This research was undertaken as part of June Ross’s PhD research supervised by Iain Davidson. We would like to thank Andrée Rosenfeld, Mike Morwood and Brett Galt-Smith for their valuable contributions to the initial research. Funding for this project was provided by the Australian Research Council through a Linkage grant, the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory and the Department of Lands, Planning and Environment, NT Government. Funding was also provided by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra and through a Special Research Grant, from the Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, University of New England. We especially thank the many central Australian Aboriginal communities who contributed to or gave their permission for this research. Comments from the reviewers enabled us to clarify many of the points we made.
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Ross, J., Davidson, I. Rock Art and Ritual: An Archaeological Analysis of Rock Art in Arid Central Australia. J Archaeol Method Theory 13, 304–340 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-006-9021-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-006-9021-1