In October 1962 Norman Tindale was fl own to the Geosurveys Hill area, deep in the Simpson dunefield (Figure 1), to follow up reports of prehistoric occupation exposed on interdunal pans in the area (Anon. 1962). Tindale, then at the South Australian Museum, had been invited to make the trip by Reg Sprigg, Managing Director of Geosurveys of Australia Ltd, one of several companies prospecting the Simpson Desert for oil and gas in the 1960s (Sprigg 1993). Geosurveys staff had noticed that 'long lines of stones on a claypan disappear under sand hills' (Sprigg 1993). Left alone in the desert in the late afternoon, Tindale, then nearly 62, was a hardy, self-reliant field archaeologist: ‘I took stock of my camp,' he wrote in his journal, 'got together some firewood against the night, chose a place to sleep and then made a hasty reconnaissance of the claypan.' Later he 'fed on chops grilled in ashes, made tea and then with a flashlight searched for and found stone implements ... on the claypan' (Tindale 1962:7). Although he had planned for several days of fieldwork, Tindale only had a few hours of daylight in the area as the plane returned the next morning to collect him before impending rain made local clay pans too soft to land on.

A new find of an engraved 'archaic face' in the Toomba Range, on the northeastern edge of the Simpson Desert, provides additional evidence for the production of these distinctive motifs on the eastern side of the arid zone (Figure 1). This supplements an earlier report of an engraved archaic face at Carbine Creek, 100km to the northeast of the Toomba Range (Morwood 1978, 1985). Together, these two engravings with characteristic bas-relief facial features extend the known distribution of archaic faces and suggest that sometime in the past people shared aspects of a common visual vocabulary across the entire breadth of the arid zone, north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

In arid Australia the importance of grass and acacia seeds as grain led to a substantial demand by Aboriginal groups for replacement grinding slabs. This demand was met in some areas by large grindstone quarries that supplied millstones for local needs, as well as long-distance exchange networks (McBryde 1987, 1997:594; Mulvaney 1976; our terminology follows the grindstone typology set out in Smith 1985, 1986). These grindstone quarries are typically located where there are suitable sandstone outcrops on the edge of large tracts of sand plain, dune field or stony 'gibber' desert - areas where sandstone slabs are otherwise scarce. The best known examples are the quarries at Helen Springs ('Kurutiti') in the Northern Territory (Mulvaney and Gunn 1995) and others in South Australia, including Anna Creek ('Palthirri-pirdi'), west of Lake Eyre South ('Hercus 2005'); Tooths Nob ('Wadla wadlyu'), north of Reaphook Hill in the Flinders Ranges (McBryde 1997); Charlie Swamp ('Biljamana/Pidleeomina'), south of Finniss Springs Station (McBryde 1982); and the quarry complexes north and south of Cooper Creek at Innamincka (including Wild Dog Hill and McLeod's Hill) (Hiscock and Mitchell 1993; McBryde 1987, 1997). Despite their importance for desert prehistory, there are few published plans of this type of site, and little quantitative data on the scale of grindstone production (although see McBryde 1997 and Mulvaney and Gunn 1995 for exceptions). Here, we describe Narcoonowie, a small, discrete, grindstone quarry in the Strzelecki Desert in north-eastern South Australia (Figure 1). PJ Hughes briefly recorded the quarry in 1980, during an impact assessment survey of archaeological sites in the Cooper Basin (Hughes 1980, 1983). We recently relocated it on aerial photographs.