The genesis for this thesis came out of the industrial development of the Burrup, one of the 42 islands of the Dampier Archipelago, located two thirds the way up the Western Australian coast, in a region known as the Pilbara. One of the major rock art areas in Australia and the foremost petroglyphs region, the Dampier Archipelago comprises arguably the highest concentration of petroglyphs in the world. It was to record Aboriginal archaeological culture as a member of the Dampier Archaeological Project team (under contract to Woodside Offshore Petroleum Pty Ltd) prior to the construction of the North West Shelf Venture Karratha Gas Plant, which brought me to the Burrup. It was this same company that established, many years later, the research scholarship that instigated this current study. Rock art is owned by the Aboriginal people of the area, and protected under state and federal legislation. Custodianship is held by Yaburara and Mardudhunera descendants, and Wonggoottoo and Ngarluma people. In the local Ngarluma language the Archipelago is known as Murujuga; the word for engraving and rock art is Marni (DAS 1979; Von Brandenstein 1973). Stylistic form, technique and subject depiction in the rock art of the Dampier Archipelago have been interpreted as demonstrable of a deep and rich antiquity. ... This thesis presents a revised model of the artistic traditions and their associated petroglyphs. The art is not painted on the rock surfaces but etched into it, nor are there suitable rock coatings which may provide a means of dating it. Through a combined use of superimposition, where one motif overlies another, and a five state reference of motif contrast condition (an index of weathering), I propose a temporal resolution. Analysis of 5,650 petroglyph sample recorded at 17 site complexes, consisting of ten locations on the Burrup and seven from five other islands, allows a relative sequence of the rock art production to be established.

This book celebrates the work of archaeologist Isabel McBryde. Her long-term contributions to the understanding of Indigenous culture and heritage in Australia are explored in this collection of valuable new cross-disciplinary studies by leaders in the fields of archaeology, history, heritage management, linguistics and anthropology.

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.

Theoretical approaches adopted in recent rock art research 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 is rarely made clear. In this thesis I investigate the relationship between the central Australian rock art assemblage and ritual behaviour. I have proposed a theoretical framework formulated from Roy Rappaport's anthropological study of ritual, which identified the structural form he saw as universal to all ritual. I have identified the form and structural features of the central Australian rock art assemblage and compared them with the theoretical framework in order to identify rock art assemblages associated with ritual behaviour.

The major focus of this work has been the patterning of Australian Aboriginal beads and their functions. This work started as an investigation into the relationship between Aboriginal material culture and drainage basins and led to the role of beads in determining past human behaviours. The symbolic content of beads has been recognised and their appearance in early archaeological sites has long been accepted as identifiers of modern human behaviour. The patterning of style in beads and other material culture from hunter-gatherer societies has been investigated by authors for interpreting the archaeological record. At the time of European colonisation from the late 1700s, Aborigines were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with hundreds of language groups and diverse ways of living. Australia has shell beads that have been dated to over 30,000 years old and there is ethnographic material held in museums from the late 1800s to the early 1900s that shows what Aboriginal people were manufacturing during those early years. Added to that is literature that gives accounts for the use of material culture. A combination of those lines of evidence could have implications for understanding the archaeological record. For this project, I have synthesised the beaded ornaments held in Australian museums and set up a classification system that has allowed me to determine spatial patterning of beads and to investigate current theories for explaining patterning. I determined that there was clear patterning in discrete categories, no two categories had the same distribution and there were categories that were highly standardised for local use and exchange. This study has shown that the relationship between archaeological and ethnographic evidence for beads is more complex than those given by current explanations.