A substantial quantity of rock art was produced in central Australia in the period following contact between the Indigenous population and Europeans in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. An analysis of the post-contact rock art assemblage indicates that, despite the abrupt disruption to traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, the Indigenous response to the European invasion in this region was more positive, resilient and creative than early historians assumed. Significantly, many elements of the precontact assemblage continued to be produced or reworked whilst the range of production techniques expanded. Innovations emerged with a number of older forms of representation being replaced by newer forms, a range of new subject matter was introduced, and new means of flagging identity were created alongside the old. Analysis of the post-contact rock art assemblage has demonstrated that Aboriginal people in central Australia were active participants in change, mediating their interactions with the intruders in innovative ways.

Puntutjarpa Rockshelter was the first archaeological site excavated in the Australian desert. Dug between 1967 and 1970, the archaeological sequence was originally interpreted as a continuous record spanning the last 10,000 years BP. With a new series of radiocarbon and OSL dates we show that Puntutjarpa primarily contains a mid-Holocene deposit with a veneer of last millennium material and a thin underlay of terminal Pleistocene evidence. We show that over the last 12.0 kyr, there were three discrete phases of site-use at Puntutjarpa – 12.0–9.7 kyr, 8.3–6.2 kyr and ~1.1–0 kyr – each with differences in the nature and intensity of occupation. This removes key field evidence for the ‘Australian Desert Culture’, a concept that has increasingly become an anomaly since the 1980s.