Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology

4. Rock Art as Historical Sources in Colonial Contexts

66 4 Rock Art as Historical Sources in Colonial Contexts Alistair Paterson We begin with three episodes of marking rock, all in part historical. 2000 BP, CE 1977 In December 1975 the Indonesian army occupied East Timor. Timorese people fled their villages for distant locations to hide from the military. In a remote rock shelter near the village of Sorocama in Eastern Timor are painted the words “FRETLIN 28-1-1977 GAC” on the limestone wall. This is a recent use of the shelter for rock art, which probably dates back to at least 2000 years BP (O’Connor and Oliveira 2007). In their analysis the archaeologists use this information to suggest that the use of remote sites such as rock shelters was important in both prehistory and historical contexts. This reminds us of long continuities in landscape marking practices; however, very few Indigenous rock-art traditions have survived to the present. CE 1600s–1900s In Arnhem Land, northern Australia, rock art has been made for millennia, revealing both cultural and environmental continuities and changes over time (Chippindale and Taçon 1998). From the seventeenth century (if not earlier), Aboriginal Australians were visited by Southeast Asian mariners largely for the purpose of collecting trepan—a marine species valued in Asian markets, once dried for export. These visits took the form of seasonal voyages, with Rock Art as Historical Sources 67 coastal settlements for the processing industry and as occupation bases. Here, inevitably, culture contact ensued between Aboriginal people and the visitors, commonly termed “Macassans” after their main home port in Sulawesi (Macknight 1976; Clarke 2000). Elements of these visits, such as Macassan boats, knives, huts, and the Macassans themselves, occur in rock-art sites (Chaloupka 1979; Clarke and Frederick 2004). One painting of a prau appears to date at least to the seventeenth century (Taçon et al. 2010), predating European explorers and settlers in the nineteenth century. This rock-art provides evidence of events occurring on a continent beyond the reach of written records, and supports Aboriginal understandings of these encounters reflected not only in art, but also in folklore, mythology, and the use of items introduced to Arnhem Land such as the dugout canoe. CE 1488 At Matadi on the Congo estuary, Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão and his crew engraved their names as well as a large crucifix and shield emblem in a rock shelter. This marked the extent of Portuguese exploration on one voyage along the African coast in the fifteenth century. Elsewhere, Portuguese explorers such as da Gama and Diogo Cão marked their arrival by raising a crucifix; in this case Diogo Cão marked the rock. Contemporary Portuguese mapmakers employed the same convention by depicting landfalls on maps with a crucifix. All of these depictions constitute “historical rock art” and were produced by people who were operating within longer time frames of marking behaviors. What do we mean by “historical rock art”? Typically this refers to rock art we understand to have been produced in historical contexts. This may be understood through the depicted motifs, the use of writing, and the location of the imagery, or through ethnographic or other information that describes it being produced after contact with outsiders, typically Europeans. Rock art is a source of archaeological evidence, despite the strong subdisciplinary nature of most rock art research. In some instances rock art provides the means to depict periods of great change, such as that heralded by culture contact. For literate societies , such as in the Portuguese example, rock engravings are often considered a form of “historical graffiti,” and in other cases, valuable historical documents. These three examples of historical rock art and stone marking were clearly produced in different contexts and periods. All were produced in landscapes threatened by occupation and change, and in periods when Indigenous people found themselves faced with the threats and potentials offered by great Alistair Paterson 68 changes. In this chapter I specifically consider rock art produced during periods of historical culture contact to understand how rock art contributes to our understanding of historical events. Historical culture contact is a broad topic, given the range of cross-cultural encounters between Western and non-Western societies in the last millennium . At a global scale these quickened around CE 1000. At this time we see Norse expansion across the Atlantic to reach Greenland and the Americas. Around the Mediterranean various western European societies directed Crusades...