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T he rock-art of central Australia is characterized by a long-standing graphic tradition based on relatively simple forms of circles , arcs, lines, and track motifs. Over time there are some changes in the expression and in the combinations of these graphic forms, and new forms, including rare figurative motifs, appear in the very recent art, but there are no identifiable stylistic breaks. Sites identified as “early” on archaeological criteria are integral to current mythological meanings encoded in the land, and the motifs are for the most part easily interpreted by custodians in terms of these current meanings. The archaeology of central Australia, however, indicates significant cultural change in this region during the Holocene and especially during the last millennium. Smith and Thorley have both argued for fundamental changes in the social dynamics of Aboriginal culture. Smith took a broad regional view and argued for fundamental changes in population densities, mobility patterns, and alliances, in part as a result of the introduction of new extractive technologies in the late Holocene (Smith 1996); Thorley (1998a,b) in focusing more narrowly on the Palmer River catchment questioned the impor61 five Rock-Art as an Indicator of Changing Social Geographies in Central Australia Andrée Rosenfeld tance of demographic increase and emphasized changes in land use and territoriality during the recent Holocene. Kimber (1996) reconstructed an admittedly speculative history for the century or so preceding white colonization of the Center, focusing particularly on the impact on demography of diseases introduced by coastal contact with Macassans to the north and Europeans in the south and east, and he argued (inter alia) for an intensification of ritual. All three agree that Aboriginal culture has undergone significant transformations in the recent past in the areas of technology, subsistence strategies , and the demographics of mobility and territoriality . It is improbable that such transformations did not also require reformulations of the legitimating ideologies that underly social praxis. The impact of this dynamic history on rock-art is, of course, not explicit in its current exegesis, because Aboriginal metaphysics is underscored by a precept of unchangeability of the created world, but it raises questions on the extent to which changes in sociopolitical structures in central Australia may be further illuminated by the rock-art. The near-permanent nature of rock-art means that much of it will outlive the period and cultural context of its production, leaving marked places in the land that pertain to an earlier social geography. If we take the essence of a geography to be the enculturation of natural space, its primary mechanism involves the identification and naming of nodes in a spatial continuum (i.e., places whose significance derives from assigned cultural meanings). Most geographies comprise generic named entities (rivers, mountains, woodland, etc.), but it is the identified and named individual features and “places” that structure a sociopolitical framework of space (i.e., “country”) and in this way serve to define and to articulate a shared identity by its legitimate users. A cohesive ontology of country requires an explanatory framework, generally with both spatial and temporal referents and frequently legitimated by a supernatural , creative, or a heroic ancestry.The legitimacy of ownership can be expressed in a variety of ways, including associated knowledge or, more visibly, by permanent marking, which includes rock-art. In Australian Aboriginal geographies of country such explanatory frameworks are encoded in the mythology of the creative actions of supernatural beings whose activities took place in a remote and timeless past, often glossed as “the Dreamtime.” It is often the combined activities of a number of creative beings within a definable area that serve to define “country.” These creative beings are also ancestral to the human communities whose “country ” they define, and as such their interactions as embodied in “country” also define the relational framework for human groups. Thus, throughout the continent, the manifestations of ancestral beings in the land and the social identities of its custodians are inextricably linked. The web of meanings that link places into a geography of country also serves to define the social identities of persons and to articulate their place in society. Some of the ancestral beings traveled widely, each creating its own features in the land that it traversed. In this way, shared identities emerged between segments of territorial groups that crosscut territorially defined identities. The degree to which the mythologies of different parts of the continent comprise localized or wide-ranging ancestral beings varies. This results in communities who place differing emphasis...

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