 of your colleague, Joe Mcdonald, who is the director of the Rockart Center at the University of Western Australia. Joe has had a long and very, very accomplished and productive history as a researcher in Australia. She, before she became an academic, which she never wanted to do. She was probably recently more successful and accomplished as a resource or consultant archaeologist in Australia based in Sydney. I've known her for a number of years. I've participated in some of her visitors, some of her Rockart sites. She has just received a few years ago, what they call a futures fellowship from the generous Australian government who supports a lot of archaeological research, not enough as far as they're concerned. But nonetheless, to make a comparative study of the Rockart in Australia's Western Desert and the Great Basin, and that's what she's gonna talk to us about today. She'll be around for a couple more weeks here. So if anybody wants to talk to her further, let us know. She's reachable by that usual thing, email. And she would love to continue the conference with you. And today she's gonna talk about basically the Arizona Rockart Comparative Project that she's just been in the field for the month of October in the Great Basin. So well done. Thank you, Meg. Thanks. And thanks for having me. I do love this forum at Berkeley. It's something that I first came to, it was over 10 years ago, and I thought, what's a great idea to call visiting speakers, you know, brown bags? I think that fits quite well in this instance. So I'm feeling good, I'm up for it. And today, as Meg said, I am gonna talk about this Australian Research Council project that I've been working on now for the last five years. What I'm doing is basically trying to bring a comparative approach to the Great Basin and bring some of the methods that I've been using in the Western Desert and see if there are ways we can actually think about the Rockart here differently. So in a nutshell, the project has basically been interested in drawing a comparison between the peopling of two empty continents. Australia and North America, before the arrival of modern humans, were both empty. So these large continents have both been peopled by modern humans. And so I'm interested in how people did that in the first instance. How they moved into the arid zones once they were there. And my view is that probably Rockart was part of the suite of modern human behaviors that in fact made it possible for them to make that sort of journey out of Asia across the sea into Australia 50,000 years ago. And by sea, possibly by ice sheet, by the land bridge, the bearing land bridge into North America. And obviously we don't know exactly when that is. And there's obviously a very vibrant sort of set of new research agendas that have happened in terms of when was America first settled by people. So in their paper on human dispersals, by Yosef and Belford Cohen put forward the notion that an interaction between cultural and genetic systems played a major role in human evolution. And that this can contribute to our understanding of the package of modern human behaviors. So social traits like large-scale cooperation, behavioral norms, ethics and ethnicity. Now by Yosef and Belford Cohen used stone tools as their road sign to identify the teaching and learning systems that they argue must have been in place by people in the past to characterize specific social groups of people as they move through Eurasia in the middle and upper Pleistocene. Now it's patently clear that Rockart has evidence for cognition with recognizable symbolic systems provides an even more potent form of archaeological evidence for this type of dispersal. In fact, if stone tools are road signs, then Rockart is time square. It's a blaring cacophony demonstrating intra and intergroup behavioral changes accompanied by technological innovation and efficient forms in systematic teaching of survival skills. It's true that archaeologists have had to make do with stone tools in attempting to unravel the mysteries of how people have dispersed into these different landscapes. But Rockart as evidence for a learned system of perpetual knowledge, likely facilitated I think the colonization of Australia and the New World. Art as a form of information exchange would have provided a much clearer learning outcome than a core reduction strategy. And it certainly would have enabled the crossing of ecological boundaries in Eurasia with the subsequent migrations into Sahul and the Americas. So where have I been and where do I come from to give you this perspective? I've been working in the Western Desert, which is in the middle of the Australian arid zone. I started working there about 15 years ago with Peter Veth and a project that we did in the late 2000s, the Kenning Stockrit project, formed a lot of the data and provided a lot of the data that I've been using for the last five years for this future fellowship. So I think that arid zone hunter-gatherer behavioral adaptations are key to understanding how the rock art works in this landscape. And we've been modeling, he and I have been modeling how this behavioral change as identifiable in the archeological record can be identified in the rock art. So the important take home message from this time series graph, which comes from the work of Al Williams and colleagues, is that there are major episodic environmental changes through the 40,000 years that the Australian arid zone has been occupied and lived in by people and that you've got these spikes in occupation through time, but that the proliferation of evidence for human occupation is in the last two to 4,000 years. There they are, the last two to 4,000 years. Okay, we've been dating the rock art. Now, we've targeted the most recent phases of rock art production because they're the ones that have actually got surface pigments in the art. And similarly, we get the same pattern. Most of this art is produced in the last two to 4,000 years. And we've dated sites now from 35 different locations across the desert. Not only that, we've also been trying to get some correlation between occupation deposits and the art in those shelters. So we've been excavating decorated shelters to try and get this shared sequential information. And we've got a phased art sequence, which I won't talk about in detail here because we have published it. You can read it any time you like. But basically this model sees art accompanying every phase of occupation of the arid zone. I think people used art when they arrived in Australia. I think they were using art when they moved into the arid zone. And then what we see in the arid zone in Australia is this phase change through time, which is demonstrated by major discontinuities in stylistic information in that art, which indicates that people are in fact changing the ways they use particular locations and they change their relationships with each other at different times, depending on their territoriality, on whether it's a wet or a dry period, how mobile they are, how closely they know their neighbours, how much they need to depend on their neighbours. So all these things are tied into understanding how people will be living in the desert, but also what their need is to signal information about each other, to signal their long-term connections and social connections and stylistic connections. And then this has changed through time and we can see quite this quite clearly in the Australian desert. Now interestingly, as part of my future fellowship, I in fact went back and did some more recording because 800 sites was not enough. And so I've focused on this particular range which is in the middle of the Birra Balloon native title determination. We've recorded another 10 of these locations which are spread around the range in quite a different way to some of the other provinces that we've found, but the other reason that I've focused on this particular location is that it is the place where Serpent's Glen exists. So Serpent's Glen is known to the locals as Karnatakul and the Kanavan ranges are Kachara. So these are the Aboriginal names for this particular landscape which has been on the map since the 1890s. Now, the reason that I was particularly focused on going back to Serpent's Glen, Serpent's Glen was dug by Peter Veth and Sue O'Connor in the late 80s, early 90s I think, a long time ago in prehistory. And when we went back and we dated the most recent art on the wall in this shelter, we found that most of it was created between about 500 and 1,000 years ago. Now, when you look at the excavation sequence provided by Sue and Pete's early excavation, you can see, yes, it proves that Aborigines started living in the desert 23,000 years ago. There was a peak in the mid Holocene around 4,000 years ago, but then their most recent dates, the largest focus of occupation was indistinguishable from modern in their dating. And so I had a problem with that because our art date suggested in fact that the main peak of the most recent art production was in fact sometime between 500 and 1,000 years ago. So we went back. Partly because we also were not able to date this panel which is a large red and white bi-chrome panel with headdress figures and lots of lovely, probably Sakura on the board, these large boards which are decorated which are sacred in recent times. This has got a skin over it and so there's no pigment on the surface. We weren't able to date this particular panel. And so we went back and we've actually excavated four, three pits in that shelter, two of them directly beneath the panel. And from that you can see that we've in fact revised the sequence. We now have a really nice spread of dates in the last millennium when 70% of the occupation in fact took place in this rock shelter. We also have a new early colonization date for the desert which is around 50,000 years ago calibrated. And we have a really nice LGM sequence at the same time that they got their early date. So around 25,000, 25,000 years ago, a bit older than they got, not that we're counting. And then of course the same mid-holocene spike as well. So that's really nice. We've now got a really good sense of the contemporary between the art production and this really fine set of occupation lenses and things that we can see in that recent period. And we have a good indication that earlier art probably is produced around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, the red and white art, which is something we'd argued earlier in terms of our phase model based on other art dates we got from elsewhere in the stock route. So from there, let's go to the Great Basin. And let's think about what the environment would have looked like if people got here in the Pleistocene, whenever that particular number was. Obviously it would have been a very different environment for the Paleo Indians who arrived there. It would have been much wetter than it is today. And I think we can assume that the early art and occupation sites are probably located around those large Paleo lakes. But it would appear from the recent research that people are doing looking for pre-Clovis layers that we could be having to look a lot harder and a lot deeper for that evidence. People are finding that up to five meters below the current surface level is where you're going to find the evidence for the pre-Clovis layers. So that's ongoing research. And it's really interesting because when I started this project, I thought I was dealing with two totally disparate time sequences in terms of America and Australia. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end they're probably the same. I mean, if people came by boat and arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, there's no reason why they couldn't have walked or gone around the sea coast into America. It doesn't make sense. Anyhow, that's another. That's another death for another day. So what am I interested in? Part of the reason that I wanted to do this comparative thing is that the ethnography for the Great Basin and the Western Desert are very similar in terms of the modeling that was done by early people who worked there. So Dick Gould came to Australia, did a lot of early modeling for how hunter-gatherers moved around the Western Desert. And this was based on stewards and Julian's stuff from the Great Basin. It turns out Dick Gould had never been to the Great Basin before he came to the Western Desert and it shows because when you come to the Great Basin from the Western Desert, you go, this is nothing like the Western Desert. It's totally different. High elevation, recent landscapes, totally different in lots and lots of ways. However, it did have the same sorts of local organization and mobility patterns at contact as we find in Australia. So there are similarities, obviously, in arid zones and I think the fact that the family was the basic adaptive unit, that these units aggregated and dispersed based on seasonal variability forms a good basis for understanding this difference but also I think work that's been done by the Great Basin scholars in the last two decades particularly has shown great stochasticity in the way humans have in fact behaved in the last 10 to 15,000 years. So I think we have lots of signs there for the sorts of changes you might expect in the art. A number of people have tried to put together models for the Great Basin. These are of limited utility now because they really were based at the time on the data that people had. So Heitzer and Baumhoff's original model was based on what the known chronology and extent of occupation in the Great Basin was. Same with Grant, Baird and Pringle. They basically saw there being these different phases through time but the interesting thing is that people have always assumed that you could correlate in some way the art with the occupation. So if people are here for 5,000 years then people have tried to fit their models to that same occupation phase. So there's not anything unusual in that. Certainly when you look at Dave Whitley and his colleagues model from the COSO range, they've in fact identified using VML, a really deep sequence based on 12,000 years worth of micro data in these crusts. And they've argued in fact that this is the longest stylistic tradition anywhere in North America. Now obviously quite a few people disagree with that. And I think probably one of the problems with it is that really you have such major evidence for there being major cultural phases and identified changes in tool technology in the last 12,000 years, including the change from the atlatal to the bow and arrow. Changes which are seen in the rock art that it seems unlikely that this is an unchanging art tradition through that entire occupation phase. So anyhow and of course the other major thing to consider is Bettinger's latest book with the orderly anarchy, where he sees the bow and arrow bringing with it a whole set of sociopolitical changes which should be indicated in the art. The most fundamental of these is the self-sufficiency and economic competitiveness of the nuclear family. So if this is how people are living in the recent past, you would not expect there to be major group identifying behavior being practiced by people. Anyhow, let's get to the areas that I've been looking at. So I've been looking at two different areas. I've been really lucky to have colleagues that work in these areas who've invited me to work with them. And so the volcanic table lands, which is near Bishop in California, and the Peranigot Valley, which is in near Alamo, two hours north of Las Vegas, is the other area. And so I'll be talking about those in various amounts of detail today. So the Lincoln County Archaeological Initiative meant that some colleagues of mine working at ASM did this project for BLM called a three-ACEC total-recordation project. We would never call anything that in Australia. But anyhow, what it meant is that they actually surveyed each of these huge areas totally. So they did 30-meter transects across the entirety of these very large areas, and they were between 30 and 40,000 hectares each. And they've recorded everything in them. The volcanic table lands is an area which has also been studied intensively over the last 20 years. People, different types of issues, obviously management and stuff there. But again, I've been working with the BLM and people who've been recording out for the BLM in that area also. So I'll start with a broader overview on the volcanic table lands because my work there has not been quite as detailed. It's building again on, as I said, the work of many, many other people who've done lots of excavation, lots of recording work. Gambastiani, Mark Gambastiani, who's now in Reno, who's a Davis graduate, wrote his PhD on the volcanic table lands. And he concluded that the table lands were a marginal environment with limited water resources beyond the oasis, which is known as fish lube. And plant resources are seasonal at best. So ethnographic accounts indicate that this area was a prime location for rice grass harvesting. And the extensive evidence for seed processing is testament to this activity. And what about the rock art? Is this a signal of marginal occupation and unfocused territoriality? Or does, in fact, the extensive rock art of this landscape, indeed, tell more, a more complex tale? So what we're doing here, and in fact I've got a PhD candidate who worked with me this last month in the field, she's at UWA, Lucia Clayton. She is, in fact, going to run with a lot of these questions, which are really quite prime questions about how art has changed in the volcanic table lands, using a really high density of rock art sites and an archaeological record, which is quite detailed. So there's a great variability in site types generally. We've got lots of house rings, villages, threshing floors, game drives, lots of different types of occupation evidence, ceramics, lots of obsidian hydration zones that people have used around the area, and, of course, all these many, many art sites. So this is a distribution map of all the known sites that are in the volcanic table lands. These are the ones that are occupation sites that have no rock art. These are the rock art sites which have no occupation evidence, and then you have a whole series of sites which have both occupation evidence and rock art production. So one of the things we're interested in is, in fact, how those two activities relate to each other. Various people have worked on the rock art, various people have worked on the archaeology, but no one has attempted to actually put the two data sets together. And I think this has got huge potential for actually trying to understand some of those hunter-gatherer activities in the Owens Valley in particular. So what does it look like? It looks like this largely, lots of geometric motifs, very, very few big horn sheep. Interesting variability, there's lots of interesting variability in the geometrics there. 120 odd sites have been recorded by David Lee and his colleagues with Western Rock Art, and they've very generously shared their data. They've produced a lot of that material for BLM under research projects, and I've started counting some of that material. So at this stage, I've only counted about 17 of their sites, but have a large amount of data already and can certainly say a certain amount about what people have been doing in this part of the world. A lot of that, as I said, a lot of the art is associated with different types of habitation evidence. So there's lots of different types of data that are going to be able to be brought into play to understand what people are doing there. The art looks a bit like this. It ranges from being heavily patinated to less heavily patinated, and obviously there's some interaction between grinding patches and other sorts of productions. And we also have an interesting amount of pigment use, and again, de-stretch obviously is making this much easier for us to in fact see that people have in fact used pigment in a way interacting with the petroglyphs, which suggests that people are using these art sites recursively. So they often go back and they actually add pigment to art that's been produced a long time before. I think this is a really interesting process. So over into Nevada, as I mentioned, Alamo is the location. It's the most cultural heritage, important thing from a cultural heritage point of view is it's right next to Area 51. So if you're actually out on a rock art site and a tourist comes on a guided tour, they're usually on the Area 51 tour and they're just tacked on a bit of rock art on the side, but all these people are really keen to go and actually see what they can see over the fence at Area 51 if there are any aliens. They've actually got a highway called the Extraterrestrial Highway, so it's a pretty wild place to work, I have to say. Anyhow, these three areas, as I said, have been totally recorded as part of this recordation project. Mount Irish is 33,000 hectares and it's between 5,000 and 9,000 feet. Parrock is the smallest rock art assemblage of the three I looked at. It's actually most of the study areas down on the plain where they're having more, BLM was more concerned about this managing the sort of cultural resources that are in that zone because it's being impacted by people camping and whatever. And then Shooting Gallery, which is probably the largest rock art center across that area and it's also a really large 35,000 hectares and similarly between four and a half and 9,000 feet. And as I said, this entire area has been surveyed at 30 meter transects. I actually went with these guys on a couple of days. I surveyed that hill, which is why I think it's important to have it in this slideshow. I have to say in Australia, we never do survey like this. They did their 30 meter transects in the same orientation across the entirety of their study area. We would normally do that hill going around the contours. I can tell you we went straight down that side and we came straight up the other side and all I can say is I'm glad I can do downhill skiing because I basically used that technique and I didn't find any archaeology. Very odd. Anyhow, I mean, I think it's really interesting the whole thing of survey technique is something which really struck me as being a massively different thing between Australia and here. Anyhow, that was not what I was trying to talk about. Lots of work again in this area of people who've been out there recording the rock art, thinking about the rock art, thinking about the archaeology. There've been a few excavations. Heitzer and Hester in 1974 visited Black Canyon, which is just south of Alamo. They identified this peranigot representational style which has got these big anthropomorphs. And that sort of has become a description of how people in fact see the art. So that was one of the things I was interested in looking at. Also interested in dealing with this huge data set that was going to result from this amount of work. So while there were 51 rock art sites which had been recorded previously and some of these sites have got up to 150 panels, so we're talking big rock art sites. We're not talking about piddly little rock art sites. What we did was mobilise a set of techniques which were aimed at both harvesting that legacy data but also collecting new data. And so we used a number of digital approaches to that. Back in 2013, we used all technology which was the Samsung Galaxy and mobile data system as a way of actually embedding our forms on the devices to record it. These days we use an iPad and FileMaker 13. So it's an evolving process and it's an ongoing struggle to try and deal with the amounts of data and the photographs that we generate. So as I said, we've been out for the last month recording art in both of those areas. We thought we'd found a broken fluted point. We were so excited but the experts tell us it's probably just about by face. But anyhow, we thought we'd found something that no one else had found so that's life. Always not quite as easy as it looks. So as I said, this legacy data produced by multiple people and the Narada Rock Art Foundation and many other people who've gone out and recorded these. So we've used that data. We haven't ignored it. We haven't dismissed it at all. It's incredibly useful. What we've done though is gone back and photographed these sites and actually done a comparative thing, looking at the photographs, looking at the legacy data and now have digitised and entered all that data into a database. And so at the end of that process for that particular report, we ended up with 129 rock art sites which had almost 700 panels and close to 7,000 motifs. So quite a large data set to deal with. And interesting because we actually had these three study areas that you could do intra-regional comparison as well as the regional ones. The whole thing of course was linked to GIS which meant there are all sorts of questions and things that you could ask of that data that you couldn't ask before. This for instance is a part of the Mount Irish rock art province. All the yellow dots are recorded panels and then the purple and green ones are different types of perinigate figures. So you can see they're not consistently distributed across the landscape. They're quite localised and I think they're doing, they're signalling quite different things in this art repertoire. Again, quite a lot of pigment art, surprising amount of pigment art but again, I think using D stretch in the field. So having it chip on your camera in the field and I assume you all know about D stretch and you all know John Harmon who's here. He's the inventor, he's the one who's revolutionised the way we do rock art. It helps your eyes if you can actually see what you're looking at. It can certainly helps your recording if you can actually get an idea of what's actually there that is almost invisible to the naked eye. So lots of this pigment art and again in the three areas we looked at it ranged quite a lot in terms of proportions. So in one area there was less than 1% of the motifs were pigment whereas in another area it was close to 20%. So you get intra-regional variability even within a single style province. And here's some examples. Now that you were mentioning to me before about the perinigate figure that was in pigment that someone had seen. This is possibly it. I don't know. It's got a nice little knobby things at the top and the bottom but it doesn't really have a pattern. So I don't know if that's the one that your colleague was talking about but that's the only one we saw that looked like it could be a pigment representation of a PBA. It's not got much of a pattern in it and it's a little bit marginal. But anyhow, I think the interesting thing about and the reason I put this slide in is I think that a lot of, again with the volcanic table lands you find a lot of the pigment uses in fact picking out detail in previous art production episodes. So I think people are going back and in fact reactivating the art in some way with a different technique. So they're using pigment to recursively produce the same sorts of motifs and this suggests that art continues to function in some way in subsequent with subsequent people. Though of course we don't know why or how that, what that actually means. Again, de-stretch this was just an example of how useful it is with petroglyphs. People used to say you can't use de-stretch with petroglyphs, you can only use it with pictographs. Well, it's not true. Here's an example of a bighorn sheep here which is what you can see with the naked eye. Here's what you can see with de-stretch on the camera and then when you actually trace it that's the sheep that's there. Now we've got quite a lot of these very large bighorn sheep in Peranigot. These are more than a metre in size. They're all in this very early contrast set. I think they're an earlier form of production. I think they probably relate to the large pattern bodied and solid body figures. That's another issue again. And here's another example of how useful de-stretch is with the legacy data. So these are using photos taken by Amy Gilrith a couple of years ago and you can see using de-stretch you can actually see a huge amount of detail on the petroglyphs that you couldn't see so easily without. Without it. Another innovation we've been using is photogrammetry as a way of trying to actually model how the art appears on the rock and this is just a screen grab of one of those being processed with the different camera views of that. And if it works, I've got a little movie. This is the sorts of things we're producing in Australia for Aboriginal communities that we work with as a way, what was it gonna work? Hang on. No, it says not available. Oh, that's sad. I'll never mind. Okay, well that's okay. So what happens is basically by having created this photogrammetric model, 3D model it will actually pan across it and pan back again. So you feel like you're walking past the panel which is a great way to actually, we've done this and fly throughs and various other ways of actually visualizing with the glasses and various different things with communities. So people with traditional owners for instance who are not mobile enough to go out and visit the sites can actually get a real sense of what it's like to be in the site and to actually feel what it's like to be there. Anyhow, so with all this data, what have I tried to do? Well, I've really been trying to work on how these two provinces fit into a broader understanding of hunter-gatherer occupation models generally. And I've been trying to work at how the rock art might be modeled to both complement the existing behavioral models and indeed provide a more nuanced understanding of people's adaptive strategies for both peopling the Great Basin in the first place and then their subsequent phases of occupation. So people have devised many different foraging models based on obsidian conveyancing zones for instance. And these are obviously more complex than just the distribution of identifiable lithic resources. But I would argue that this type of approach to understanding people's hyper-mobility in the early Holocene could be used as a basis for identifying early Holocene distribution of say the Great Basin Carved Abstract, which has been demonstrated in various instances now to probably date to around 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. However, the model on the right, which is based on more recent language information, so ethnographic and ethnohistorically documented language boundaries, this is more likely to in fact reflect the distribution of the styles that people were using at contact. So you wouldn't expect that people are doing the same thing across this entire desert at the same time through time to be the same. And you'd expect to be able to pick up these different patterns at different scales, I would argue, depending on what those types of hyper-mobility models might be. The fact that the majority of Great Basin Rock Art is geometric means that in many ways it's impenetrable to us as etic observers anyway. We don't understand what people were doing when they were creating all these types of images. And not surprising, when you start to investigate the nature of that geometric repertoire, you also see that this is not a homogeneous thing. So by saying that 90% of the Great Basin Art is geometric, what does that mean? Because what they look like, and this is an example of the proportions and the volcanic table ends, much larger percentages geometric, and then you've got a lot of tracks. In the Peranigate Valley, about 30%, however, is largely big horn sheep. So people are doing very, very different things in these different locations, even though they're only separated by a couple of hundred kilometers. And as I was saying, the geometrics in these two areas don't look the same. So people creating geometric motifs in the Peranigate Valley are thinking and doing very different things to the people who are actually creating those same sorts of general class of motifs in the volcanic table ends. So how do we deal with that? Well, I've started looking at the way that people have started looking at or how people created anthropomorphic motifs in the Peranigate Valley. As I mentioned, Heitzer and the one whose name I can never remember, Heitzer in 1974 came up with this Peranigate representational anthropomorphic style, which included these solid-bodied anthropomorphs and these pattern-bodied anthropomorphs. But they only represent about a third of the anthropomorphs that are actually created in that art body. Most of them are, in fact, these linear stick figures that, in fact, go much, schematically, go much better with, in fact, most of the big horns, which are also quite schematic. So I was interested in looking at the pattern-bodied anthropomorphs and seeing if I could actually look at stylistic patterning in that which might tell me something about the way that people were using this particular art form. These solid-bodied anthropomorphs are actually identified by Southern Paiute informants today as water babies. And they say that the PBAs are Shaman's helpers. This indicates to me from an Australian perspective that how art is being reinterpreted recursively by people in social groups in a contemporary context. And I say this because I think that these motifs were probably created in the early Holocene. And I'll tell you why. So one of the things that I did, because we can't date this larger body of art, we've used contrast state of a way of seriating the earliest to the latest types of production. So we've coded things in the database as to whether they're a contrast state one, which means it's at one with the rock, or contrast state five, which is much fresher looking. And as you can see from the 1949 graffiti, it's much, much fresher looking than the older art. We've then worked out what percentage of the art is in fact created in each of those contrast states. So it's not giving it necessarily any time zones at this point, but all it's saying is, well, how much of the art is created in each of those phases. And you can see that most of the arts in fact produced in contrast state three. Very little is produced in the last contrast state. So in the time from around 1949 and before that, not much art, and there's in fact more art created earlier on in contrast state one. When you look at the solid body and the pattern body, the anthropomorphs, you can see that there's a bit of a shift in that overall pattern. And in fact, most of these motifs are in fact created in contrast state two, and then followed by three. So they're slightly earlier than the bulk of the art that's actually being produced in the area, again, with no actual dates to tie these down. I've then done a stylistic analysis looking at how people have actually used these motifs. And as you can see, there's an enormous variability in the way that people have in fact decorated these pattern-bodied anthropomorphs. These are just the designs in the interior of the pattern bodies. And then you've got different types of little top extensions, which range from being just a single line to little knobby things to little things with like woo-hoo's, bird tracks or whatever. You have different bottom extensions, and then you have fringes, which can be at the top or the bottom. So these are all things that were able to be quantified, and so I've entered those all into a database and counted them again, measured them, got a sense of the scale of these things, and then looked at the patterning across those four major locations. So the three areas that were studied by ASM for the BLM project, Black Canyon, which is the site type, and which is a major concentration for production of those motifs. And as you can see, the ones at the top are in fact designs which you find in all four of those locations, but you actually get unique designs being located in each of those different sub-provinces. Most of them occur at Black Canyon, which has of course got as probably partly a sampling thing because there are more of them, but I think also that's an aggregation locale. I think people are actually doing different things with the Black Canyon perennial figures than they are in the other locations. And then when you look at the, again, that seriation through time and when they're being produced, you can see that in fact the focus of them has shifted from, first of all, being produced at Black Canyon to shifting to in fact being produced in Shooting Gallery and Mount Irish later. So I think there's a shift in the production centres through time. And in fact, people are using this as a regional signalling system, but in fact the way that they're in fact using that system through time is subtly changing. Multiple Correspondence Analysis, my favourite, is a great way of actually trying to find patterns in your data and trying to understand how similar or dissimilar things are. And when you actually throw all this into an MCA and the Cronback factor shows that in fact, you know, it's statistically viable, it's above 0.8, but you also have internal decoration, what hand the atlatal is being held in and the decoration at the top, and I can't read that anymore, my eyes are too bad, whatever, anyhow, four of those things that I counted are more significant in terms of describing the difference in the assemblage. However, they're pretty much similar on a larger scale. So one way that you can try to explore that further is to pull out the data and to again plot it with that area around the origin being indicated differently on the different graphs because in fact the scale is different. So in some areas in fact it looks like a big circle, but in fact the scale on the axis is the same. And from this you can see that in fact, while Black Canyon has a really strong core of homogenous stylistic stuff, that there are quite a few motifs that are outside, whereas there are other groups and other sub-regions, whereas in fact all those motifs are very similar looking. So I think this is again showing that the increased heterogeneity at Black Canyon is an additional way of indicating that in fact, that's probably an aggregation locale compared to these other locations which are people's homes, territories. So it's much too excited, get much too excited about MCAs. Anyhow, the other thing that I think has been really interested about atlatal variability. Now only atlattles are seen with these motifs here. If you go to the COSO range where you also get pattern bodied antithromorphs, they're almost entirely with bows and arrows. So I think something quite different, that's another question, that's quite a different question, but here they are shown with atlattles. And if you again look at contrast state, you can see that the way people are depicting the atlattles through time also is changing. So this is again showing that people are modifying the way they're doing this, but the fact that there are no motifs that have anything other than atlattles, so there are no barren areas, I think in fact that this particular type of productions had stopped before 1500 years ago. I think there's also a change in the way people are distributing these motifs around the landscape. If you use the GIS and you look at where these motifs are located in the landscape, they're up high, they're in prominent positions, they're highly visible. I don't know if you can see, my intrepid assistant up high on the cliffs recording pattern bodied antithromorphs that are way, way above the actual floor of the canyon. A lot of other art is produced down low, lots of bighorn sheep, lots of geometrics in a very different sort of location to that. And again, when you look at the chronological occupation sequence, so what does the archaeology say about the timing for that likely production through time? You can see the majority of the diagnostic artifacts found on the surface, the hydration dates and all that sort of evidence shows most of the occupation occurred between three and a half and 1300 years ago. However, most of the pottery dates to the last thousand years. So I think you've got a major shift here in the way people are in fact using this landscape as hunter-gatherers. There's a shift in the last thousand years to the pinion juniper processing. People are using pottery. I think people stop producing rock art because they're making pottery and that's the way they can in fact signal information, the same sorts of stylistic information that they're signaling previously. And by putting the two together, the two strains of evidence together, looking at the general environmental changes through time, you can come up with an explanatory framework for how in fact people are switching between a geometric and a representational repertoire since people first started using the desert. Too much information to talk about here, but basically by looking at the different strands of evidence in the Pyrenegid Valley, I think you can see different phases of art production which tie in to major occupation phases. And then stylistic changes which can be shown also to shift with these climatic phrases, and which can be understood in terms of social shifts which go with those broad environmental changes. So at the end of five years, I conclude that there's huge potential in the Great Basin to actually link occupation, modeling with rock art. I think it's waiting to happen. It's just, it's starting to happen and I think it's enormously exciting to think about the amount of data that's there, the amount of information that's there from an archaeological perspective, the amount of information that can be gathered stylistically about the rock art. And I think this is something that's going to continue to be an interest for me, even though this project's finished. But I think the conclusion is yes, you can do it and I think there's enormous opportunities to in fact for other people to start dealing with these sorts of questions and trying to understand how rock art can help us have a more nuanced view of what hunter-gatherers are in fact doing in the Great Basin. So that's it, I've got lots of people to thank in the Peranigut area, people who did lots of work, who ran up and down those hills, recorded lots of rock art, same in the Owens Valley, people at BLM, Mark Bazgoul in particular at Sac State who's assisted with the guys from BLM to get permits and stuff. And of course you guys, go bears. That's it, thank you. Pleasure. Moving forward, possibly the sources of the pigments that the rock art made, as in how that correlates with the microchip patterns that you've been speaking of? Yeah, certainly that's what we're doing in Australia already. We're using PXRF as a way of actually looking at small changes in the pigments. I mean in Australia we've got a difficulty in that so many of our reds are obviously iron-based hematite and so is the rock, that we have a lot of problems with the reds. But we're finding with the yellows and the whites that in fact we're getting quite interesting signatures in titanium levels and different parts in the white, which are giving us ideas of where those pigments might come from. Here I don't know how much pigment there is and I don't know what the locations are. So I mean, I think that's certainly an interesting question to follow and it's really important in terms of trying to understand why is there a lot of pigment art in some areas and not a lot in other areas. I mean, proximity or is it, you know, importance or are there all sorts of reasons why people create pigment art as opposed to petroglyphs? Oh yeah. Where do those struggles have been had with using the PXRF on rock art? Holding it against the wall for the time. Yeah. There are problems, obviously, with the size of the beam and the thickness of the pigment on the wall. Look, it really varies in different art bodies. Part of the problem we have in Australia is the development of skins over the top, which means that in fact you're being masked by a whole series of calcium carbonates and other things that are actually coming over the top. I actually heard recently a guy who used to be at Anstow, who's now back in Italy, Claudio Tunis, who's a chemist or a physicist, I think maybe a physicist. They've just developed a portable XRD machine, which they actually are, he says, oh yes, it's portable, it only weighs 50 kilograms. Oh, you can carry it. Anyhow, you basically can direct it and it will give you a 30 by 30 centimeter scan of the entire surface. And so he's in fact wanting to bring that to Australia to do some experimental work on what are the actual elements that are being used in particular locations. I think it's got great potential. I think carrying a 50 kilogram better kit through the desert doesn't appeal to me, but I'm, helicopter's a good, yeah. But it is, it's a really interesting problem. And Serpent's Glen is an excellent case in point where it's worked really well because of the pigment is quite thick, but there are other cases where the pigment is drawn or much more superficial and in those cases, it's more difficult. And again, getting the thing to work all the time is always not, yeah, not simple, yeah. Christine, yeah. I'm proud of your shaman figures that you clearly, your team has spent a lot of time on. If I'm not mistaken, I guess that you think that stopped around 1500 years ago, but it's quite old, those two bars in the middle of two and three. That's right, yeah. In terms of patina and wear on the rock. So, and then you seem to say that it was linked to pot, you think it's somehow linked to this pottery coming in. So are those images turning up on the pottery? If not, where are the shamanistic images going? I think the interesting thing is that people are still interpreting them as shamanistic images, even though I think they were not produced by the people who are interpreting them as that. So I think that's my comment about the recursive action of people seeing the art and interpreting it as however they like, really. I think people stopped producing rock art in the last 1500 years, and my argument is, well, maybe they're using pottery as a way of signaling stuff about themselves. This is my pot, therefore, this is my place. So if you come to this place and it's got these pots, then that's my pot. They're not doing imagery on them as far as I can see. They're not doing big horn sheep on them. They're not doing a whole lot of things. There are some pot designs, which are obviously highly informative in terms of those sorts of identifying behavior. But in this part of the world, they don't seem to be. So my real question is, why do people... I mean, it's not a question. I think it's a reality. Rock art comes in and out of people's production cycles. In some phases, they do it all the time. In other phases, they don't. And I don't know whether that's an individual. It's probably largely to do with the individuals in the group. But I think it's also to do with how important it is to, in fact, demonstrate things about group cohesion. It's a great way of indicating all sorts of things about yourself, the landscape, your attachment to it. In the Western desert, people stopped producing engravings. They were producing pigment art in the last couple of thousand years. I think they weren't producing engravings probably for three or four thousand years. So, you know, there are phases where it was only engravings. Well, that's all we can see that's left now. You know, it's an episodic production through time, and it's those major changes in the styles that people are using, which are showing us that there's been a major cultural shift, I think. So the Pranigat figures disappear, except for John's colleague has found one somewhere, a pigment one somewhere. Whether it's that one doesn't really look like one to me, but, you know, it could be... We thought it might because it had the little knobs at the top and the knobs at the bottom, but... So they disappear, except in the cosos. They go to the cosos and they get bows and arrows, you know? But they're also slightly different shapes, and they have faces in the cosos. The ones in the Pranigat valleys don't have actual... They anthropomorphise in that they have extensions at the top and the body which we're interpreting is little short arms and little short legs. They don't have hands like the cosos, either, hands or faces. So, again, it's a totally different stylistic production. What goes you later in the coso? We assume so because they've got bow and arrows, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes. Is this contrasting dating something that you guys developed, or is that something that's another part of the literature that has a lot of history to it? Because I've not heard that. No. It's exciting, right? We use it in Australia. It's been happening for the last 10 years in Australia as a way of trying to interpret the Dampier archipelago art. Yeah, yeah. Controls go on with, you know, like fascination or these things. Like, is there orientation, substrate? That's stuff we're working on, and it is highly complex. We've now got a sixth class, which is NA. And that's for the ones where you think, oh, it's got, look, it's one here, it's two here, and it's three there. So what is it, you know? I mean, I think there are a whole lot of things at play that we can't disentangle. But the other important thing to note is that Amy Gilreith and her colleagues have, in fact, used VML and dated the desert varnish at Black Canyon. And they have dates of between 8,000 and 10,000. That would be rad. If you took Black Canyon as one of these big aggregation sites and used one set of, okay, so VML or the, what would you call it, contrast state, right? Yeah. And then compared to something where another major aggregation site like China Lake or Grapevine Canyon, and then see like, does the contrast state link up with VML dates for a broad range of panels through those massive concentrations? Yeah. Well, I think the thing is you see these, you see this change through time, and you see similar changes through time in diagnostic artifact types. You know, you have peaks of things. So, you know, it's very tempting to say that that peak of major diagnostic point and obsidian hydration dates correlates with that peak in art production. So, you know, it's a cheeky correlation at this stage, but it's one which I think is worth trying to try and test some other way. I mean, until we can date Petroglyphs, which is not easy, it's never going to be easy. Well, that's what I thought about the contrast state, so clutch, if you could dial that in a little tighter and then use it against, you know, those three main definitions like you could really, that would be a real tool. Yeah. That would be so fantastic. Yeah. It would be good. That's for next project. Yeah. Yeah. Laurie. Just an anecdote. Yeah. Artifacts that's been found in the southeast and in the African-American sites at a point in time when you've got planters who are residing with their slaves are these tobacco pipes that have these plumped in decoration. When you trace them back, they are actually skin designs that were put on bodies as part of the lead-up to the marriage. And in the culture where they originate from, there's one form of the symbol that's on fear vessels that are provided by the groom's family and another form that is on the woman's body and from the tattoo. And what you see on these tobacco pipes is the female form on the clay bodies. Fantastic. Yeah. And once residences shift out and people are no longer co-residing, these types disappear. So it's happening somewhere else. But it may be worth thinking about bodies as canvases for pigment as well and that there may be times for the bodies to be marked instead of the landscape. In the western desert, that's absolutely true and, in fact, we've had traditional owners actually say to us, oh, this motif is the one we put on our bodies when we're dancing the nightjar dance. And they'll say, and this one over here is when we do so and so. And I mean, you can clearly see those sorts of connections across the different media. So in the western desert, you've got sand paintings. You've got sand sculptures. You've got rock art. You've got little portable tablets. You've got all sorts of things and people are using all of them in different ways and at different times and for different types of long-term effect. So, you know, you actually put on your skin because it's in the moment. If you're actually recording on the art, then it's recording again something different about that particular symbol and people's use of that particular site. So, absolutely. That's really interesting. So African skins. Yeah, right. Cool. John. I was just reading an article by Don Christensen. Yep. You probably know him from western rock art. Yeah. And he did a survey of the Mojave Desert in the Mojave area and looked at the time depth and he came up with a couple of different estimates for the time depth of the rock art and the amount of symbols. And he's a very thorough man and he's probably seeing most of the rock art that exists up there. Yep. And when he divided the number of symbols by the number of years, he realized that the rock art must have been quite episodic. It must have been ephemeral. Yeah. It had to have come into an area and lasted only a few years and then disappeared. And, of course, then it just stays there. So, in fact, he's on the rock and the others are on the rock. But the people have gone. I think that's the really interesting thing about potential change through time is that people who come in and use the place after that are dealing with that earlier material and they either interact with it or they ignore it. But, again, the way they do that I think is really interesting. Yeah. He does know a lot. Yeah. Meg. The question I was going to ask was you've got, obviously, a lot of really rich ethnography in Australia. Now, I'm certainly much, much less when we could go on using this domain for the North American Great Basin, Sir Samson. While we all know the perils and pitfalls of ethnographic analogy, I just wondered if in doing a comparative study, to what extent would you know so well from the Australian situation it has the possibility or actuality of informing some of the possibilities for substantive, cultural, interpretive kinds of ways of dealing with the variation. Good question. Look, I think the whole question of ethnography in the Great Basin is ongoingly debated. There's a really interesting paper in that recent handbook about the ethnogenesis in the Great Basin. Part of the problem in Australia, people say you've got great ethnography in Australia, but we don't really because the people we're dealing with on the ground now are probably three generations away from the people who created the art. However, there's still active cultural systems that are activating knowledge and they are connected and we're still in a way which I don't think people in the Great Basin have been for a very long period of time. So one thing we did when we were in Bishop is we went and introduced ourselves to the Bishop Paiute and we were advised by our colleagues that this was going to be a difficult process for us and we said, well that's okay, we get shouted at all the time in Australia. We're okay with that, we can manage. We turned up at a tribal meeting and this was extraordinary because this is like a courtroom, like it's got the board sitting up on a table at the front, it's got people taking notes as a tribal policeman at the back and Luthier and I, oh my God what are we doing, we're in trouble here. Anyhow, we weren't. They were incredibly charming to us, they were delighted that we, because we basically said we're just coming to introduce ourselves so that we're here and that we're working on this rock art and in Australia we always talk to the traditional owners and we would never go and work anywhere or do a project unless we had, you know, community permission and so we didn't necessarily ask permission but we said we're here and we're interested in working with you if there's anything you're interested in working with on this art, we'd really like to do that. Oh that's great, when you're starting it was just like, and we had been expecting a really, really negative response because we've been told that their tribal their particular person who did heritage work didn't like white people, didn't like women and didn't like people from anywhere else so we thought we're classic, we get on all way they're on all counts. So anyhow, I think it is, I don't know how much information is there I think in Australia certainly when I started working in Sydney a long time ago most of the ethnography that I read was in fact what was being mobilized by Aboriginal communities back then but in New South Wales it's a very different situation to the western desert because it's probably more like what you're getting in the Owens Valley because I think it's people who have been moved from where their family's originally were and I think connections are much less tangible than they were and they're longer, the distance between then and now is much longer so I don't know, it's something we would really like to be able to do but I just don't know how realistic it is hmm you must have, oh you've all had lunch you must be starving yeah that's a pleasure