Serpents Glen (<i>Karnatukul</i>): New Histories for Deep time Attachment to Country in Australia’s Western Desert
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/bha-624Abstract
Recent work at Serpents Glen (Karnatukul) in the Carnarvon Ranges (Katjarra) of the Western Desert has changed our archaeological understanding of both deep time occupation and more recent arid-zone social geography. Mobilising rock art evidence into earlier models for how arid zone peoples have entered, settled and known Country has allowed us to project people into cycles of human mobility. Our understanding of the deep time and more recent engagements with Country (ngurra) has changed significantly since Richard Gould wrote Yiwara and Living Archaeology in the late 1960s. Early ethno-archaeological studies portrayed the desert as harsh and precarious, and the lifeways of arid zone peoples as marginal and conservative. Fifty years of archaeological endeavour working with traditional custodians in the Western Desert, has changed this view of the ‘dangerous desert’. ‘Risk-minimisation’ and the ‘dietary stress hypothesis’ have been replaced with models that consider human mobility, social geography and information exchange theory as ways of understanding how arid-zone peoples have been successfully on country since the earliest human occupation of this continent. Karnatukul’s record rewrites the deep history of the arid zone, as well as refining our understanding of social complexity by combining late Holocene arid zone art and occupation evidence.
Published
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2020 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms. If a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s):
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.
Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).