Rock art in South Australia: Analyses of Panaramitee tradition engravings and paintings

This paper presents an analysis of Aboriginal rock engravings and paintings in the Olary Province of South Australia. Comprising predominantly of animal tracks and non-figurative motifs, the art forms of this region have been considered the heartland of a corpus of rock engravings known as the Panaramitee. Engraving sites of this tradition are widely distributed across Australia, and the Panaramitee has been represented as homogeneous at a continental level, but with two notable exceptions (Flood 1997; Rosenfeld 1991), rock paintings have not normally been considered part of this tradition. A multivariate investigation using correspondence analysis, cluster analysis, coefficients of diversity and presence/absence of motifs was undertaken comparing first the Olary Province rock engravings sites with other Panaramitee Tradition engraving sites across the continent, and then the rock engravings with the rock paintings of the Olary Province. It was found that the Olary Province engraving sites grouped with other arid zone sites (St].!rt's Meadows and N'Dhala Gorge) but could be differentiated as a region, known as the Central region, from four other Panaramitee Tradition regions in terms of the emphasis on different types of motifs. The rock engravings of the Central region were also found to be more diverse, with more even proportions of a number of different motif types, than those at the periphery of the continent, which tended to show concentrations on a smaller range of motif types. In the second analysis, the Olary Province painting and engraving sites were differentiated from each other. A model, known as the Discontinuous Dreaming Network Model, is put forward to explain these patterns