Rock Art Research

There is a long history within the Australian rock art literature of attempts to identify material culture items, including weapons and specific weapon types. This paper examines two groups of weapons not commonly noted in the literature on Australian rock art. We undertake a broad review of published rock art, focusing on the Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre basin, where long fighting poles/boomerangs were produced and used, and northeastern Queensland, where wooden swords were an iconic part of the material culture, to assess if there might be representations of these weapons and to answer the question: are images of weapons always depicted in the rock art of their areas of manufacture? It was found that depictions of long fighting poles/boomerangs and large wooden swords are rare, and generally, images were not found in their area of production. Potential depictions of these weapons were documented at locations outside of the production areas, suggesting that these weapons were exchanged/traded across large distances.