Aboriginal rock art in Panaramitee style of South Australia dated within Holocene epoch from 11,700 years ago
Typical motifs (at left) at Panaramitee sites: a. macropod tracks b. bird tracks c. circles d. radiating lines e. lizards f. crescents g. dots. Top right: Black dots indicated recorded Panaramitee-style sites around Australia. Bottom right: Panaramitee-style engravings from Middle Arm Peninsula, Northern Territory.
Map and Northern Territory image by Ellen Tiley
Panaramitee, a style of Aboriginal rock art confirmed as going back from 11,000 years ago, was named after its occurrence at Yunta Springs (Olary district) and Red Gorge (Flinders Ranges)
The style depicts animal tracks including those of macropods (kangaroos, wallabies etc), birds and humans as well as radiating designs, circles, spots, crescents and spirals. These petroglyphs or pecked engravings in rock were also found in central Australia, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia.
The first person to publish academic papers about the petroglyphs in the north of his state was South Australian anthropologist, geologist, explorer, politician and doctor Herbert Basedow. He made the first qualified claims of Pleistocene (before 11,700 years ago) antiquity, outside of Europe, for the Australian rock art. Basedow justified the Pleistocene-age for the rock art at two sites by them becoming inaccessible due of glacial or river erosion. Linking the megafauna fossils found at Lake Collabonna, Basedow speculated that a large animal track petroglyph could represent the diprotodon, a large marsupial thought to have gone extinct 44,000 years ago.
Anthropologist, archaeologist, entomologist and ethnologist Norman Tindale, also long associated with the South Australian Museum, later visited Yunta Springs and also speculated that images of large bird tracks at Pimba, near Woomera, could depict megafauna.
Also documenting Aboriginal rock art and engravings in the 1960s, anthropologist and later South Australian Museum curator Robert (Bob) Edwards, working with his mentor Charles Mountford, thought a complex maze at Panaramitee North sitde, near Yunta, represented the head of a saltwater crocodile that had existed in southern Australia for millions of years. A later Aboriginal interpretation of the petroglyph was that it was a “magic object”.
Although Edwards’ research on rock engravings was influential, his career saw a shift to appreciating that many sites that he regarded as ancient were part of a living tradition. He and Mountford found that many petroglyphs were near water sources.
Modern dating techniques didn’t support the claims for petroglyphs being from the Pleistocene epoch but a consensus was that the Panaramitee style emerged during the first half of the Holocene (after 11,700 years ago) epoch.
