A Survey of Developments in Dating Australian Rock-Markings

The dating of Australian petroglyphs and pictograms has been the subject of considerable discussion in recent decades. There have been continued initiatives in the application of techniques derived from the physico-chemical sciences and many useful results generated. Indeed, as with the early days of radiocarbon dating, there may be many results but less knowledge of which one may be confident. While the increasing availability and demand by researchers for geochemical data still requires a renewal of a higher level of dialogue between specialists, perhaps what has been less evident in many quarters is a lack of care by rock art researchers in dealing with the data provided by archaeometrists, of continued self-critique of scholarship and logic of argument at a later stage of interpretation. Here are reviewed some recent developments and their contributions to the difficult matter of dating ancient rock-markings.