ALL eyes are on the shaman: arms outstretched, head back, her face hidden
behind a mask. She wears a long, tapering cap, and clutches a short wand in each
hand. There are tassels at her hips and elbows, and these jump as she begins to
move. The crowd around her watches, spellbound, as she embarks upon her journey
to the spirit world.
That’s one possible interpretation of a scene recorded thousands of years ago
on a remote rocky outcrop in north-west Australia. The painting is part of a
vast collection that opens a window on an ancient hunter-gatherer society that
may date back to the last ice age. Despite the quality and extent of this
record, much about the paintings remains a mystery. Who were the artists? When
were the paintings done—and what do they mean?
The suggestion that this rock art may be the oldest known depiction of a
shamanistic ritual comes from a group of researchers led by Per Michaelsen, a
geologist at James Cook University in Queensland. They argue that these ancient
paintings may represent not only early religious practices, but perhaps also a
cultural heritage common to all humans. Such daring new theories do not go down
well with the rock-art establishment, especially as Michaelsen and his
colleagues are newcomers to the field. But regardless of which ideas prevail,
the controversy is certain to attract attention to an astonishing record of a
vanished people.
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The Bradshaws, as the paintings are collectively known, were first noted by
Europeans in 1891 and take their name from Joseph Bradshaw, the rancher who
described them. They are found in a region known as the Kimberley, a remote
place even by Australian standards. The Kimberley lies at the northern end of
Western Australia and is around twice the size of Britain with fewer than 40,000
inhabitants. It is a rugged sandstone landscape of plunging canyons and
treacherous swamps. There are few roads, and tropical monsoons make the interior
inaccessible for much of the year.
Michaelsen estimates that there may be as many as 100,000 Bradshaw
“galleries” tucked under rock overhangs along the region’s major river systems.
Many of the paintings have never been studied. But observations made by other
researchers over the past few decades reveal several distinct artistic styles.
Researchers recognise at least four major periods which they can place in
chronological order by looking at patterns of weathering and instances where one
style is superimposed upon another.
The oldest and largest paintings, which are up to 1.7 metres tall, are known
as the tasselled figures. They are the most realistic of the images and show
figures in static poses in what appears to be ceremonial dress. The figures are
characterised by large conical headdresses, and in particular by tassels
attached to the upper arms, elbows, hips and knees. The artists have taken great
care to capture not only the ornamentation, but also the curves of the human
body and anatomical details such as fingers and toes. In a few cases, the line
of a nose or brow almost suggests a portrait.
The subjects’ dress changes over time, as does the style of the paintings
themselves. The next oldest figures are notable for the sashes around their
midriffs. These sash figures still have armbands, but not the prominent tassels.
Some of the figures wear knee-length skirts, while others sport large horned or
feathered headdresses. Most hold boomerangs, and often a small whisk-like object
dangles from the wrist.
Aggressive figures
Younger than the sash and tasselled figures, the clothes-peg figures are much
more highly stylised. The older paintings tend to show profiles, but these are
frontal portraits. Gone is the anatomical detail, and many figures assume
aggressive stances and carry multi-barbed spears and spear throwers. At least
one scene shows a battle with spear-waving combatants arrayed in opposing ranks.
Some of these paintings still have yellow and white pigment on them, in addition
to the red and mulberry hues found on the other styles.
There are also so-called elegant action figures of people running and
hunting, which are difficult to date because none is superimposed on a painting
from another period. However, the abstract style suggests that they were created
some time after the tassel and sash figures. They lack the body ornamentation
seen in the other styles, but they often hold barbed spears or boomerangs, and
some of the figures carry captured animals.
All these paintings provide a wealth of detail about the material culture of
the Bradshaw people. Yet despite this, nobody knows when the Bradshaw culture
developed or where it came from. Only two groups have attempted to date the
paintings directly, and their results are wildly different.
In 1997, a group led by Richard Roberts, now at the University of Melbourne,
used a technique known as luminescence dating to assign a minimum age of 17,000
years to one of the younger paintings. The second study, also published in 1997,
used radiocarbon dating and came up with a much younger estimate: about 4000
years. Its author, Alan Watchman of James Cook University, believes the Bradshaw
culture in northern Australia might date from between 5000 and 6000 years ago,
but rejects the idea that it could be 17,000 years old or more.
Both researchers stand by their results. Roberts suspects that Watchman’s
radiocarbon samples might have been contaminated by traces of younger carbon.
Watchman thinks that the painting dated by Roberts was, in fact, pre-Bradshaw.
Despite their differences of opinion, the two are currently working together and
expect to present new results before the end of the year.
Either way, the Bradshaw people were not the original inhabitants of the
Kimberley. Their paintings have little in common with the crudely rendered
animals of the region’s oldest art. Archaeological evidence suggests the first
settlers of the Kimberley arrived at least 40,000 years ago. They would have
found a region of open tropical forest and woodlands, suitable for year-round
habitation, where they seem to have flourished for 10,000 years. Then things
began to change.
The ice age brought cooler temperatures, strong winds and lower rainfall to
northern Australia. The sea level dropped, and at times during the glacial
maximum—between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago—it was up to 140 metres
below its present level. The coastline was as much as 400 kilometres further to
the north-west. Australia was connected by land to New Guinea and separated from
Southeast Asia by just a narrow channel. Could the Bradshaw culture have arrived
in Australia at this time?
Intriguingly, one of the Bradshaw paintings shows a boat with upswept prow
and stern, and multiple paddlers. It raises the possibility that the artists
were originally a seafaring people. The idea that the Bradshaw people came from
Indonesia or further afield has a long pedigree in Australian anthropology, but
there is no hard evidence to support it.
Just as the ice age might have opened the way for the arrival of the Bradshaw
people, it may also have led to the culture’s demise. Water became scarcer, and
human populations across the region contracted. “It would have been pretty tough
to hack out a living,” says Roberts. At the height of the ice age, many sites
appear to have been abandoned.
Then, about 15,000 years ago, rainfall increased, sea levels began to rise
and human populations across north-west Australia started to expand again. The
archaeological record shows that these people began using stone points. Yet
there seems to be no record of this new technology in the many Bradshaw
paintings. Although matching rock art with artefacts is notoriously difficult,
one interpretation is that the absence of stone points in the paintings is an
indication that the Bradshaw people were forced off their land by changing
conditions at the end of the ice age.
Whatever happened, the long Bradshaw tradition appears to end as suddenly as
it began. The paintings have little in common artistically with those that
follow. And according to Grahame Walsh, an independent researcher who has spent
23 years documenting the Bradshaws, the traditional Aboriginal inhabitants of
the Kimberley have no cultural link to the older paintings. All of which makes
interpreting the Bradshaws particularly difficult.
That hasn’t discouraged Michaelsen and his colleague Noel Smith from the
State University of New York at Plattsburgh from advancing their theory.
Michaelsen notes that many of the Bradshaw figures appear to be dancing. “In
some paintings, the figure’s head is bent far back, looking up toward the sky. A
lot of them seem to float in space, as if they are on a vision quest,” he says.
“It is a central element in shamanism.”
Cult of the shaman
Shamanism, loosely defined, is a set of spiritual beliefs and practices in
which an individual is believed to leave his or her body, often in a trance, and
enter a spirit world. Shamans, or something like them, have been recorded in
historical times in Asia, North and South America and Africa. “A shaman is
someone who uses his or her mastery of guardian life forces to engage the life
forces of the Universe,” says Smith.
He points to similarities between the head-back stance in the Bradshaw
paintings and postures seen in modern depictions of shamanism by the Paracus
culture of Peru. And he likens the lines extending from the fingers of some of
the Bradshaw people to similar lines in the shamanistic rock art of the San
people in southern Africa. Another team member, Tasja Ebersole from James Cook
University, has identified eucalyptus leaves in some Bradshaw paintings, and
suggests that their psychoactive effect may have been used to induce a
shamanistic trance.
But others are sceptical. Walsh, author of the most comprehensive book on the
Bradshaws to date, is critical of the newcomers’ lack of experience. “There are
many people beginning to enter the Kimberley rock-art scene and set themselves
up as experts, with some quite remarkable statements now being very
authoritatively presented.” he says. Walsh has so far found nothing that
indicates shamanism. “And I would be extremely cautious in attempting to link
such prehistoric art with comparatively modern art in distant countries.”
Nevertheless, he does believe the Bradshaws contain complex information that has
yet to be deciphered.
Paul Bahn, a specialist on ice-age art who is familiar with the Bradshaws,
describes the shamanism theory as a “bandwagon”. He says he isn’t aware that
shamanism had ever existed in Australia. “People are lumping together all kinds
of folk—witch doctors, diviners, rainmakers, healers, and so
on—under this blanket term, so it has become meaningless,” he says. “The
whole point of prehistory is to try and separate out what is different in each
culture, not lump them all together.” Bahn also points out that there are rarely
any ground lines in rock art, which is why most of its figures appear to
“fDz”.
George Chaloupka, an archaeologist at the Museum and Art Gallery of the
Northern Territory in Darwin, puts it even more bluntly. “Shamaniacs rule the
world at present,” he says. “It’s just another orthodoxy basking in its five
minutes of sunshine.”
But Michaelsen and his group are pushing well beyond orthodoxy—and
beyond Australia. They argue that shamanism may have dispersed out of Africa
about 50,000 years ago. “There is quite a bit of evidence of a profound cultural
change occurring in north Africa at that time,” says Smith. Practices such as
body decoration, rock art and the production of intricate bone tools seem to
take off from this point. “So a worldwide pattern of shamanism suggests that it,
too, may have dispersed from that centre of origin,” says Smith. “If shamanism
in the Bradshaw paintings is that old, it gives important clues about the early
spread of human culture.”
Smith says he doesn’t want to overstate what he and Michaelsen are claiming.
“Unless you can raise the dead, I can’t imagine what would be definitive. All we
can ever go on is what seems to be reasonable,” he says. “Hopefully more and
more lines will converge and begin to rule out other possibilities.”
The search for meaning in this remarkable artistic record is sure to
continue. Hundreds, or even thousands, of talented artists must have worked on
the paintings over many generations. Yet they were always careful to stay within
the strict stylistic limits of each particular period. According to Walsh, these
facts alone indicate that the paintings were intended to convey specific
information. But decoding the Bradshaws today may require nothing less than the
skills of a shaman.
There are few signs of gender among the Bradshaw rock paintings, but Per
Michaelsen and Noel Smith believe they can see small but distinctly female
breasts on two of the shamans they have identified. “We know that female shamans
are very common in other cultures,” says Smith, noting that female shamanism has
been documented by anthropologists in Siberia and North America. “In fact, women
very well may have been the original shamans,” he adds.
Smith points to several strands of evidence that suggest female shamans
pre-date their male counterparts. The first is linguistic. “Female shamans
across Siberia all have the same name. But male shamans have totally different
names in different languages,” he says. What’s more, in North America the male
shamans often put on women’s garb and affect female mannerisms.
“There’s also some literature on the Aborigines,” says Smith. “The women
Aborigines explicitly say that the men have taken over their roles—the
roles they have been playing as shamans.” However, only a minority of
researchers accept the existence of shamanism among Australian aborigines.
Grahame Walsh calls the idea of female shamans in the Bradshaw culture
“preposterous”. He says there are “very, very few female figures”. When the
Bradshaw artists did depict women, they gave them few adornments, small or
non-existent headdresses and, most importantly, extremely prominent breasts.
Walsh says the small breasts identified by Michaelsen and Smith are simply a
standard chest-band decoration which is found on several of the tasselled
Bradshaw figures.
Spiritual mothers
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Further reading:
Australian ice age rock art may depict Earth’s
oldest recordings of shamanistic rituals
by Per Michaelsen and others, The Mankind
Quarterly, vol 41(2), p 131 (2001) -
Bradshaw Art of the Kimberley by Grahame Walsh,
Takarakka Nowan Kas Publications (2000) - www.BradshawFoundation.com
- Michaelsen’s research team: www.bradshaw.dk