Nawarla Gabarnmang: Ancient Rock Art Shelter of Arnhem Land

Nawarla Gabarnmang is a large rock shelter in Jawoyn Country on the Arnhem Land plateau of northern Australia, known for its painted ceiling resting on natural stone pillars. Excavations found that people used the shelter from about 45,000 years ago and recovered a small piece of rock with a charcoal drawing about 28,000 years old. It is one of the oldest securely dated examples of rock art in Australia and an important place for the Jawoyn people today.

Setting and rediscovery

The shelter lies on the south-western part of the Arnhem Land plateau, a rugged sandstone landscape in the Northern Territory cut by gorges and dotted with thousands of painted rock shelters. Arnhem Land is one of the world’s great rock-art regions, with painting traditions that continued into the twentieth century.

Nawarla Gabarnmang had been known to Jawoyn families, but by the late twentieth century it was no longer regularly visited. In 2006 it was brought to the attention of researchers during survey work organised by the Jawoyn Association, the organisation that represents the area’s Aboriginal Traditional Owners. The Association then invited archaeologists to study the site with Jawoyn elders and rangers.

A ceiling on pillars

The shelter’s shape is unusual. Rather than a single overhang, it is a wide, low chamber whose roof is supported by about three dozen natural rock pillars, created by the weathering of layers in the sandstone. Light enters from several sides, so the space feels open rather than cave-like.

The ceiling and pillars are covered with paintings in red, white, yellow and black. They include fish, animals, human figures and spirit beings, painted in many layers over a long period. Most of the visible images are probably from the last few thousand years, but older layers lie beneath.

Excavations suggested that people deliberately modified the shelter. Slabs of rock appear to have been removed from the ceiling and pillars, perhaps to make the space larger or to reach sound stone. This turns the shelter into a place shaped by human hands as well as by nature.

The excavations

From around 2010, a team including the archaeologists Bruno David and Jean-Michel Geneste, working with Jawoyn Traditional Owners, excavated the floor deposits. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal showed that people were using the shelter by about 45,000 years ago, not long after the first arrival of people in Australia.

The deposits also contained a fragment of a ground-edge stone axe dated to about 35,000 years ago. When it was published in 2010 it was among the oldest known examples of a ground-edge axe anywhere in the world. Older examples have since been reported from the Kimberley, but the find still shows that northern Australia was an early centre of this technology.

The 28,000-year-old drawing

The most celebrated find is a small piece of rock that had fallen from the shelter wall or ceiling and became buried in the floor deposits. One face carries a charcoal drawing, a few lines that form part of a larger design. Because it lay in a layer dated by radiocarbon to about 28,000 years ago, the drawing must be at least that old.

Published in 2013, the fragment was described as the oldest securely dated piece of rock art in Australia at that time. Dating rock art is notoriously difficult, so excavated fragments like this give firm minimum ages that surface paintings rarely provide.

Timeline

• c. 45,000 years ago: People begin to use the shelter, according to radiocarbon dates.
• c. 35,000 years ago: A ground-edge stone axe is used and later broken at the site.
• c. 28,000 years ago: A fragment of rock bearing a charcoal drawing is buried in the floor.
• Recent millennia: Many layers of paintings are added to the ceiling and pillars.
• 2006: The shelter is brought to researchers’ attention through Jawoyn Association survey work.
• c. 2010-2012: Excavations by Jawoyn Traditional Owners and archaeologists.
• 2013: Publication of the 28,000-year-old painted rock.

Nawarla Gabarnmang and early Australia

The shelter adds to evidence from sites such as Madjedbebe, also in Arnhem Land, and Lake Mungo in New South Wales, which together show that people were living across Australia tens of thousands of years ago. These sites belong to the wider story of the peopling of Australia by sea from South-East Asia.

For Jawoyn people, the shelter is not only an archaeological site but part of a living cultural landscape. The research there has been carried out at their request, and access remains under their control.

Why it matters

Nawarla Gabarnmang provides firm evidence that people in northern Australia were making drawings at least 28,000 years ago and living in the region for even longer. Its pillared, painted ceiling also shows how a single place could be used, shaped and decorated across tens of thousands of years by the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal Australians.