Pictures, jargon and theory—our own ethnography and roadside rock art. In F.D. McCarthy, Commemorative Papers (Archaeology, Anthropology, Rock Art), ed. Jim Specht

The roadside pictures of an area in suburban Sydney were examined as valuable 'things to think with' for prehistorians in particular and other students of rock art. It was discovered that several traits which had been considered unique to, and characteristic of, European palaeolithic rock art are also characteristic of the pictures of suburban Sydney. New light is shed on the concepts of 'art' and 'style' when they are confronted with essentially familiar materials whose ethnography is at once known and intangible. CLEGG, J., 1993. Pictures, jargon and theory our own ethnography and roadside rock art. Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 17: 91-103. This paper consists of three parts: i) introduction and fieldwork: exploration of the pictures beside a kilometre or so of Sydney roads, ii) theoretical discussion, and iii) refinement of jargon and concepts in the light of contemporary picture-making and ethnographic considerations. An invitation to offer a paper on Ethnography and Rock Art to the Australian Archaeological Association conference at Valla, November 1985, stimulated this investigation. More and more prehistorians are trying to use prehistoric pictures as relevant and valuable data. This is expressed in the literature (Conkey, 1978, 1980a, 1980b, 1982, 1984; Gamble, 1982; Jochim, 1982; Wobst, 1977) and at conferences (W orld Archaeological Congress, Southampton 1986; First Australian Rock Art Congress, Darwin 1988). What prehistory means to us is strongly linked to the contrasts between prehistoric situations and our own, so studies of prehistoric and contemporary pictures reinforce and illuminate each other. Margaret W. Conkey discovered several attributes which are characteristic of palaeolithic pictures, but which, it turns out, are also found in the pictures of our society. These will be discussed in the third section of this paper. It may be impossible to· make a satisfactory definition of 'art' for all purposes, but it is not difficult to recognise the sorts of things (e.g., marks on rocks) prehistorians study as 'rock art'. There are difficulties of definition, such as the need to determine whether some marks are natural or artificial and whether they are the by-product of some other process like sharpening a tool. Such problems are not the concern of this paper. The best-known prehistoric pictures are from the Palaeolithic of western Europe. They consist of drawings, paintings, prints and stencils, carvings, engravings and models. For analysis they are separated into two groups: mobiliary (portable pictures often made on bone, antler, or ivory), and parietal (pictures which are on rock surfaces, usually walls or ceilings of caves or rock shelters). 92 Records of the Australian Museum (1993) Supplement 17 In studies of this art, sometimes some sorts of marks are ignored, usually for the insidious but excellent reason that there is nothing to say about them. Thus, very little attention was paid to the 'signs' of the European Palaeolithic until Leroi-Gourhan and Marshack published provocative studies of some of them. It is necessary to select the sorts of objects one studies, deliberately and with consideration. Unconscious selection is likely to introduce subjective bias. The word 'art' is associated with (often subjective) selection of marks, tending to favour those pictures which are pretty, naturalistic or iconographic. When I study 'rock art', I do not want to discard the artefacts which are not pretty, or not well made, or for any other reason not' Art'. Any such selection would bias the archaeological sample (Clegg, 1985:44). I have sought, accordingly, a better term for what I study. Up till the present I have used the term prehistoric pictures, hardly adequate for its purpose, because some people's concept of 'picture' is restricted to the subset 'representation' or 'picture of', and the term has to include three-dimensional marks, whether or not they conform to anyone's idea of 'picture'. This usage has not caught on, and I am now willing to surrender to the ubiquitous term 'Rock Art', which is all-embracing and no longer restricted to particularly pretty or naturalistic pictures. Work with rock art requires many concepts, and workable definitions of them. Particularly difficult is style. Fortunately, the jargon and concepts are evolving; the multitude of meanings of style is settling down into one agreed meaning, which relates to manner, characteristic of a time and place. Working with prehistoric artefacts means working from ignorance. The purpose of this paper is not to discuss appropriate words, or deal with definitions. The aim is to stimulate a wider consideration of rock art studies by drawing attention to an easily available supply of 'things to think with', whose usefulness is exemplified by a confrontation between prehistory, literature and contemporary pictures. I looked at the 'rock art' along a suburban roadside, which seems generally comparable to palaeolithic parietal art, although suburban pictures have many media (cast-iron, road-paints, printed posters and, above all, writing) which were not available in the Palaeolithic. The confrontation continually challenges definitions and theory. In the field I strove to look at the material in the ways that prehistorians (such as myself) deal with the prehistoric material, so I was generally concerned with marks on surfaces rather than the surfaces they are on. The primary objective is to clarify concepts particularly those used in the study of rock art by applying them to familiar objects, in a culture with whose ramifications we are all acquainted. Additional notes are listed in the Appendix. Choice of Ethnographic Area The investigation required a large quantity of pictures of a rich and complex culture which is ethnographic ally well known, so that the characteristics alleged for Rock Art could be reasonably sought. I chose to study the pictures I pass twice every weekday as I drive from home in Balmain to work at Sydney University, and back again. The area is comparatively old; most of the buildings look 19th century. It is between 3 and 4 km from the city centre. The roads are secondary: The Crescent, Minogue Crescent and Ross Street in Annandale and Forest Lodge (Gregory's, 1982: maps 1, 5, 26, 28). Ross Street is the shopping centre of the suburb Forest Lodge and contains its primary school and a playground. Minogue Crescent is partly cut from a sandstone cliff, and has a small reserve with residences on one side and Harold Park horse trotting track on the other. The Crescent is bordered by a reserve, some residential property, and some waterfront industrial and railway property. The brick-facing to a railway embankment has a painting on it. The roads are amply supplied with advertising hoardings, ubiquitous road furniture and signs, and several bus stops. The pictures belong to our culture, including subcultures. The products of one subculture may not be fully comprehensible to a member of another for one or more of the following reasons (Hunt, 1982: 117): our normal mode of communicating ... with each other is highly abbreviated and elliptical; listeners and readers supply far more information than is overtly contained in the words of the speaker or writer. This is equally true of less verbal modes of communication.