Rock art is one of the most visible and geographically widespread of cultural expressions, and it spans much of the period of our species' existence. Rock art also provides rare and often unique insights into the minds and visually creative capacities of our ancestors and how selected rock outcrops with distinctive images were used to construct symbolic landscapes and shape worldviews. Equally important, rock art is often central to the expression of and engagement with spiritual entities and forces, and in all these dimensions it signals the diversity of cultural practices, across place and through time. Over the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied ancient arts on rock surfaces, both out in the open and within caves and rock shelters, and social anthropologists have revealed how people today use art in their daily lives. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art showcases examples of such research from around the world and across a broad range of cultural contexts, giving a sense of the art's regional variability, its antiquity, and how it is meaningful to people in the recent past and today - including how we have ourselves tended to make sense of the art of others, replete with our own preconceptions. It reviews past, present, and emerging theoretical approaches to rock art investigation and presents new, cutting-edge methods of rock art analysis for the student and professional researcher alike.

The Social Archaeology of Indigenous Societies presents original and provocative views on the complex and dynamic social lives of Indigenous Australians from an historical perspective. Building on the foundational work of Harry Lourandos, the book critically examines and challenges traditional approaches which have presented Indigenous Australian past as static and tethered to ecological rationalism. The book reveals the ancient past of Aboriginal Australians to be one of long term changes in social relationships and traditions, as well as the active management and manipulation of the environment. The book encourages a deeper appreciation of the ways Aboriginal peoples have engaged with and constructed their worlds. It solicits a deeper understanding of the contemporary political and social context of research and the insidious impacts of colonialist philosophies. In short, it concerns people, both past and present. The Social Archaeology of Indigenous Societies looks beyond the stereo

65,000 years ago, modern humans arrived in Australia, having navigated more than 100 km of sea crossing from southeast Asia. Since then, the large continental islands of Australia and New Guinea, together with smaller islands in between, have been connected by land bridges and severed again as sea levels fell and rose. Along with these fluctuations came changes in the terrestrial and marine environments of both land masses. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea reviews and assembles the latest findings and ideas on the archaeology of the Australia-New Guinea region, the world's largest island-continent. In 42 new chapters written by 77 contributors, it presents and explores the archaeological evidence to weave stories of colonisation; megafaunal extinctions; Indigenous architecture; long-distance interactions, sometimes across the seas; eel-based aquaculture and the development of techniques for the mass-trapping of fish; occupation of the High Country, deserts, tropical swamplands and other, diverse land and waterscapes; and rock art and symbolic behaviour. Together with established researchers, a new generation of archaeologists present in this Handbook one, authoritative text where Australia-New Guinea archaeology now lies and where it is heading, promising to shape future directions for years to come.

The Archaeology of Tanamu 1 presents the results from Tanamu 1, the first site to be published in detail in the Caution Bay Studies in Archaeology series. In 2008-2010, the Caution Bay Archaeological Project excavated 122 stratified sites 20km northwest of Port Moresby, south coast of Papua New Guinea. This remains the largest archaeological salvage program ever undertaken in the country. Yielding well-provenanced and finely dated assemblages of ceramics, faunal remains, and stone and shell artefacts, this remarkable set of sites has extended the geographical range of the Lapita cultural complex to not only the mainland of Papua New Guinea, but more remarkably to its south coast, at Australia's doorstep. At least as important has been the discovery of rich and well-defined layers deposited up to c. 1700 years before the emergence of Lapita in the Bismarck Archipelago, providing insights into pre-ceramic cultural practices on the Papua New Guinea south coast. Sites and layers interdigitate across the Caution Bay landscape to reveal a 5000-year story, each site contributing unique details of the grander narrative. Positioned near the coast on a sand ridge, Tanamu 1 contains three clear occupational layers: a pre-Lapita horizon (c. 4050-5000 cal BP), a Late Lapita horizon (c. 2750-2800 cal BP), and sparser later materials capped by a dense ethnohistoric layer deposited in the past 100-200 years. Fine-grained excavation methods, detailed specialist analyses and a robust chronostratigraphy allows for a full and transparent presentation of data to start laying the building blocks for the Caution Bay story.