The picture says it all. The engraved boulders of Sapa are slowly being eroded – naturally from the environment, but at an accelerated rate from tourists clambering onto the rocks. I visited the site two years ago and many of the engravings on the larger boulders which were accessible to tourists were already faint due to smoothening of the rock surface or vandalised.

Tourists climbing the engraved rocks at Sapa, Vietnam Net Bridge 20120129

Distress cry for help from Sapa ancient rock field
Vietnam Net Bridge, 29 January 2012

The Sapa ancient rock field in Muong Hoa Valley, Sapa district in Lao Cai province is a mysterious and invaluable relic, which is proposed for UNESCO’s recognition as a world cultural heritage site. But this relic is being ruined.

This 8sq.km area of remains consists of large multi-grade rocks engraved with ancient images. It was discovered by a Russian French archaeologist of the French School of the Far East in 1925.

There are nearly 200 rocks of various dimensions concentrated in the area. Hon Bo, which is 15m long and 6m high, is the biggest of theses rocks. The engravings on the surfaces of the stone are either pictographic or decorative. Remarkably, among the engravings are drawings of humans, stilt-houses of the ethnic minorities and symbols believed to be a primitive form of writing. But their meaning has not yet been deciphered.

Full story here.

Some of my initial observations:
- as I suspected, there is much more rock art in Southeast Asia than previously reported, particularly in Laos and Myanmar.
- rock art research in this part of the world is at its infancy. A number of participants (perhaps half) are not archaeologists or directly involved in rock art research. Most of the countries involved do not even have an archaeologist or scholar whose primary research interest is in rock art.
- Southeast Asia is an incredibly diverse place linguistically, with every country having their own language. So it’s interesting to see how people from different countries communicate to each other in English.
- the diverse audience in this workshop also poses its own challenges. English might be the common denominator, but in many cases English is the second language and it’s really hard to teach complex theoretical and technical concepts in this setting.
- many of the technical terms used in rock art are not readily translatable in Southeast Asian languages.

This week is full of lectures and workshops based in the SEAMEO-SPAFA office in Bangkok; next week we will be heading out to some rock art sites in Thailand to practice field recording. I’m looking forward to field testing some new equipment and applications for the iPhone/iPad and I hope to blog about them in a later date.

Being in Australia now I am keen to take a look at the many examples of rock art here. On a bushwalk a couple of weekends ago, I was at the Namadgi National Park south of Canberra, on a walking trail called Yankee Hat, which contains the only known rock art found in the Australian Capital Terrritory.

The Yankee Hat Trail at the Namadgi National Park

Yankee Hat is the name of a mountain – presumably named because it looks like a yankee hat – at the site is a group of boulders located at its foot. The walk to the boulders took aout an hour and a half.

Yankee Hat Rock Art Site

Sign near the boulders

Rock art is notoriously hard to date, but dates taken from deposits found in the shelter suggest that the Aboriginal People have been using the site for at least 800 years, while dates from other nearby sites suggest that people have been in the area for around 3,700 years.

Yankee Hat Rock Art

The red paints are made from ochre, while the whites are of clay. This is all the rock art there is, so it’s a fairly small site. Some of the depictions include:

An 'emu' or 'brolga'

A 'goanna' or 'turtle'

A 'kangaroo'

Kangaroos are a common sight through the bush – one encounters many groups of them while walking the trail.

For more information about the Yankee Hat Rock Art site, click here.

Reading the Rocks
Archaeology Magazine, Jan/Feb 2011

The Rock Art of Malarrak
Archaeology Magazine, 14 December 2010

The Rock Art of Djulirri (video series)
Archaeology Magazine, 14 December 2010
(In five parts. Part IV contains the video about Southeast Asian Praus in contact with Arnhem Land)

In a remote corner of Arnhem Land in central northern Australia, the Aborigines left paintings chronicling 15,000 years of their history. One site in particular, Djulirri, the subject of “Reading the Rocks” in the January/February 2011 issue of ARCHAEOLOGY, contains thousands of individual paintings in 20 discernable layers. In this video series, Paul S. C. Taçon, an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and rock art expert from Griffith University in Queensland, takes ARCHAEOLOGY on a tour of some of the most interesting and unusual paintings—depicting everything from cruise ships to dugong hunts to arrogant Europeans—from Djulirri’s encyclopedic central panel.

Now, onto phd applications…

‘New’ Rock Art from Gua Tambun, Perak, Malaysia
Tan, N. H. and Chia, S.
Rock Art Research, 2010, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 9-18.

The rock art site at Gua Tambun in Perak, Malaysia was first reported in 1959 and was noted for its spectacular collection of rock art with depictions of anthropomorphs, animal figures and abstract shapes. Little scholarly attention was paid to it, however, and much of the interpretations produced thus far on the rock art have been speculative or unverified. The site was revisited by the authors in January 2009 in order to examine, record and study the rock art in detail. During the course of the fieldwork, individual rock art elements were identified and recorded, including a number of ‘new’ motifs, which are presented in this paper for the first time. The total count now stands at slightly over 500 distinct rock art elements, spread over ten distinct panels, making Gua Tambun one of the largest rock art sites in Malaysia, if not the largest.