Making sense of scenes

Social behaviour and structures are often invisible in the archaeological record. However, rock art sometimes provides unique visual examples of social and cultural practices as perceived by the authors. Through a specific case study, a rock art scene from Injalak Hill (western Arnhem Land, Australia), this paper explores how the social information encoded in rock art scenes can be understood on the basis of three categories of analysis: the rock paintings, the archaeological/spatial context and the ethnographic context. This study demonstrates that patterns of composition are not at random in rock art scenes, but used to replicate social patterns of behaviour more than a simple action.