Cameron Neal speaks about his first class honours thesis at the AAA conference

Cameron has been recognised as an emerging talent in archaeology and was asked to be a speaker at the Australian Archaeological Association’s Conference in December.

The speaking session featured Cam’s insights into his large-scale independent work, resulting in First Class honours being awarded, particularly being carried out with resilience through the year of COVID restrictions.

Some of the questions Cam’s thesis and presentation covered were:

• What role did the awe-inspiring views around Sydney play in Aboriginal ceremonial activity?

• What is the relationship between visual perception and the engraved art?
  

Cam’s work used a landscape perspective to determine if high visibility was a desirable feature in choosing where to place engraved art and to explored patterns of visibility within the context of movement. He hypothesised that engravings would tend to be in places affording extensive views. Secondly, that sites containing rare motifs would afford even greater levels of visibility. Thirdly, sites located along known travel routes would be located in places affording extensive visibility.

To test this, Cam generated affordance-viewshed models for Ku-ring-gai National Park, Yengo National Park, and the Boree Track using GIS. He plotted the location of known engraving sites onto the model to determine level of visibility at engraving sites. Sites chosen included both common and rare motifs (based on frequency reported by McDonald). Research on hunter-gather aggregation sites (e.g. Conkey 1988, McDonald & Veth 2011) indicates a potentially greater level of significance at sites containing rarer motifs. Therefore, we may expect sites containing rarer motifs to also be located in areas affording the highest levels of visibility of the surrounding landscape.