‘Animals into humans’ Multispecies encounters, relational ontologies, and social identity in Indigenous rock art from northeast Kimberley, Australia, during the Pleistocene

This thesis explores how Indigenous people from Australia’s northeast Kimberley related to animals during the Terminal Pleistocene and the role animals played in the construction of social identity. Three rock art styles – the Irregular Infill Animal Period, Gwion Period, and Elegant Action Figure Period – form the focus of this study. Iconographic, ethological, ethnographical, zooarchaeological, and statistical analyses were conducted to study human-animal associations. This work contributes to both local and global understandings of identity through time, through the application of a multispecies perspective that incorporates rock art, Indigenous knowledge, material culture, and the landscape.