I must go down to the seas again: Or, what happens when the sea comes to you? Murujuga rock art as an environmental indicator for Australia's north-west

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. The Dampier Archipelago (properly known as Murujuga) is a rich rock art province in north-western Australia which documents an arid-maritime cultural landscape. But this Archipelago of 42 islands has only existed since the mid-Holocene. When people started to engrave art here, the granophyre bedrock was part of an inland range, more than 160 km from the coast. The Pilbara archaeological record demonstrates human responses through over forty thousand years of environmental change. This paper discusses how rock art across Murujuga can give insights to changing dynamics of people in place as well as depicting major environmental change. A predictive model is developed to assist in understanding the social changes which have been wrought by sea-level rise and consequential environmental changes.