Murujuga : rock art, heritage, and landscape iconoclasm
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Murujuga : rock art, heritage, and landscape iconoclasm
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2020
- : hardcover
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-284) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A fascinating case study of the archaeological site at Murujuga, Australia
Located in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Australians who have historically inhabited the archipelago. To date, there has been no comprehensive survey of the site's petroglyphs or those who created them. Since the 1960s, regional mining interests have caused significant damage to this site, destroying an estimated 5 to 25 percent of the petroglyphs in Murujuga. Today, Murujuga holds the unenviable status of being one of the most endangered archaeological sites in the world.
Jose Antonio Gonzalez Zarandona provides a full postcolonial analysis of Murujuga as well as a geographic and archaeological overview of the site, its ethnohistory, and its considerable significance to Indigenous groups, before examining the colonial mistreatment of Murujuga from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of postcolonial perspectives, Zarandona reads the assaults on the rock art of Murujuga as instances of what he terms "landscape iconoclasm": the destruction of art and landscapes central to group identity in pursuit of ideological, political, and economic dominance. Viewed through the lens of landscape iconoclasm, the destruction of Murujuga can be understood as not only the result of economic pressures but also as a means of reinforcing-through neglect, abandonment, fragmentation, and even certain practices of heritage preservation-the colonial legacy in Western Australia. Murujuga provides a case study through which to examine, and begin to reject, archaeology's global entanglement with colonial intervention and the politics of heritage preservation.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Michel Lorblanchet
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
PART I. MURUJUGA
Chapter 1. Situating Murujuga
Chapter 2. Murujuga and Its Meanings
PART II. FROM THE COLONIAL GAZE TO THE ACADEMIC APPRECIATION OF ROCK ART
Chapter 3. The Colonial Gaze
Chapter 4. Rude Aesthetics
Chapter 5. The Colonization of the Landscape
PART III. ICONOCLASM, LANDSCAPE, AND HERITAGE
Chapter 6. The Destruction of Landscape in Murujuga
Chapter 7. The Making of Heritage
PART IV. A THEROY OF LANDSCAPE ICONOCLASM
Chapter 8. Landscape Iconoclasm
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"