Sven Ouzman
I am an archaeologist and heritage specialist who specialises in rock art, graffiti, heritage politics, Indigenous knowledge, intellectual property, landscape, cross-cultural contact, origins, and understandings of time. In terms of intellectual arc, I studied for my BA and BA Honours at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (1988-1992). I then worked as the Head of the Rock Art Department at National Museum in Bloemfontein (1994-2002) before reading for an MA and PhD at UC Berkeley in California on a Fulbright scholarship (2002-2006; PhD conferred 2008). While studying there I also taught Ancient African History at San Quentin Prison outside San Francisco. I returned to South Africa as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Anthropology & Archaeology (2006-2011) before becoming Curator of Archaeology at Iziko South African Museum (2011-2013).
On 1 July 2013 I joined the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia as a Kimberley Rock Art Research Fellow (2013-2015) and have been Archaeology Discipline Chair (2016-2018), Major Co-ordinator (2015-2021), Honours co-ordinator (2015-20198, 2022-2024 Mentor) and Seminar co-ordinator (2017-2020) programmes. I was Director of Learning, Teaching + Student Matters for the School of Social Sciences (2020-2022). I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
I have directed research in Australia, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa, documenting over 4000 rock art sites and producing 234 site reports and conducted >20 excavations. I have produced >60 academic >100 other publications; established 6 rock art and heritage site museums; curated 10 exhibitions and trained >50 heritage practitioners.
Supervisors: Meg Conkey, Mariane Ferme, and Whitney Davis
Phone: +61 (0)86488 2863
Address: Archaeology & Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, Room 1.26 Old Commerce Building, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia (M257), 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009, Australia
https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/sven-ouzman
On 1 July 2013 I joined the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia as a Kimberley Rock Art Research Fellow (2013-2015) and have been Archaeology Discipline Chair (2016-2018), Major Co-ordinator (2015-2021), Honours co-ordinator (2015-20198, 2022-2024 Mentor) and Seminar co-ordinator (2017-2020) programmes. I was Director of Learning, Teaching + Student Matters for the School of Social Sciences (2020-2022). I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
I have directed research in Australia, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa, documenting over 4000 rock art sites and producing 234 site reports and conducted >20 excavations. I have produced >60 academic >100 other publications; established 6 rock art and heritage site museums; curated 10 exhibitions and trained >50 heritage practitioners.
Supervisors: Meg Conkey, Mariane Ferme, and Whitney Davis
Phone: +61 (0)86488 2863
Address: Archaeology & Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, Room 1.26 Old Commerce Building, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia (M257), 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6009, Australia
https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/sven-ouzman
less
InterestsView All (22)
Uploads
Papers by Sven Ouzman
Rock art is one of the most visible forms of human activity of the landscape, found at thousands of sites in the form of paintings (pictographs), engravings (petroglyphs), and even images made from beeswax. There are also ‘stone arrangements’ (sometimes also called ‘geoglyphs’) where people have manipulated stone to make large and small designs on the ground, in rock shelters and so on. Some of this rock art marked events, was involved in ceremonies to increase economic and social resources, parts of spiritual rituals – and even resisting colonial invasion.
Heritage is often divided into ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’, which gets in the way of the holistic understanding and management of cultural landscapes and their heritage. The cultural landscape of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Catchment provides an ideal example of how an integrated management framework can be achieved in a system where cultural and natural heritage values are strongly interconnected.
This heritage, considered and managed holistically, offers social and environmental benefits such as sustainable, on-Country employment, improved physical and mental health outcomes, land stewardship to manage climate change and other impacts on biodiversity, food security, strong sense of identity and purpose. Already, Indigenous Ranger programs and the Martuwarra River Keepers programs are leading the way in applying heritage management to real-world benefits.
The outstanding cultural and natural values of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Catchment are an asset at local, state, national and international levels. These values are both threatened by climate change and human interventions – but also offer sustainable prosperity pathways if managed wisely. Managing the heritage of Martuwarra can also act as a model for other places where there are multiple stakeholders impacting on multiple heritage values.
Being one of Australia’s largest Heritage sites – and the longest in Western Australia at 733 km - comes with its own unique set of opportunities and challenges. But to fully understand and act on these opportunities and challenges, we need to fully understand why the region and its people are so special. What makes this globally unique place special? How can people access it in responsible ways? How can it help us create sustainable heritage futures?
It was these questions that the project team sought to address when applying to the DCCEEW for a Heritage grant to "improve access to National Heritage sites". Our response was a novel interactive educational resource / that allows people to explore the region regardless of their geographic location or level of knowledge.
Speaking with Traditional Owners, the response was consistent that the “criteria" of the National Heritage inscription did not always align with the values and points people wanted to share. In many cases, points that people did want to share, were not suitable for the public domain. The project team spent months on the road, sleeping in swags, sometimes following tracks that had not seen a motor car in decades, and other times cursing the helicopter for not starting after driving thousands of kilometres to a rendezvous point. 6 months of collaborative fieldwork resulted in honest and rich content to share with the public. After compiling a mountain of wide-ranging media material, the post-production phase offered its own set of challenges to be overcome before something could be delivered that was both informative of the National Heritage criteria and critically, true to Traditional Owners' Voices. We hope that this educational resource allows you to join the journey and be immersed in the rich heritage tapestry associated with Martuwarra and the West Kimberley.
Archaeologists, architects and anthropologists are able to recognise, analyse, and propose alternatives to this wilful ignorance of an enduring social issue. Our 2015 spatial survey of four sites in Perth’s CBD and penumbra ‘saw’ traces of homelessness through examining official efforts to eradicate, hide, or move on what property owners consider an ‘unsightly’ streetie society. We are not concerned with the archaeology of homelessness but with the architectural and related responses to it - such as barriers, benches designed not to be slept on, sprinklers, alarms, manipulation of landscaping, and hindering access to water and ablutions. Interestingly, within authority regimes there is some tolerance - and even enabling - of street living.
Homelessness costs Perth at least $75 million per annum – and hostile architecture adds to this cost absolutely and socially. We propose a recognition of ‘streeties’ as legitimate, long-term dwellers and title-holders of the city’s spaces-in-common. We also recognise the street as a legitimate dwelling space. This approach may help re-humanise hostile architecture.
ISBN9780646888415
and lions in France’s Chauvet Cave. The oldest known Australian Aboriginal figurative rock paintings also commonly depict
naturalistic animals but, until now, quantitative dating was lacking. Here, we present 27 radiocarbon dates on mud wasp nests
that constrain the ages of 16 motifs from this earliest known phase of rock painting in the Australian Kimberley region. These
initial results suggest that paintings in this style proliferated between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago. Notably, one painting of a
kangaroo is securely dated to between 17,500 and 17,100 years on the basis of the ages of three overlying and three underlying
wasp nests. This is the oldest radiometrically dated in situ rock painting so far reported in Australia.
Rock art is one of the most visible forms of human activity of the landscape, found at thousands of sites in the form of paintings (pictographs), engravings (petroglyphs), and even images made from beeswax. There are also ‘stone arrangements’ (sometimes also called ‘geoglyphs’) where people have manipulated stone to make large and small designs on the ground, in rock shelters and so on. Some of this rock art marked events, was involved in ceremonies to increase economic and social resources, parts of spiritual rituals – and even resisting colonial invasion.
Heritage is often divided into ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’, which gets in the way of the holistic understanding and management of cultural landscapes and their heritage. The cultural landscape of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Catchment provides an ideal example of how an integrated management framework can be achieved in a system where cultural and natural heritage values are strongly interconnected.
This heritage, considered and managed holistically, offers social and environmental benefits such as sustainable, on-Country employment, improved physical and mental health outcomes, land stewardship to manage climate change and other impacts on biodiversity, food security, strong sense of identity and purpose. Already, Indigenous Ranger programs and the Martuwarra River Keepers programs are leading the way in applying heritage management to real-world benefits.
The outstanding cultural and natural values of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Catchment are an asset at local, state, national and international levels. These values are both threatened by climate change and human interventions – but also offer sustainable prosperity pathways if managed wisely. Managing the heritage of Martuwarra can also act as a model for other places where there are multiple stakeholders impacting on multiple heritage values.
Being one of Australia’s largest Heritage sites – and the longest in Western Australia at 733 km - comes with its own unique set of opportunities and challenges. But to fully understand and act on these opportunities and challenges, we need to fully understand why the region and its people are so special. What makes this globally unique place special? How can people access it in responsible ways? How can it help us create sustainable heritage futures?
It was these questions that the project team sought to address when applying to the DCCEEW for a Heritage grant to "improve access to National Heritage sites". Our response was a novel interactive educational resource / that allows people to explore the region regardless of their geographic location or level of knowledge.
Speaking with Traditional Owners, the response was consistent that the “criteria" of the National Heritage inscription did not always align with the values and points people wanted to share. In many cases, points that people did want to share, were not suitable for the public domain. The project team spent months on the road, sleeping in swags, sometimes following tracks that had not seen a motor car in decades, and other times cursing the helicopter for not starting after driving thousands of kilometres to a rendezvous point. 6 months of collaborative fieldwork resulted in honest and rich content to share with the public. After compiling a mountain of wide-ranging media material, the post-production phase offered its own set of challenges to be overcome before something could be delivered that was both informative of the National Heritage criteria and critically, true to Traditional Owners' Voices. We hope that this educational resource allows you to join the journey and be immersed in the rich heritage tapestry associated with Martuwarra and the West Kimberley.
Archaeologists, architects and anthropologists are able to recognise, analyse, and propose alternatives to this wilful ignorance of an enduring social issue. Our 2015 spatial survey of four sites in Perth’s CBD and penumbra ‘saw’ traces of homelessness through examining official efforts to eradicate, hide, or move on what property owners consider an ‘unsightly’ streetie society. We are not concerned with the archaeology of homelessness but with the architectural and related responses to it - such as barriers, benches designed not to be slept on, sprinklers, alarms, manipulation of landscaping, and hindering access to water and ablutions. Interestingly, within authority regimes there is some tolerance - and even enabling - of street living.
Homelessness costs Perth at least $75 million per annum – and hostile architecture adds to this cost absolutely and socially. We propose a recognition of ‘streeties’ as legitimate, long-term dwellers and title-holders of the city’s spaces-in-common. We also recognise the street as a legitimate dwelling space. This approach may help re-humanise hostile architecture.
ISBN9780646888415
and lions in France’s Chauvet Cave. The oldest known Australian Aboriginal figurative rock paintings also commonly depict
naturalistic animals but, until now, quantitative dating was lacking. Here, we present 27 radiocarbon dates on mud wasp nests
that constrain the ages of 16 motifs from this earliest known phase of rock painting in the Australian Kimberley region. These
initial results suggest that paintings in this style proliferated between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago. Notably, one painting of a
kangaroo is securely dated to between 17,500 and 17,100 years on the basis of the ages of three overlying and three underlying
wasp nests. This is the oldest radiometrically dated in situ rock painting so far reported in Australia.
The Living Waters Heritage project aims to improve Indigenous and non-Indigenous engagement and awareness of these heritage values and deliver digital resources people can use. Martuwarra contains 10 sub-bioregions and is home to 10 nations that include the Jarrakan, Nyulnyulan, Pama-Nyunga, Bunuban, and Worrorran language families who are linked by the ancient and evolving Wunan knowledge and exchange system and governed by First Law. Most people are very aware of how their actions affect their neighbours downstream – as exemplified by the common saying “water flows down”. Such actions include not taking excessive water, regularly being on Country and monitoring, advocating for Country, and renewing Wanjina ancestors by engaging with rock art.
In Western Australia’s northeast Kimberley region, on Balanggarra Country, a two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo spans the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter above the Drysdale River. In a paper published today in Nature Human Behaviour, we date the artwork as being between 17,500 and 17,100 years old — making it Australia’s oldest known in-situ rock painting. We used a pioneering radiocarbon dating technique on 27 mud wasp nests underlying and overlying 16 different paintings from 8 rock shelters. We found paintings of this style were produced between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.
These knowledges and practices often mingled, ensuring the past is never far from the present. For example, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is sited on ancestral /Xam land - though there is almost no official acknowledgement of this (Mowszowski 2012). Archaeology seeks to uncover such forgotten and hidden histories. Formerly a colonial tool, post-colonial Archaeology tries to combine ‘western’ science and Indigneous knowledge for a fuller understanding of human culture that combines scientific excellence with social context. Multiple knowledge systems can co-exit. They can also conflict over, for example, the relationship between origins and evolution. These are nevertheless honest disagreements within a larger quest for knowledge and sense of belonging. But there is also a worrying trend in which pseudoarchaeology is being used to promote damaging hypotheses about Indigenous astronomy. On one extreme there is selective use of multiple data sets to suggest exotic, non-Indigenous authorship of artefacts, structures, knowledge and practices. On the other extreme is the promotion of an exclusively Afro-centric astronomical knowledge domain. In-between ‘New Age’ proponents make a series of claims that include extra-terrestrial visitation.
Academics occasionally challenge this pseudoscience, but are seldom trusted or are too disengaged (with exceptions like AIMS and SAAO) from a society in which formal maths and science literacy is low (Buxner & Holbrook 2008:87-93; Medupe 2012:84; and Spiller 2012 for embedded skill and knowledge). Society witnesses this knowledge contestation with little guidance on what constitures reliable information (Gottschalk 2007; Snedgar 2007). I suggest four steps to counter this pseudoscience:
• Identify what these publics consider reliable archaeoastronomical ‘evidence’;
• Identify who these publics consider reliable sources of archaeoastronomical knowledge;
• Acknowledge the skill and knowledge of these publics and not condescend to them;
• Communicate in ways best suited to southern African circumstances.
I ground this programme of action archaeologically by reviewing what is reliably known of Indigenous southern African’s astronomical knowledge, practices and artefacts. I then examine how and why Indigenous astronomy has been (mis)interpreted by European colonists. I conclude by considering some contemporary pseudoarchaeologies, suggest why these often bizarre claims appeal to broader publics, and suggest strategies to counter them.
References
Barnard, Alan. 1992. Hunters and herders of southern Africa: a comparative ethnography of the Khoisan peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 85.
Bleek, Wilhelm & Lucy Lloyd. 1911. Specimens of Bushman folklore. London: Allen.
Buxner, Sanlyn and Shawna Holbrook. 2008. Integrating African cultural astronomy inti the classroom. In: Holbrook, Janita, Medupe, Rodney and Johnson Urama (eds). African cultural astronomy: current archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy research in Africa: 83-93. New York: Springer.
Gottschalk, Keith. 2007. The political uses of astronomy. African Skies / Cieux Africaines 11:33-34.
Medupe, Thebe. 2012. Bridging science and culture. In: Kreamer, Christine M (ed). African cosmos: stellar arts: 82-93. New York: The Monacelli Press.
Mitchell, Peter. 2002. The archaeology of southern Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mowszowski, Ruben. 2012. SKA on the birthplace of humaity. The Cape Times, 11th May.
Ouzman, Sven. 2010. Flashes of brilliance: San rock paintings of Heaven’s Things. In: Blundell, Geoffrey, Christopher Chippindale and Ben Smith (eds). Seeing and knowing: understanding rock art with and without ethnography:11-31, Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Skotnes, Pippa A. 2010. Stars are small dark-coloured things that live in holes in the ground. In: Block, David L., K.C. Freeman and I. Puerari (eds). Galaxies and their masks:1-22. New York: Springer.
Snedegar Keith V. 1996. Stars and seasons in southern Africa. Vista in in Astronomy 39(4):529-538.
Snedgar, Keith V. 2007. Problesm and prospectsi n the cultural history of South African Astronomy. African Skies / Cieux Africaines 11:27-32.
Spiller, Guy (Director). 2012. My room at the center of the universe (12 minute preview). Africa meets Africa.
Archaeologists, architects and anthropologists are able to recognise, analyse, and propose alternatives to this wilful ignorance of an enduring social issue. Our 2015 spatial survey of four sites in Perth’s CBD and penumbra ‘saw’ traces of homelessness through examining official efforts to eradicate, hide, or move on what property owners consider an ‘unsightly’ streetie society. We are not concerned with the archaeology of homelessness but with the architectural and related responses to it - such as barriers, benches designed not to be slept on, sprinklers, alarms, manipulation of landscaping, and hindering access to water and ablutions. Interestingly, within authority regimes there is some tolerance - and even enabling - of street living.
Homelessness costs Perth at least $75 million per annum – and hostile architecture adds to this cost absolutely and socially. We propose a recognition of ‘streeties’ as legitimate, long-term dwellers and title-holders of the city’s spaces-in-common. We also recognise the street as a legitimate dwelling space. This approach may help re-humanise hostile architecture.