The major focus of this work has been the patterning of Australian Aboriginal beads and their functions. This work started as an investigation into the relationship between Aboriginal material culture and drainage basins and led to the role of beads in determining past human behaviours. The symbolic content of beads has been recognised and their appearance in early archaeological sites has long been accepted as identifiers of modern human behaviour. The patterning of style in beads and other material culture from hunter-gatherer societies has been investigated by authors for interpreting the archaeological record. At the time of European colonisation from the late 1700s, Aborigines were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with hundreds of language groups and diverse ways of living. Australia has shell beads that have been dated to over 30,000 years old and there is ethnographic material held in museums from the late 1800s to the early 1900s that shows what Aboriginal people were manufacturing during those early years. Added to that is literature that gives accounts for the use of material culture. A combination of those lines of evidence could have implications for understanding the archaeological record. For this project, I have synthesised the beaded ornaments held in Australian museums and set up a classification system that has allowed me to determine spatial patterning of beads and to investigate current theories for explaining patterning. I determined that there was clear patterning in discrete categories, no two categories had the same distribution and there were categories that were highly standardised for local use and exchange. This study has shown that the relationship between archaeological and ethnographic evidence for beads is more complex than those given by current explanations.

One of the largest concentrations of rock paintings in Australia is found in the rugged and remote Kimberley region in the northwest of the continent. A sequence of visually-distinctive figurative styles is likely to span periods of complex cultural change and major climatic events. However, the timing, nature and course of these changes are poorly understood. In order to redress these deficiencies, I investigated the relationships between continuity and change in the form and context of production of anthropomorphic figures in the rock art assemblage. Specifically, I identified the core characteristics of anthropomorphic figures in each of the established stylistic periods. I analysed the evidence cited by previous researchers to support notions of an abrupt discontinuity in the art assemblage between the Wararrajai Gwion and Painted Hand Periods. New chronological data was correlated with environmental evidence to establish the timing of cultural change and potential association of events with the Last Glacial Maximum. Factors that contributed to, or drove change were identified in order to develop an understanding of the social and economic lifeways in the northwest Kimberley through time.