Puntutjarpa rockshelter revisited: a chronological and stratigraphic reappraisal of a key archaeological sequence for the Western Desert, Australia

Puntutjarpa Rockshelter was the first archaeological site excavated in the Australian desert. Dug between 1967 and 1970, the archaeological sequence was originally interpreted as a continuous record spanning the last 10,000 years BP. With a new series of radiocarbon and OSL dates we show that Puntutjarpa primarily contains a mid-Holocene deposit with a veneer of last millennium material and a thin underlay of terminal Pleistocene evidence. We show that over the last 12.0 kyr, there were three discrete phases of site-use at Puntutjarpa – 12.0–9.7 kyr, 8.3–6.2 kyr and ~1.1–0 kyr – each with differences in the nature and intensity of occupation. This removes key field evidence for the ‘Australian Desert Culture’, a concept that has increasingly become an anomaly since the 1980s.