AR12. 8 July 2003
Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Sharpe.
Unaccepted magazine article proposal.

THE MEANING OF FINGER FLUTINGS

by

Kevin Sharpe

ABSTRACT. When we think of cave art, we think of Lascaux, Altamira, and other wonders of Paleolithic Europe. However, there is another form of cave art; little known, little researched, older, and on the other side of the world.

The finger flutings that occur throughout the Australian continent have only recently been addressed. Their appearance in Europe has all too often been ignored, explained away – or not recognized at all. Essentially the later representational forms have eclipsed them both physically and academically. In Australia, however, there is a long and continued use of these enigmatic forms. But what do they mean and how can we elucidate this?

“Rock art,” for many people, means bison, ibex, and horses dancing across the roofs and walls of caverns and passageways. Most people don’t know that another “art” form exists in caves: finger flutings, sometimes called “meanders” or “macaroni.”

Not necessarily representational or geometric, finger flutings result from fingers run over a surface, as in the finger painting of infants. They usually occur on (formerly) soft calcite deposits known as moonmilk or Montmilch, a microscopic, fiber-like lattice of calcite crystals, which can absorb large amounts of water. They also usually appear as meshes of lines.

Finger flutings abound in Australia and Europe. They cover the walls of massive caverns to tiny passageways, barely large enough for an adult to enter. Some swathe walls over an hour’s climb in pitch-black from the surface, up and down hazardous drops and ascents.

What did these enigmatic forms mean to their makers?

Archaeologists have known about, but overlooked finger flutings for many years. The marks offer little scope for conventional stylistic analysis because they appear unstructured and they lack symbols.

My colleagues and I have developed a theory about their significance. We’ve also developed an experimental approach that extends Alexander Marshack’s, Robert Bednarik’s, and Francesco d’Errico’s pioneering techniques, and attempts to recreate the lines in readily available media. We focus on the lines in Koonalda Cave, South Australia.

The flutings, we suggest, had a purpose and meaning for their makers.

Hominids made marks, we suggest, to represent objects and ideas. They made them with materials they could easily obtain and they passed on their information with simple signs, pictures, or markings. Linguists describe these marks as communication inscriptions, cueing systems, or notation systems. Some of the line markings that people of the late Pleistocene created, therefore, may have been forms of communication. If an early notational system, finger flutings are a cultural and stylized form of interpersonal communication, a mnemonic form of writing.

Story telling was probably an important form of communication for prehistoric peoples and probably the first notation systems related closely to story telling. The line markings in the caves may have acted as organizing and memory devices for their story-telling creators, mnemonically reminding them of crucial and specific occurrences in a story. Squiggles and lines do this for young children today.

It is also likely that prehistoric peoples performed specific rituals at specific places – this appears in ethnographic studies of Australian Aborigines. People repeatedly visited Koonalda Cave, therefore, for a certain ritual and the retelling of the myths involved in that ritual. The finger flutings in Koonalda could represent this set of myths. Further, different sets of flutings in the Cave may represent the same myths and this sameness may appear as structural repetition or consistencies in the marks.

We could look for these consistencies, recognizing that, probably, myths and notation systems changed over time and were peculiar to a geographical and cultural region.

Whether we find consistencies or not, untangling the meaning of finger flutings – if achievable even in part – must rely on investigations of the marks themselves and on lessons learned from recreating them in the laboratory.