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The Rainbow Serpent is agreed to be one of the most powerful, all consuming and widespread Ancestral Beings of Aboriginal Australia. It pervades not only oral history but also ceremony, performance and visual art, and is associated with great acts of creation and destruction. Although Rainbow Serpent imagery varies, its supernatural nature is usually emphasised by its form, often through the incorporation of attributes derived from a variety of natural creatures. Rock paintings of the Being are scattered across the continent but a particularly large sample can be found in western Arnhem Land. We analyse 107 of these in detail and note variation across both time and space through the use of multivariate statistical techniques. We hypothesise about the origins of the oldest images and compare key elements of Rainbow Serpent stories to those of 'Yam Style' Rainbow Serpents, reputed to be 4000-6000 years of age. It is our contention that an archaeological context for many of the more significant aspects of Rainbow Serpent oral history can be found over several millennia.

Depictions of battle scenes, skirmishes and hand-to-hand combat are rare in hunter-gatherer art and when they do occur most often result from contact with agriculturalist or industrialized invaders. In the Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory of Australia we have been documenting rare depictions of fighting and are able to show that there has been a long tradition of warrior art. At least three phases have been identified and in each of them groups of hunter-gatherers are shown in combat. The oldest are at least 10,000 years old, and constitute the most ancient depictions of fighting from anywhere in the world, while the newest were produced as recently as early this century. Significantly, a pronounced change in the arrangement of figures began with the second, middle phase — beginning perhaps about 6000 years ago. This appears to be associated with increased social complexity and the development of the highly complicated kinship relationships that persist in Arnhem Land today. Evidence from physical anthropological, archaeological and linguistic studies supports the idea of the early development of a highly organized society of the type more commonly associated with agriculturalists or horticulturalists.