October
01
/ 2015
The groundswell of interest world-wide in artifacts from our prehistoric past reveals our shared humanity at a time when no written records exist to bear testimony to it. Indeed, 99% of our history is prehistoric, which leaves a lot of mankind’s developing apprehension of the world and the skills acquired to negotiate it, completely unmapped — except of course for stone tools and implements. At the University of Sydney, the Macleay Museum has mounted a remarkable exhibition called Written in Stone, curated by Matt Poll, which explores the history and aesthetics of Australian Aboriginal stone artifacts from some 40,000 years ago to the nineteenth century. The presentation of these implements extends their significance from the anthropological and archaeological into the
