A New Framework for Interpreting Contact Rock Art: Reassessing the Rock Art at Nackara Springs, South Australia Page 1 of 28 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 10 November 2017 Abstract and Keywords This chapter addresses the challenge of seeing beyond the motif. Based on a case study in the Mid North of South Australia, this chapter presents a new analytical framework for analyzing style in rock art and using stylistic characteristics to identify authorship. The framework can be customized to different sites and/or regions to provide more nuanced understandings of specific contact trajectories. The results of this study suggest that innovation in contact rock art initially occurs in a single aspect of style and that a sequencing of innovations may be able to provide a temporal succession for contact motifs. The wider value of this framework is that it provides a basis for developing regional or site-specific models of style that may help researchers obtain greater insight into the authorship of contact rock art in different parts of the world. Keywords: contact, rock art, archaeological theory and method, style, Indigenous archaeology A New Framework for Interpreting Contact Rock Art: Reassessing the Rock Art at Nackara Springs, South Australia Claire Smith, Jordan Ralph, Kylie Lower, Jennifer McKinnon, Matthew Ebbs, and Vincent Copley Senior The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art Edited by Bruno David and Ian J. McNiven Subject: Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Archaeological Methodology and Techniques Online Publication Date: Nov 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190607357.013.27 Oxford Handbooks Online