Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia, 90(3), September 2007 
Considered together, this artistic, dietary and cultural 
evidence suggests that the occupants of the Cue region 
had closer links with the people to their north and east, 
than with those to their south and west. Those links 
become clearer when the places where grinding patches 
have been found associated with rock art are considered. 
Grinding patches and rock art - women's work, men's 
business? 
About 650 sites where grinding is associated with rock 
art have been reported in Western Australia: 87% in the 
Pilbara and 11% in the Kimberley (Figure 8). The 
remaining sites are more widely scattered, although very 
few have been reported south of 26° S. Not all the 
registered sites could be plotted on Figure 8 because DIA 
suppresses the co-ordinates for sites whose files are 
closed for cultural reasons, about 10% of the total known. 
Nonetheless, Figure 8 is a reasonable representation of 
the geographic distribution of the sites where rock art 
has been found in association with grinding; whether 
that grinding is bedrock patches or portable grindstones 
is unknown. As noted above, the on-line DIA database 
does not distinguish between these types of grinding. 
The distribution pattern seen in Figure 8 does, however, 
seem to comprise two major regions; the Pilbara and the 
Kimberley. 
In the Pilbara, grinding is associated almost exclusively 
with petroglyphs. A few sites with both pictograms and 
Figure 8. Sites where grinding has been reported in association with rock art. (Drawn by J Smith). 
122 
