Archaeology on Film: Fact Versus Fiction

Rated: PG
Directed by James Bobin
Duration: 102 minutes

Dora, a girl who has spent most of her life exploring the jungle with her parents, must now navigate her most dangerous adventure yet – high school. Always the explorer, Dora quickly finds herself leading Boots (her best friend, a monkey), Diego and a ragtag group of teens on an adventure to save her parents and solve the impossible mystery behind a lost Inca civilization.

Rated: Exempt
Directed by Bill Code
Duration: 90 minutes

In a corner of Australia exists a place of astounding natural beauty, archaeological significance and age-old culture. But the Indigenous scarred trees and artefacts found here are at risk, until an unlikely intergenerational partnership develops that could save the site for future generations. The lake of scars tells a story of allyship, environmentalism and cultural rebirth – a picture of what reconciliation between Aboriginal and European Australians might look like. But is that idea harder than it seems?

Rated: PG
Directed by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler
Duration: 56 minutes

First footprints is a series that takes us back to an Australia before Captain Cook. It’s the untold story of the original pioneers of all humankind, a history that began in Australia 50,000 years before modern humans reached America and Europe.

Australia’s original pioneers made the first open ocean crossing in history, conducted the world’s earliest cremation with grave goods, invented revolutionary technologies like the hafted stone axe and boomerang, etched the earliest depiction of the human face, engraved the world’s first maps and made the earliest narrative paintings. These cornerstones of our humanity first appeared here, in response to the formidable challenges of living in the harshest habitable continent on Earth.

This first episode of the series explores how archaeological discoveries reveal the cross-ocean migration of Aboriginal people to Australia over 50,000 years ago.

Rated: PG
Directed by Andrew Pike and Ann McGrath
Duration: 70 minutes

Lake Mungo is an ancient Pleistocene lake bed in south-western NSW and is one of the world’s richest archaeological sites.

Message from Mungo focuses on the interface between scientists on one hand and, on the other, the First Nations communities who identify with the land and with the human remains that were revealed at the site in 1968. This interface has often been deeply troubled and contentious, but within the conflict and its gradual resolution lies a moving story of the progressive empowerment of the traditional custodians of the area.

The film focuses on the human remains known as ‘Mungo Lady’. Claims were made that the remains were around 40,000 years old or possibly even older. Lake Mungo became recognised as an archaeological site of world importance.

Through the 1970s and 80s, Aboriginal groups associated with Lake Mungo began to question the work of the scientific community and became increasingly involved in the management of archaeological work. In 1992, the remains of Mungo Lady were handed back to the First Nations custodians.

Rated: G
Directed by Werner Herzog
Duration: 90 minutes

In this documentary, filmmaker Werner Herzog and a small crew are given a rare chance to film inside France’s Chauvet Cave, where the walls are covered with some of the world’s oldest surviving paintings.

Examining the 30,000-year-old drawings, Herzog discusses with scientists and art scholars conducting research at Chauvet how the artwork represents humanity’s earliest dreams.