People in northern Australia seem to have used beeswax to shape miniature stencils to paint on the walls of Yilbilinji Rock Shelter in Limmen National Park.

Archaeologists and anthropologists, working with Marra rangers, noticed that most of the miniature stencils had rounded edges, and it looked like they had been sprayed over something that fit flush against the contours of the rock.

Flinders University archaeologist Liam Brady and his colleagues wanted to find out if beeswax shapes could also be used to create stencils on rock, so they decided to play with some beeswax themselves.

When it was warm and soft, it only took a couple of minutes to mold the beeswax into a variety of shapes that looked like the stencils at Yilbilinji.

Brady and his colleagues stuck their beeswax templates onto a slab of sandstone, then spattered it with paint from white kaolin clay and water.

That suggests beeswax could work—but is that really how the Yilbilinji artists made their miniature stencils.

Brady and his colleagues didn’t get to date the paintings or test the rock shelter’s walls for microscopic traces of beeswax, resin, or some other soft, sticky material, but they hope to come back with the right equipment on a later trip.

For the Marra, Yilbilinji Rock Shelter is a site associated with Karrimala, one of the Ancestral Beings who travelled through Australia during the Dreamtime to create the continent’s landforms, plants, animals, and people.

People lived at Yilbilinji in the past; the floor of the rock shelter is still littered with stone tools, grinding stones, and a stone-ringed fireplace.

At another rock shelter in Limmen National Park, Brady and his colleagues found small beeswax figures still stuck to the walls.

Men whose families had the right connections to certain places, and who knew the right songs to sing, could use images on those places’ walls to magically attack their enemies, the Marra men told Brady and his colleagues.