Inscriptions by the crews of the whaling ships Connecticut and Delta have been discovered on rocks on Rosemary and West Lewis Islands in the Dampier Archipelago, north-west of Karratha.

They were made over the top of earlier indigenous rock art carvings.

University of WA project leader Jo McDonald said the discoveries shone a light on a brief period when indigenous people and visiting whalers shared the same territory without obvious major conflict.

"The whaling inscriptions are a rare example of maritime inscriptions on rock and represent the only tangible evidence of this earliest phase of white colonisation of the Australian north west so far discovered," Professor McDonald said.

"There is no other historical or archaeological evidence for contact between the whalers and the Yaburara, making these inscriptions especially valuable."

The discoveries have been detailed in a research paper in the journal Antiquity, published on Tuesday, in which the authors suggest the whalers deliberately inscribed on already richly decorated rocks in an indirect attempt to engage with the Yaburara people.

The inscriptions were made decades before pastoralists and pearlers arrived in the north west in the 1860s, and the infamous Flying Foam Massacre of the Yaburara people in 1868.

Australian Associated Press