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Puntutjarpa Rockshelter was the first archaeological site excavated in the Australian desert. Dug between 1967 and 1970, the archaeological sequence was originally interpreted as a continuous record spanning the last 10,000 years BP. With a new series of radiocarbon and OSL dates we show that Puntutjarpa primarily contains a mid-Holocene deposit with a veneer of last millennium material and a thin underlay of terminal Pleistocene evidence. We show that over the last 12.0kyr, there were three discrete phases of site-use at Puntutjarpa - 12.0-9.7kyr, 8.3-6.2kyr and similar to 1.1-0kyr - each with differences in the nature and intensity of occupation. This removes key field evidence for the ’Australian Desert Culture’, a concept that has increasingly become an anomaly since the 1980s.