IMAGE: The Conversation, 6 January 2021
To the best of my understanding, Cloggs Cave formed in the Middle Devonian & sited 72.3m above sea level, is on the country of and under the cultural care of the Krauatungalung clan of the GunaiKurnai nation.
Nature Human Behaviour, 01 July 2024:
Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented ritual dated to the last ice age
Bruno David, et al
In societies without writing, ethnographically known rituals have rarely been tracked back archaeologically more than a few hundred years. At the invitation of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders, we undertook archaeological excavations at Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Australian Alps. In GunaiKurnai Country, caves were not used as residential places during the early colonial period (mid-nineteenth century CE), but as secluded retreats for the performance of rituals by Aboriginal medicine men and women known as ‘mulla-mullung’, as documented by ethnographers. Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artefacts made of Casuarina wood smeared with animal or human fat, matching the configuration and contents of GunaiKurnai ritual installations described in nineteenth-century ethnography. These findings represent 500 generations of cultural transmission of an ethnographically documented ritual practice that dates back to the end of the last ice age and that contains Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts.
Determining the longevity of oral traditions and ‘intangible heritage’ has important implications for understanding information exchange through social networks down the generations. This can be achieved by tracking the origins and transmission of ethnographically known cultural practices through their associated material culture. However, understanding the issue of transmission has been fraught with difficulties. People often re-interpret and re-inscribe what they observe with new knowledge, altering the original information along the way (the hermeneutic process). Additionally, exposed material evidence can be seen for generations after a site’s construction, leaving it open to copying and re-interpretation under changing cultural contexts. One way out of this dilemma is to discover archaeological materials that could not have later been seen and copied, but that rather needed to have been passed on through intentional information exchange, such as through formal or familial education and training. In this Article, we report two examples of one such set of cultural materials from GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Country in southeastern Australia. Each consists of a wooden stick made from a Casuarina sp. tree stem. Each stick had been trimmed by cutting or scraping off smaller twigs flush with the stem. Each trimmed stick was smeared with fatty tissue. It was then placed in a low-temperature miniature fire, which burnt for a very short duration of time. The two installations were made deep in a secluded cave that was never used for everyday occupational activities. In each case, the miniature fireplace and its trimmed wooden artefact was rapidly buried by accumulating sediments at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and remained in situ until they were archaeologically excavated in 2020 CE, preserving the installation’s structural integrity in the process. Such wooden artefacts and their fireplace installations were previously only known from local nineteenth-century ethnography, but have now been archaeologically found dating back to the end of the last ice age, as reported here.
The examples we document here are testimony to the endurance of cultural practices and oral traditions unaffected by complications of visibility and copying. According to nineteenth-century GunaiKurnai ethnography, the ritual practices involving the construction of such installations took place in secluded locations. Additionally, their key wooden components normally decayed within a few years or decades, preventing them from being regularly seen by the broader population and copied over extended periods. Furthermore, the archaeological wooden objects were juxtaposed to or smeared with fatty tissue from animals or humans when they were used, matching ethnographic practice. This association of the artefacts with fat would have remained invisible to the naked eye and is thus not amenable to copying. The suite of factors contributing to the survival of both the installations and their wooden artefacts provides unparalleled insight into the resilience of GunaiKurnai narrative traditions and the passing down of knowledge. These artefacts, along with ethnographic evidence, demonstrate the transmission of ideas and practice over a timespan of 12,000 years.
The excavation methods used in this study are reported in Methods. All stages of the research comply with all relevant ethical regulations including the Australian Archaeological Association and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Codes of Ethics. This research was requested and led by, and undertaken with the participation of, the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation, representing the Aboriginal Traditional Owners of the study site. At the corporation’s request, the ethical protocols for this partnership research were formally written into a memorandum of understanding checked for ethical compliance and co-signed by the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation and Monash University on 23 October 2018.....
Cloggs Cave contains a number of archaeological features characteristic of GunaiKurnai ritual installations and practices. The following ritual features date to various times that together span some 23,000 years, indicating that the cave has been used for a range of ritual activities over this period of time: (1) a stone arrangement occurs at the back of a shallow recess towards the rear of the cave (the alcove). (2) Up to 80 cm above the floor of this recess, on the alcove’s low ceiling within human reach, many of the stalactites were artificially broken. Uranium–thorium ages for the bases of ‘soda straws’ (stalactitic filament regrowths) growing on the broken stalactite stumps indicate they started growing between 120 ± 30 and 23,230 ± 300 years ago, signalling that the stalactites had been broken within the period of confirmed Aboriginal presence in the cave, which began by ~25,000 cal BP (calibrated radiocarbon years before 1950 CE). (3) On the floor adjacent to the stone arrangement is a large patch of powdered (crushed) calcite. (4) A portable grindstone with traces of crushed calcite crystals, dated to between 1,535 and 2,084 cal BP, was excavated 8 m away near square P35 (refs. 13,14). (5) One hundred fifty-eight broken soda straws and crystal quartz artefacts were found in the excavations in squares P34–P35 and R31 (ref. 15). Nineteenth-century GunaiKurnai ethnography, along with current GunaiKurnai knowledge holders, identify these objects as bulk (pebbles) and groggin and kiin (crystals). Each of these object types was documented to hold ritual power and to have been used to perform magic and medicine. (6) A fully buried standing stone, around 2,000 years old, was excavated in square P35 (refs. 13,17). (7) Despite the presence of tens of thousands of bones from small vertebrates (from natural deaths, mainly from owl roosts), there are no vertebrate animal food remains in the excavations. (8) Local ethnography and current GunaiKurnai knowledge document that caves such as Cloggs Cave were never used for general occupation in GunaiKurnai Country; the lack of archaeological food remains in such caves is consistent with the ethnography. Rather, the caves were the retreats of mulla-mullung, powerful medicine men and women who practiced magic and rituals in secluded places.....
The full report can be downloaded at:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w.pdf
ABC News article of 2 July 2024 can be read at:
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| IMAGE: ABC News, 2 July 2024 |
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