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:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-02/gunaikurnai-ritual-fireplaces-sticks-cloggs-cave-archaeology/104034756
