02 July 2024, Archaeologists have unearthed charcoaled remains of fires that smoldered over 10,000 years ago, providing evidence of what may be the longest continuing ritual, shared across generations of Indigenous Australians since the end of the last ice age.
The ancestral lands of the GunaiKurnai Aboriginal people, located in the foothills of the Australian Alps in southeastern Australia, extend southwest to the Victorian coast. These caves, not used for shelter but as secluded retreats for magic practitioners known as mulla-mullung, have been a site of continuous ritual practices.
Ethnographers documented these practices in the 1800s, but archaeologists in the 1970s overlooked them due to their focus on secular interpretations of the caves. Now, a team of archaeologists working with the GunaiKurnai people has described two miniature fireplaces ringed by limestone rocks, each containing a single stick of Casuarina wood stripped of side branches and smeared with fatty tissue.
Ethnographic accounts from the 19th century describe rituals conducted in caves by an esteemed “doctor” away from the rest of the community. Some European accounts describe the role as one who “bewitched” or “healed … of bewitching”, with objects touched by an intended victim attached to a piece of wood and burnt briefly with some human or animal fat.
Monash University archaeologist Bruno David, GunaiKurnai Elder Russell Mullett, and their colleagues have now uncovered evidence of this practice deep within Cloggs Cave.
The fireplaces, buried soon after they were last used by sediments dating back some 10,000-12,000 years to the end of the last ice age and the dawn of the Holocene, are nearly identical, yet dating suggests they were built and used 1,000 years apart.
Excavated in 2020 with the permission and help of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders, the fireplaces and wooden implements have been preserved out of sight for millennia. This preservation supports claims that the GunaiKurnai people’s traditions have been orally shared for at least 10,000 years.
“The suite of factors contributing to the survival of both [fireplaces] and their wooden artifacts provides unparalleled insight into the resilience of GunaiKurnai narrative traditions,” David and his colleagues write.
“These findings are not about the memory of ancestral practices, but of the passing down of knowledge in virtually unchanged form, from one generation to the next, over some 500 generations.”
After centuries of colonial dispossession and dismissal, archaeologists and other scientists are beginning to learn from and work more respectfully with Australia’s First Nations peoples, integrating traditional knowledge into scientific analyses to enrich and strengthen findings.
These analyses, often of genetic histories, confirm what Indigenous peoples have known and asserted through oral traditions: their deep connections to their ancestral lands. For instance, ancient creation stories of the Gunditjmara people’s ancestors align with geological records of volcanic eruptions, and oral traditions of the Palawa people of Tasmania describe the flooding of a land bridge connecting the island to mainland Australia some 12,000 years ago.
This new work with the GunaiKurnai people stands out as it uncovers delicate handmade remnants of ritual practices, preserved much like the oral traditions themselves.
Read Now:Incredible Hydrothermal Environment Discovered Deep Beneath the Ocean
