Groundbreaking archaeological research may have overturned a long-held belief that Australian Aborigines did not make pottery.
A paper published Wednesday in Quaternary Science Reviews details 82 pottery sherds found at a single excavation site on the island of the Great Barrier Reef, dating them to be between 3,000 and 2,000 years old and determining that the pottery was likely made by Aboriginal people. using locally sourced clay and mortar.
These sherds are the oldest precisely dated pottery discovered in Australia, making Australian aborigines an ocean-going human network that formed “a cultural community across the Coral Sea” in Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait and the Pacific Islands, the article says . . Pottery shards have also been found in the Torres Strait.
Archaeologists say the finds have opened “a new page in the archeology of Australia, Melanesia and the Pacific.”
Kenneth McLean, chairman of the Walmbaar Aboriginal Corporation, is a member of the Dingaal clan and traditional owner of the group of islands where the pottery was unearthed.
“For our elders, Jiigurru was always a sacred place,” McLean said. “This was always a place of trade and ceremony.”
Distinguished professor Sean Ulm of James Cook University, who led the excavation with Prof Ian McNiven of Monash University and the Dingaal and Ngurrumungu communities, says the findings not only disrupt ideas about Aboriginal people and pottery, but also a number of “very common tropes”. It’s about Indigenous Australians.
The first is that they are all isolated from the rest of the world. Another concerns the simplicity of Aboriginal watercraft.
The Jiigurru chain of islands, the largest of which is the 10 square kilometer Lizard Island, surrounds a lagoon about 33 km from Cape Flattery.
The 2.4-metre deep excavation revealed evidence of continuous occupation dating back more than 6,000 years on the islands, which were cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels at least 10,000 years ago.
A small glimpse into the extraordinary knowledge we have yet to uncover
Sean Ulm
McLean believes his ancestors used clay pots to transport resources such as water and shellfish on long canoe journeys to the islands.
“Keeping locally made pottery pieces in the countryside made one feel the presence of my ancestors,” she said. “It was an emotional moment, holding something old.”
There is a lot to learn about how pottery is made and came to be. The average size of the pieces is less than 2cm; It is too small and fragmented to reveal much of its original form and functions.
Ulm says such an important story told by such small pieces of tilled land explains why it took years for the research to reach publication.
The excavation began in mid-2017 and ended 14 months later. But their findings will challenge the widely accepted view among academics because the pottery shards were first detected at Jiigurru by a New Zealand archaeologist snorkeling in the shallow lagoon at Jiigurru in 2006.
Efforts to date these pottery sherds were inconclusive, but they have been interpreted by many as direct evidence of the presence of Lapita people in Australia.
The Lapitas and their descendants settled large areas of remote Oceania from the islands of eastern Papua New Guinea for several centuries; pigs, dogs, chickens, taro and breadfruit, and their distinctive pottery to the Solomon Islands and eastward across the Pacific to Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.
Ulm’s article describes it as “one of humanity’s greatest achievements of maritime settlement.”
But when Ulm and his colleagues went looking for more pottery shards using a methodical excavation method that might shed light on who made the Jiigurru pottery, they found none of the tell-tale signs that suggest Lapita, such as chicken bones or banana prints. job. Instead, the shellfish and fish bones in the midden were a harbinger of continued Native occupation. And none of the ceramic pieces bore the distinctive designs of Lapita potters.
The find raises the question of why pottery sherds have not been found since about 2000 years ago, even though seasonal settlement continued. Ulm says this is a question that cannot be answered from a single excavation site and will require more research to resolve.
McLean also hopes the research will encourage greater collaboration between Indigenous communities and archaeologists to “find more ancient artefacts that could rewrite Australia’s ancient history”.
University of Southern Queensland professor Bryce Barker, who was not involved in the research, said it was “absolutely very important” and “exemplary research”.
“The science in this paper is exemplary; you can’t blame the science,” he said. “I don’t think there is any doubt that there were 3,000 pots there.”
But he said the claim that Aboriginal people made the pottery was “somewhat controversial”.
“Perhaps the more parsimonious explanation for the presence of this pottery on Lizard Island is that it was part of trade and interaction with people from the north, rather than something produced by Aboriginal people,” he said.
Related researchers suggest that ancient pottery from the Great Barrier Reef “points to the possibility” of more remains, including Lapita, scattered “across a vast and archaeologically unknown northeast Queensland coastline”.
“To me, that’s what’s exciting about this find, is that it’s a small glimpse into extraordinary information that we haven’t yet uncovered about the deep history of this country,” Ulm said.
“If a one meter by one meter dig can tell us all these ‘new things’, what can the rest of the coastline teach us?”