David, Bruno, Mullett, Russell, Wright, Nathan, Stephenson, Birgitta, Ash, Jeremy, Fresløv, Joanna, Delannoy, Jean-jacques, McDowell, Matthew C., Mialanes, Jerome, Petchey, Fiona, Arnold, Lee J., Rogers, Ashleigh J., Crouch, Joe, Green, Helen, Urwin, Chris, and Matheson, Carney D. (2024) Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age. Nature Human Behaviour, 8. pp. 1481-1492.

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Abstract

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.

Item ID:	85722
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2397-3374
Copyright Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funders:	ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage
Projects and Grants:	ARC CE170100015
Date Deposited:	04 Jun 2025 00:21
FoR Codes:	45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4501 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, language and history > 450101 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander archaeology @ 70% 43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4301 Archaeology > 430101 Archaeological science @ 30%
SEO Codes:	21 INDIGENOUS > 2104 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture > 210401 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artefacts @ 50% 21 INDIGENOUS > 2104 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture > 210407 Conserving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture @ 50%
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