Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age
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Mullett, Russell
Wright, Nathan
Stephenson, Birgitta
Ash, Jeremy
Freslov, Joanna
GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation
Delannoy, Jean-Jacques
McDowell, Matthew C
Mialanes, Jerome
Petchey, Fiona
Arnold, Lee J
Rogers, Ashleigh J
Crouch, Joe
Green, Helen
et al.
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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.
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Nature Human Behaviour
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© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access 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/.
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David, B; Mullett, R; Wright, N; Stephenson, B; Ash, J; Freslov, J; GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation; Delannoy, J-J; McDowell, MC; Mialanes, J; Petchey, F; Arnold, LJ; Rogers, AJ; Crouch, J; Green, H; Urwin, C; Matheson, CD, Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age, Nature Human Behaviour, 2024