2024-07-04 07:04:04
The ancestral lands of the GunaiKurnai Aboriginal people lie in the foothills of the Australian Alps, an area of south-eastern Australia dotted with boulders and limestone caves – and extending southwest to the coast of the state of Victoria.
The Gunai Kurnas did not use these caves as shelters, but as secluded retreats for practitioners of magic called mulla-mullung. Ethnographers recorded this practice in the 19th century, but in the 20th century Archaeologists who explored the caves in the 1960s ignored them—because the magical rituals did not fit with their largely secular interpretations of caves as places to cook and sleep.
Now, a team of archaeologists working with the GunaiKurnai people has excavated and described two miniature hearths surrounded by limestone rock rings, each containing a pruned stick of casuarina wood smeared with tallow.
19th century Australian ethnographic accounts describe rituals, which were performed in the caves by a respected “healer” separated from other members of the community. Some European accounts describe this role as that of a “charmer”, referring to objects taken from or touched by the intended victim, which were attached to a piece of wood and burned using human or animal fat.
Monash University archaeologist Bruno David, GunaiKurnai Elder Russell Mullett and their colleagues have now discovered traces of this practice deep inside Cloggs Cave.
The igneous rocks in the cave are thought to have been quickly buried shortly after they were last used, with sediments that are about 10,000 to 12,000 years old, marking the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene (the current geological epoch). Furthermore, the two firebrands are almost identical – but the team’s dating shows that they were put together and used 1,000 years apart.
in 2020 With the permission of the GunaiKurna Aboriginal elders, firewood and wooden tools were dug up – and if they had not been underground for thousands of years, they would surely have decayed.
This makes it unlikely that the abandoned remains of the ritual could have been seen and copied by modern cave visitors – supporting claims that the traditions of the GunaiKurnai people have been passed down orally for at least 10,000 years.
“The factors that led to both [ugniakurų] and the survival of their wooden artifacts, together provide unparalleled insight into the resilience of GunaiKurnai storytelling traditions, B. David and his colleagues write in a research paper. “These findings are not related to the memory of ancestral practices, but to the transmission of knowledge in an almost unchanged form from generation to generation, over about 500 generations.”
After centuries of colonial rejection, archaeologists (and other scientists) are beginning to learn from and work more respectfully with Australia’s first inhabitants, incorporating their traditional knowledge into scientific analysis – to enrich and strengthen scientific findings.
These analyses, often genetic histories, confirm what indigenous peoples have known for a long time and have continued to assert through oral tradition: they maintain close ties to their ancestral lands.
In Australia, researchers compared ancient creation stories, which say that the ancestors of the Gunditchmara people were born from volcanic eruptions, with the geological record of the same events.
Also, the oral traditions of the Palawa people of Tasmania tell of rising seas which flooded the land bridge about 12,000 years agoconnecting the island to the Australian mainland – and about the constellations that lit up the night sky at the time.
This new work on the GunaiKurnai people is a bit different in that the team found subtle remnants of ritual practices that have survived as well as the oral traditions themselves.
The study is published žurnale „Nature Human Behaviour“.
„Sicence Alert“ fatigue warning.
2024-07-04 07:04:04