The Lizard Island Group, where the very first pieces of pottery were found. Image credits: Philip Morton
In new research, we report the oldest securely dated ceramics found in Australia from archaeological excavations on Jiigurru (in the Lizard Island group) on the northern Great Barrier Reef located 600km south of Torres Strait. Our analysis shows the pottery was made locally more than 1800 years earlier.
Over the previous 400 years, pottery from southeast Asia appeared across northern Australia, related to the activities of Makassan individuals from Sulawesi (this activity was primarily trepanging, or gathering sea cucumbers). Older pottery in Australia is just known from the Torres Strait nearby to the Papua New Guinea coast, where a couple of lots pottery pieces have been reported, mostly dating to around 1700 years earlier.
Pottery was mainly unknown in Australia before the current past, in spite of widely known pottery traditions in close-by Papua New Guinea and the islands of the western Pacific. The lack of ancient Indigenous pottery in Australia has actually long puzzled researchers.
Why has no evidence been found of early pottery use by Aboriginal individuals? Different descriptions have actually been proposed, consisting of recommending that archaeologists simply werent looking hard enough. Well now, weve found some.
Discovering pottery at Jiigurru
In 2013 we returned to Jiigurru to excavate a shell midden on a headland near where the Blue Lagoon pottery was found. A shell midden represents a location where individuals lived, containing food remains (shells, bones), charcoal from campfires, and stone tools left behind.
Back in 2006, a number of pieces of pottery were discovered in Blue Lagoon on Jiigurru, 33km off mainland Cape York Peninsula.
Finding pottery at Jiigurru raised some big questions. How old was it? Was it made by regional Aboriginal neighborhoods? Or was it traded in from somewhere else? If so, where did it come from? Was it from a European shipwreck? Or was it made by the well-known Lapita people who colonised the islands of the southwest Pacific?
Radiocarbon dating showed individuals began camping at this place some 4,000 years earlier, making it the oldest website then understood at Jiigurru. However no pottery was found.
Initial analyses revealed the majority of the pottery was made from regional products. Regardless of a lot of work, our efforts to identify the age of this pottery were undetermined and we were no closer to working out how old it is, or who made it.
Our team excavated numerous more pieces of pottery from Blue Lagoon in 2009, 2010 and 2012.
A more comprehensive search
To our amazement, around 40cm listed below the surface we started to find pieces of pottery amongst the shells in the excavation. We understood this was a huge offer. We thoroughly bagged each piece of pottery and mapped where each sherd originated from, and kept digging.
The excavation in development. Sean Ulm
By 2016 the group had reached a dead end in examining the few pieces of pottery we had. Instead, operating in collaboration with Traditional Owners, we turned the research program to the amazing Indigenous history of the whole of Jiigurru and began surveying all the islands.
Some of the pottery pieces excavated at Jiigurru. Steve Morton
The pottery stopped at about 80cm depth, with 82 pieces of pottery in overall. The majority of are very small, with an average length of simply 18 millimetres. The pottery assemblage includes rim and neck pieces and a few of the pottery is decorated with pigment and incised lines.
In 2017 we started excavating a large shell midden at Jiigurru situated throughout the surveys.
The oldest pottery
We had another surprise waiting for us.
The reef shells eaten and disposed of in these lowest levels had actually been buried so quickly that they still have colour on their surface areas. Historical sites of this depth and age are unusual anywhere around the Australian coast.
We decreased a laser scanner into the finished excavation pit to record the thick collection of shells found in the walls. Ian J McNiven
The deepest cultural material was discovered almost two metres below the surface area, in levels we radiocarbon dated to around 6,500 years earlier. This is the earliest evidence for offshore island use on the northern Great Barrier Reef.
Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and shells found near to the pottery shows that it is in between 2,950 and 1,815 years old, making it the earliest safely outdated pottery ever discovered in Australia. Analysis of the clays and tempers shows that all of the pottery was likely made on Jiigurru.
What does it tell us that we didnt currently know?
They were not separated or geographically constrained, as when developed.
The results likewise show that Aboriginal communities had sophisticated boat and navigational abilities in using their Sea Country estates more than 6,000 years ago.
Cultural interactions prevailed around the Coral Sea. Ian J McNiven
The findings are clear evidence that Aboriginal people made and utilized pottery countless years earlier.
The historical proof does not point to outsiders bringing pottery directly to Jiigurru. Rather, the evidence reveals that Cape York First Nations communities were totally taken part in ancient maritime networks, connecting them with peoples, knowledges and innovations throughout the Coral Sea area, consisting of the understanding of how to make pottery.
What else do not we understand?
This post is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original post.
Extremely little research study has actually been conducted anywhere on eastern Cape York Peninsula. We believe it is extremely not likely that Jiigurru holds the only secrets to our nations peopled past. What other cultural and historic surprises await to be found?
The Jiigurru pottery gives us new insight into Australias history and the worldwide reach of First Nations communities countless years before British intrusion in 1788.
Sean Ulm, Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Futures and histories, James Cook University; Ian J. McNiven, Professor of Indigenous Archaeology; Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity & & Heritage, Monash University, and Kenneth McLean, Director, Walmbaar Aboriginal Corporation, Indigenous Knowledge
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Why has no evidence been found of early pottery usage by Aboriginal people? Finding pottery at Jiigurru raised some huge questions. To our amazement, around 40cm below the surface we started to discover pieces of pottery among the shells in the excavation. The pottery stopped at about 80cm depth, with 82 pieces of pottery in overall. The pottery assemblage includes rim and neck pieces and some of the pottery is decorated with pigment and incised lines.