Post by UKarchaeology on Apr 2, 2016 21:05:40 GMT
A unique, collaborative research team are working together to explore and research the marine life, botanical, maritime, and cultural connections associated with the Recherche Archipelago in southern Western Australia. The team’s recent expedition to Middle Island resulted in the discovered of a diagnostic stone implement (end scraper) made by the Traditional Owners of this region – that demonstrates links to the mainland.
The implement is a small piece of fine-grained chert that has been worked to a sharp, serrated edge on one end, and blunted or backed on the other end. This technique is a signature design element for a composite implement, where the stone tool was hafted onto a wooden shaft. The hafting method uses a resin made from the locally available grass tree (known traditionally as a balga or paalaq). Yet, no grass trees today survive on Middle Island.
“This indicates one of three things,” said archaeologist David Guilfoyle, of Applied Archaeology Australia. “The tree has become locally extinct on the island; or this implement was used during a time of lower sea levels, when people could walk to this granite dome; or that this implement was brought over to the island in more recent times.”
The first scenario is an area of investigation for this team examining the effects of island formation and the interactions of people, plants and animals for maintaining biodiversity. “It may be no coincidence,” says Doc Reynolds, “that when you remove people from the land, we also see a loss of cultural plants and animals.”
The second scenario relates to the last Ice Age, when global temperatures were much colder than today, causing the expansion of the sea ice at both the south and north poles, dropping the ocean levels around the planet. In this part of the world, some 80-100 kilometres of coastline extended from the modern day shoreline at the height of the last Ice Age, some 18,000 years ago. Over time, as the planet gradually warmed, the ice caps melted, and the sea levels rose. This flooded the vast coastal plain, and created the spectacular Recherche Archipelago. Middle Island may have been isolated form the mainland for some 3-4000 years.
“We know that these implements were hafted to a wooden shaft using the resin of the grass tree,” said Doc Reynolds, Elder and Cultural Heritage Officer for the Esperance Tjaltjaak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation. “We also know that there are no balga trees on Middle Island, so it might be evidence of the use of this area when it was all connected to the mainland, several thousand years ago.”
Full story (and lots of pictures): www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/03/2016/discovery-sheds-light-on-australian-island-mainland-interaction