Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Throughout all levels were flaked stone tools such as scrapers, unretouched flakes and large choppers. Stone tools were used for cutting as well as for making wooden tools, such as spears. They also used shells for working with wood. Choppers and large scrapers were used for general chopping and hammering. One known use was to cut notches in trees they used to climb after possums. They were also known to have choppee into the bark of cider gum (Eucalyptus gunnii) to obtain the sap which was slightly intoxicating, the alcohol of the Australian stone age.

Hafting of stone tools never developed in Tasmania, even though it was being used to make complex tools in northern Australia during the Pleistocene. There is now some evidence, in the forms of blood traces on bone points, that they were hafted to spears for hunting wallabies during the Pleistocene. It is also believed bone points hafted to spears may have been used to spear large fish early in the occupation of Rocky Cape.

Overall, the technological tradition showed a continuity in Tasmania from the ice age to the time of contact, but there was also change within this tradition. The size of stone tools gradually decreased and the adoption of better raw materials, with better flaking properties, for their production, as with the adoption of chert, spongolite, and siliceous breccia, that were obtained from places such as the quarries at Rebecca Creek, 100 km away on the west coast, where spongolite was quarried. In the early period of occupation of the Rocky Cape caves the stone tools were flaked and finished in the caves, but once the raw material was obtained from some distance away it was worked, at least to the stage of blanks, at the quarry.

Many bone implements of a wide variety were being used in the caves at Rocky Cape 7,000 years ago. Macropod shin bones were being made into awls, round-tipped points, needles with fine points but no 'eye', wide spatulas and a number of pointed bone slivers. Very few bone tools were being used by 4,000 years ago and by 3,500 years ago they are no longer found. Evidence from other sites in Tasmania supports the disappearance of bone tools. At the time of contact no bone tools were seen to be used by any Aboriginal People in Tasmania. It has been suggested that the lack of bone points after 3,500 years ago was associated with the change away from fish eating, and a study has found traces of fish blood on the bone points, indicating that they had been used for spearing fish, so were no longer needed when fish were no longer eaten (Flood, 2004).

It has been suggested that bone tools stopped being used when the people stopped making fur cloaks or rugs by sewing animal skins together (Flood, 2004). At the time of contact the Tasmanian Aboriginal People wore only skin cloaks that came from a single animal, that were fastened by tying 2 strips of the skin together, they were not made by sewing several skins together, which were often fastened by a bone pin or toggle, as occurred on the Australian mainland at the that time. On the mainland bone implements were used to make holes in skins so they could be sewn together.

A suggestion has been that the skins were not needed once the ice age had closed, but Tasmania is far enough south to often be affected by cold Antarctic winds. At the time of contact the Aboriginal People in the colder parts of the Australian mainland were using cloaks and rugs of possum skins sewn together to keep warm. The mainlanders were still using bone implements to make and fasten their skin cloaks at the time of contact.

Other differences are the use of certain tools. On the Australian mainland a number of tools that were being used during the Pleistocene, barbed wooden spears, hafted tools, boomerangs and ground edge axes, were not seen in Tasmania at the time of contact. Analysis of the use-wear patterns of artefacts from the Tasmanian Pleistocene has shown they were being used to prepare skins and make spear points used for hunting red-necked wallabies. The discovery of their use for hunting wallabies in the Pleistocene was unexpected because by the Holocene they no longer existed. It appears they had knowledge of hafting bone to spears in the Pleistocene, but it had been lost by the Holocene, where there are no known examples of hafting of either stone of bone.

Food at Rocky Cape

Sources & Further reading

Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J.B. Publishing, 2004

Links

Prehistory of Australia