The Archaeology of Tanamu 1: A Pre-Lapita to Post-Lapita Site from Caution Bay, South Coast of Mainland Papua New Guinea

[Extract] The discovery in 2010 of stratified Lapita assemblages at Caution Bay near Port Moresby, south coast of mainland Papua New Guinea (PNG) (David et al. 2011; McNiven et al. 2011), brought to the fore a series of important questions (Richards et al. 2016), many of which also apply to other parts of Island Melanesia where Lapita sites have been known for many decades. Unlike other parts of Melanesia, however, at Caution Bay some of the Lapita sites also have pre-Lapita horizons. A number are culturally very rich. At Caution Bay, where the oldest confirmed Lapita finds date to no earlier than c. 2900 cal BP (McNiven et al. 2012a), the major questions do not concern the earliest expressions of Lapita around 3300–3400 cal BP. Rather, here we are concerned more with identifying how assemblages associated with the Lapita cultural complex arrived and transformed along the south coast, after a presence in coastal and island regions to the northeast over the previous 400 years. These concerns contain both spatial and temporal elements: how and when, as a prelude to why, particular cultural traits continued and changed across Caution Bay. Tanamu 1 is the first of 122 archaeological sites excavated in Caution Bay upon which we will report. As a site, it represents the ideal entry point, as being a coastal site which contains pre-Lapita, Lapita and post-Lapita horizons it encapsulates many of the signatures, trends and transformations seen across the >5000 year Caution Bay sequence at large. Of special note in the wider context of Lapita archaeology, the presence of rich pre-Lapita horizons is what makes Caution Bay so important both in and of itself and for the Lapita story

Exploring palaeoecology in the Northern Territory: the Walanjiwurru rockshelter, vegetation dynamics and shifting social landscapes in Marra Country

This paper presents a palynological analysis of sediments from Walanjiwurru 1, a rockshelter located in the Country of the Marra Aboriginal people at Limmen National Park in the Northern Territory (Australia). Analysis seeks to test rockshelter sediments as a framework for research in an environmentally difficult location, and to explore how the palaeoecological record may capture the diversity of people-nature relationships over time in the Northern Territory. The Walanjiwurru 1 pollen record provides an approximate 500-year insight into the rockshelter’s surrounding landscape. Two plant communities demonstrate local presence across this time frame—foremost a drier eucalypt woodland, and a wetter fringing Melaleuca dominated habitat, each with an integrated series of monsoonal forest taxa. With only subtle shifts in vegetation, the Marra’s consistent maintenance of relations with their landscape is observable, and this is discussed in relation to the Walanjiwurru 1’s archaeology and regional European settler colonialism. Charcoal recovery from Walanjiwurru 1 is derived from in situ campfires, making it difficult to conclude on the response of plant types and vegetation communities to long-term landscape burning. Future palaeoecological research off-site from the rockshelter has therefore been recommended

Interpreting the mammal deposits of Cloggs Cave (SE Australia), GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Country, through community-led partnership research

Palaeontological animal bone deposits are rarely investigated through research partnerships where the local First Nations communities have a defining hand in both the research questions asked and the research processes. Here we report research undertaken through such a partnership approach at the iconic archaeological site of Cloggs Cave (GunaiKurnai Country, East Gippsland), in the southern foothills of SE Australia's Great Dividing Range. A new excavation was combined with detailed chronometric dating, high-resolution 3D mapping and geomorphological studies. This allowed interpretation of a sequence of stratigraphic layers spanning from a lowermost excavated mixed layer dated to between 25,640 and 48,470 cal BP, to a dense set of uppermost, ash layers dated to between 1460 and 3360 cal BP. This long and well-dated chronostratigraphic sequence enabled temporal trends in the abundant small mammal remains to be examined. The fossil assemblage consists of at least 31 taxa of mammals which change in proportions through time. Despite clear evidence that the Old Ancestors repeatedly carried vegetation into the cave to fuel cool fires (no visible vegetation grows in Cloggs Cave), we observed little to no evidence of cooking fires or calcined bone, suggesting that people had little involvement with the accumulation of the faunal remains. Small mammal bones were most likely deposited in the cave by large disc-faced owls, Tyto novaehollandae (Masked Owl) or Tyto tenebricosa (Sooty Owl). Despite being well dated and largely undisturbed, the Cloggs Cave assemblage does not appear to track known Late Quaternary environmental change. Instead, the complex geomorphology of the area fostered a vegetation mosaic that supported mammals with divergent habitat preferences. The faunal deposit suggests a local ancestral landscape characterised by a resilient mosaic of habitats that persisted over thousands of years, signalling that the Old Ancestors burned landscape fires to encourage and manage patches of different vegetation types and ages within and through periods of climate change

Geomorphological context and formation history of Cloggs Cave: What was the cave like when people inhabited it?

New research undertaken at Cloggs Cave, in the foothills of the Australian Alps, employed an integrated geological-geomorphological-archaeological approach with manifold dating methods and fine resolution LiDAR 3D mapping. Long-standing questions about the site’s chronostratigraphy (e.g. the exact relationship between basal megafaunal deposits and archaeological layers), sedimentation processes and geomorphic changes were resolved. The cave’s formation history was reconstructed to understand its changing morphology and morphogenic processes, and to clarify how these processes shaped the cave’s deposits. Key findings include the identification of: 1) the geomorphological processes that caused the lateral juxtaposition of 52,000 year-old megafaunal and later occupational layers; 2) the existence of one and possibly two (now-buried) palaeo-entrance(s) that enabled now-extinct megafauna and extant large fauna to enter the cave, most likely via a free-roaming passage rather than a pit drop; 3) morphological changes to the cave during the time of the Old People, including the timing of changes to the inclination of palaeo-surfaces; and 4) modifications to stalactites, crushing of calcite formations for the manufacture of powder, construction of a stone arrangement, and movement of large limestone blocks by the Old People. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate that to properly understand what Cloggs Cave was like when the Old People visited the site requires the construction of a narrative that spans some 400 million years and the development of an approach capable of integrating the many scales and processes (e.g. geological, geomorphological, archaeological) that configured to shape the site