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New discoveries on a small Australian island are rewriting our understanding of the culture and technology of the country’s early people.
It has long been believed that the ancient Aboriginal peoples of Australia did not have pottery. A few examples are known from the Torres Strait Islands, near Papua New Guinea, mostly dating to c.1,700 years ago, but the archaeological record contains no evidence of pottery use by Aboriginal people until Southeast Asian ceramics started to appear c.400 years ago. This puzzled archaeologists, as older pottery traditions are known to have existed nearby in Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia, and other islands of the western Pacific.
Now excavations have shed fresh light on this mystery. The discovery occurred on Jiigurru (Lizard Island Group), an archipelago off Australia’s north-east coast, on the northern Great Barrier Reef. A few dozen pieces of pottery were found in intertidal areas on these islands between 2006 and 2012, but efforts to date them proved inconclusive. However, a full survey of the islands followed, and in a large shell midden on a headland on Jiigurru’s South Island, archaeologists found something remarkable: 82 ancient potsherds.
The assemblage is made up of very small fragments, averaging just 17.7mm long. It includes several rim and neck pieces of pots, and a few examples decorated with pigment, but the pieces are too small to tell us much about vessel type or manufacturing techniques. They therefore cannot be dated stylistically. However, radiocarbon dating of charcoal and shells found in the same layers as the ceramics has revealed that they are between 3,000 and 2,000 years old. This makes them the oldest securely dated pottery ever found in Australia.
Analysis of the ceramics determined that they were almost certainly made in Jiigurru, indicating that the Aboriginal peoples in this region were not only using pottery thousands of years ago, but were creating it themselves using local materials. It is likely that their knowledge of pottery and its production was obtained from other cultures across the Coral Sea region, indicating that ancient communities on Australia’s north-east coast were part of wider long-distance social networks connecting them with the peoples of Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait, and the Pacific Islands.
Most of the ceramic fragments discovered are too small to tell us much about the vessels they came from, but their existence is evidence of a previously unrecognised early pottery tradition in the region.
Excavations of the midden on South Island also revealed older cultural material in lower levels, the earliest of which has been dated to c.6,500 years ago. This is a highly unusual find on the Australian coastline, and represents the earliest evidence for island use on the northern Great Barrier Reef. At that time, the island would have been 30km offshore: this discovery therefore provides clear evidence for the existence of sophisticated maritime skills at this point in time.
The recent discoveries on Jiigurru, published in Quaternary Science Reviews (https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.quascirev.2024.108624), have a significant impact on our understanding of the ancient Aboriginal peoples of Australia, challenging old stereotypes about their capabilities and the ‘sophistication’ of their cultures, as well as painting a new picture of their relationships with other cultures in the wider Pacific region. The findings may inspire further research that could uncover more examples of early pottery in Australia, particularly along the understudied north-east Queensland coast.
Text: Amy Brunskill / Images: Ariana Lambrides; Steve Morton
