Madjedbebe

LEARNING INTENTIONS

To describe the origins of ancient Australia.
To explain the dating of archaeological sources in Australia through the use of scientific analysis and what this technique reveals about ancient Australia.
To analyse hunting tools and grinding stones and explain their significance to understanding ancient Australia.

The First Australians

Much of our knowledge about the earliest people in Australia comes from archaeology. The physical remains of human activity that have survived in the archaeological record are largely stone tools, rock art and ochre, shell middens and charcoal deposits and human skeletal remains. These all provide information on the tremendous length and complexity of Australian Aboriginal culture.

This piece of ochre, excavated from the Madjebebe (Malakunanja II) site in Arnhem Land, is believed to be over 50,000 years old.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

It must be noted that apart from stone artefacts, most of the everyday utilitarian objects used by Aboriginal people were made of organic materials such as fur, feathers, bark and basketry; and these do not survive in the archaeological records. Instead, what tends to survive are hardier artefacts made of stone, bone and shells.

The first Australians inhabited places, but evidence of their presence may be difficult to detect, even when using archaeology and other scientific methods.

Deep Time Dreaming - Madjedbebe

NOTE

The earliest dates for human occupation of Australia come from sites in the Northern Territory. The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land has a widely accepted date of about 50,000 years old. Reports of a date close to around 65,000 years old (Nature, 2017), which was contentious at the time, have been rebutted by Allen & O'Connell in 2020.

Molecular clock estimates, genetic studies and archaeological data all suggest the initial colonisation of Sahul and Australia by modern humans occurred around 48,000–50,000 years ago.

The site contains the oldest ground-edge stone axe technology in the world, the oldest known seed-grinding tools in Australia and evidence of finely made stone points which may have served as spear tips. Most striking of all, in a region known for its spectacular rock art, are the huge quantities of ground ochre and evidence of ochre processing found at the site, from the older layer continuing through to the present.

Archaeologist Chris Clarkson University of Queensland Brisbane.

Edge-ground hatchet head being excavated. Photograph: Chris Clarkson/Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation

Artifacts from the 2012 and 2015 excavations at the Madjedbebe rockshelter.

Scale bars are 1 cm unless indicated otherwise.

(a) ground hatchet head. Scale bar – 5 cm. Top insets and micrographs show striations and grinding (left; scale bar – 2 mm) and edge rounding and polish from use (right; scale bar – 0.2 mm). Bottom micrograph and inset show polish (scale bar – 0.2 mm) from movement inside the haft.

(b) edge-ground margin on flake. Scale bar – 5 mm. Bottom-right inset (scale bar – 2 mm) shows striations (arrows) from use and grinding. Top-left, the ground edge is shown viewed from the side. Top-right, the ground edge is shown viewed from the front.

(d) silcrete thinning flake.

(e) sandstone grinding stone.

(f) mortar, used to pound hard plant material and with possible outline motif in the bottom-right corner.

(g) ground ochre ‘crayon.’

(h) faceted discoidal core.

(i) conjoining ochre-covered slab; inset shows fragment of mica embedded in a thick coating of ochre, with blue circles at the < 8.5-mm-diameter pXRF sampling locations.

(j) charcoal lines and dots on sandstone piece.

(k-m) pieces of sheet mica found wrapped around a large, ground yellow ochre ‘crayon’ (n).

(o-q) photographs of a maxillary fragment of a thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), coated in red pigment. The probable age of the thylacine specimen is 2,700-3,900 years before present.

(o) archaeological specimen (left) is shown relative to a modern thylacine cast.

(p) and (q) detail of ochred surface at 6.7x magnification (scale bar – 10 mm) and 45x magnification (scale bar – 1 mm), respectively.

Image credit: Clarkson et al, doi: 10.1038/nature22968.

What is the significance of striations? How do they help archaeologists?

Thylacine

The Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus: dog-headed pouched-dog) is a large carnivorous marsupial now believed to be extinct.

As archaeologist Chris Clarkson was excavating a rock shelter in northern Australia one day in 2015, May, Nango, of the aboriginal Mirarr group brought her grandchildren to look at the pit. She pointed to a spot near the back wall of the red sandstone cliff and told the children that it was a wonderful place for their ancestors—the "old people"—to sleep 65,000 years ago, says Clarkson of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Nango's tale was more than an aboriginal "dreamtime" story. She was one of the first to hear from Clarkson's team about new scientific dates for the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Australia's Arnhem Land, a region the Mirarr still call home.

“We like to stay forever, we’re buried here too. We like to stay forever on our land, and we like to teach our young kids too so they remember our old people who gave us the stories.”

The site of the Madjedbebe rock shelter has been excavated twice by Clarkson’s team, under a special agreement with the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, in partnership with the current leaseholders, Energy Resources of Australia.

Under the agreement, which Clarkson described as one of the strongest in Australia, the Mirarr have total control over the extent of the dig, and veto power. All discoveries must be reported to them and all artefacts must be returned to the Mirarr at the end of the project.

“They have to bring it back here, it belongs to this place,” said May Nango, a Mirarr traditional owner. “We trust them to work this place.”

Simon Mudjandi, a Mirarr traditional owner, said his family had travelled through the area and camped at Madjedbebe for generations.

I feel proud to come from here because country is important and country needs people. It’s special because it has a lot of sacred sites, and back in the old days our old people used to walk over here looking for bush tucker. They used the rocks and axes.

Mark Djandjomerr, a Bininj elder and family to Mirarr, said he camped at Madjedbebe as a boy, taking shelter with his family as they walked between communities, avoiding nearby hunting safari sites.

Mirrar people own this country. This is Mirarr home, we need to protect it.

Artefacts were both carbon dated and dated using optically stimulated luminescence, a technique that measures the radiative signature of a grain of sand to measure when it was last exposed to sunlight.

That dating method meant samples had to be extracted in complete darkness under red lights.

“We worked in darkroom conditions,” the University of Wollongong research fellow Prof Zenobia Jacobs said. “The moment we expose it to UV or sunlight it will reset that signal within seconds.”

ancient australia.pdf

Read this news article from 2017 and then explain the scientific processes that were used to date the artefacts found at the Madjedbebe rock shelter.

Stone tools

Stone tools in Australia, as in other parts of the world, changed and developed through time. Some early types, such as wasted blades, core tools, large flake scrapers and split pebble choppers continue to be made and used right up to today.

About 6000 years ago, new and specialised tools such as points, backed blades and thumbnail scrapers became common. Significant variation between the tool kits of different regions also appeared. Prototypes for this technology appeared earlier in Asia, suggesting this innovation was introduced into Australia.

The ground stone technique produces tools with a more durable and even edge, although not as sharp as a chipped tool. The oldest ground stone tools appear in Australia about 10,000 years before they appear in Europe, suggesting that early Australians were more technologically advanced in some of their tool manufacturing techniques than was traditionally thought.

Watch the video (10 minutes)

Go to the linked website here and select three stone tools imaged in 3D on the Stonetoolsmuseum website.

Describe their features, discuss how many have been made and used, and consider what they reveal about how people lived in ancient Australia.

Dr Griffiths experienced his first archaeological dig at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Kakadu, where, using new techniques, archaeologists dramatically enlarged the timescale of Australian history, dating the Indigenous history of human habitation back at least 65,000 years.

Rock Art at Madgedbebe

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