Vic bushfires uncover ancient Aboriginal stone houses
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The World Today - Friday, 3 February , 2006 12:45:00
Reporter: Jennifer Macey
KAREN PERCY: The recent bushfires in Victoria have uncovered a remarkable archaeological site, the remains of stone houses believed to have been built by local Aborigines up to 8,000 years ago.
The discovery in the state's far west suggests not all Aboriginal people were nomads, as previously thought.
Last month’s devastating fire has revealed stones and rocks laid out in a village-style pattern, along with tools and eel traps.
Jennifer Macey reports.
JENNIFER MACEY: Out of the ashes of last months devastating bushfires, the Windamara Aboriginal Corporation has made a unique discovery.
The fires have cleared grass and brush, giving way to the remains of stone houses near Lake Condah in south-western Victoria.
Damien Bell manages the Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project and is the chairman of the Windamara Aboriginal Corporation.
DAMIEN BELL: The last time a fire went through the property was about 80 years ago, at the same time as feeling sort of sorrow and that for the fire going through, because we lost some fences and this and that along the way, never lost anything major. At the same time we were thinking what the fires were going to uncover, because the Tyrendarra property has huge national heritage values as part of the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape the values include the traditionally engineered agriculture system – that spreads over 100 square kilometres, and also the stone houses that represent permanent dwellings by Gunditj Mara people.
JENNIFER MACEY: The fire wiped out 90 per cent of the 240-hectare Tyrendarra Indigenous Protected Area.
It's part of the Lake Condah heritage listed national park, and close to the site of a previous archaeological dig which found remnants of ancient stone huts and a complex eel farming and smoking operation.
But the size of the latest discovery has surprised Mr Bell.
DAMIEN BELL: Well, with the normal sized house that we know about, we sort of reckon that housed a family, but with this bigger house we’re thinking about three or four families living in that. Because with the landscape you’d have your house there for sleeping and also for shelter, so yeah, so you know, you’d be outside conducting a lot of your work, a lot of your aquaculture, a lot of your fish farming and so forth, plus your hunting of other animals. And yeah, so they were there for sleeping and it looked like a lot of people slept in this house.
JENNIFER MACEY: And he says the findings dispel previous assumptions that all Aboriginal people were nomadic.
For years Australian anthropologists believed that Australia's Indigenous population were hunter-gatherers who roamed the country.
These stone remains have put that theory into question, say archaeologists.
Dr Peter Vess is the director of research at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra.
PETER VESS: Look, I think the whole idea that even 30 or 40 years ago that most people had, that all Aboriginal people were completely nomadic, weren’t rooted to a single place, didn’t have territories, has been completely overturned. We know this now through people’s totemic affiliations to places. We know this from their own life histories, from both Arnhem Land through to Tasmania, and we know from now, increasingly the archaeology shows from the house structures on High Cliffy Island and the Kimberley, where people lived also on a semi-permanent basis in house structures through to these very extensive stone villages, if you like, and eel races and resource manipulation areas, that Aboriginal resources were much more complex and diverse than this very simplistic notion that people just wandered the land, almost aimlessly. They couldn’t be more incorrect.
JENNIFER MACEY: And he says these types of dwellings are not only restricted to south-western Victoria.
PETER VESS: The colleagues and I have actually recorded hundreds of stone house structures on islands from the Kimberly coastline, on the Buccaneer Archipelago. They’ve been recorded from some parts of the Pilbara, and from the Murchison in central western portions of WA. But they’re certainly not common. They tend to be in areas which are extremely rich in certain resources. So in the Kimberley it might be the fish dugong and marine shellfish flats at the Montgomery Reef, to the Murchison it was probably because of the incredibly rich eluvial terraces that had yams and other resources. And here in Victoria it looks like these incredible concentrations of eels, aquatic resources that people could actually focus on and manipulate.
So, again, it turns upside-down the whole idea that people wandered aimlessly.
KAREN PERCY: Dr Peter Vess, Director of Research at the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Studies in Canberra.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1561665.htm
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