Oldest ground-edge stone tool found in Arnhem Land
The Age
Tuesday February 15, 2011
THE piece of stone was so small that at first no one noticed it. It was only when he returned to Melbourne from the Northern Territory that archaeologist Bruno David gave it a second glance.What he and an international team of archaeologists had unearthed was a section of a stone axe whose blade had been ground down thousands of years earlier than any similar object previously located. The fragment just four centimetres long was dug up in a large rock-shelter in Jawoyn Aboriginal land in south-western Arnhem Land.Dr David says he noticed the fragment when he began examining excavated sediments in one of Monash's archaeology laboratories."I emptied the bag full of rocks and sand from the layer we had been excavating and immediately saw the fragment in the tray in the laboratory," he says. Then New Zealand scientist Fiona Petchey from the Waikato Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory prepared four pieces of charcoal, taken from just above and below where the axe fragment was found, and radiocarbon-dated them to a time period 35,500 years ago.This is earlier than the previous oldest examples of ground-edge implements dated at 26,000-34,000 years old in Japan and elsewhere in northern Australia.The Jawoyn Association, representing the traditional owners of the country, requested the archaeological survey, Dr David says. "They suggested the rock shelter, a dramatic-looking site that particularly interested them."The shelter 19 metres by 19metres also has examples of rock art but parts are threatened by wandering water buffaloes and the Monash teams plans to continue working with the Jawoyn at the site.French archaeologist Hugues Plisson, a specialist in the analysis of stone tools, confirmed how it was made and what it was used for.Dr David says axes were highly valued among Aboriginal people as their manufacture was labour intensive.During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, local Aboriginal communities believed their axes carried the ancestral forces that characterised the quarry from which they came."Their trade across the landscape moved not just the tool itself but, more importantly, the symbolic and ancestral forces of their point of origin. The axe fragment, 40 kilometres from its source, is evidence of 35,500 years of the movement of tools, technologies and ideas across the northern Australian landscape," Dr David says.Although flaked stone tools dating from more than 2 million years ago have been found in Ethiopia, Dr David says shaping them by grinding does not appear in human evolution until about 35,500 years ago."The discovery of this fragment of a ground-edge axe, now the oldest in the world, poses questions as to how and why stone-edge grinding appears to have first evolved along the western Pacific rim."Hunting and gathering populations in the southern hemisphere adopted the grinding of rock for the manufacture of ground-edge axes well before their counterparts in mesolithic and neolithic Europe. This discovery has archaeological implications very different to those that have prevailed in the standard explanations of the northern hemisphere," Dr David says.Ground-edge axes were adopted not just because they made certain tasks more efficient, they also took on important social and symbolic roles that served to cement social and territorial relationships, he says.A full version of this article appears at theage.com.au/higher
© 2011 The Age
