Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

This is a limestone cave in the valley of the north-flowing Forth River in the central highlands, east of Mackintosh 90/1 Cave and Cradle Mountain, and northwest or Warragarra Shelter. Occupation at this site was continuous from about 34,000 to 780 years ago (Cosgrove, 1995). The excavator has suggested that this gives the time when humans first arrived in Tasmania, indicating either there were time lags, in the order of 20,000 years between the colonisation of northern and southeastern Australia, or that the northern Australian chronology was incorrect, though if the sterile layer to 40,000 BP took only a short time to accumulate it would weaken the argument that the time of occupation of the region would be effectively bracketed (Source 1).

Thumbnail scrapers, but no wallaby bones, have been found between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago. Occupation density is low between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago, artefact numbers increasing at about 3,000 years ago, as occurred at Warragarra Shelter.

This is the only known site in Tasmania where undisturbed occupation deposits continued throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene.

Links

1. The Tasmanians: Part 8b: Archaeology and the Oldest Tasmanians
2. Tasmania: archaeological and palaeo-ecological perspectives

Sources & Further reading

1. Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J.B. Publishing, 2004
2. Smith,M.A. in Murray, Tim, 1998, Archaeology of Aboriginal Australia, Allen & Unwin.