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Imagine you’re in south-east Cape York Peninsula, heading north from the small town of Laura – population 133.
You are on a dusty four-wheel drive, traveling down a rough gravel road to a remote location known only to traditional Kuku Warra protectors.
Very soon, the road becomes a station track passing through the forests, leaving behind traces of civilization.
You exit the vehicle, and begin the journey on foot across the rugged and stunningly beautiful landscape in the heart of the national heritage-listed Quincon country.
Your final destination is a fascinating archaeological site that has preserved the integrity of over 1,700 years tribal Traditions.
perfect conditions
The most common archaeological objects in Australia There are stone artefacts. These were not necessarily things that tribal people made and used frequently, but rather those that were best preserved in most circumstances.
In fact, more than 90 percent of the artifacts used in daily life by tribal people were made from plant and animal materials that are unlikely to survive in archaeological sites.
But sometimes, very rarely, environmental conditions align, allowing objects you’d normally only find in a museum to survive.
The site of Windmill Way is a place where biological conservation conditions are “just right”. During excavations in 2022, more than 500 pieces of string and string objects made from plant fibers were discovered in this fascinating rock shelter.
After several years of detailed study as part of the Agarr Bamange Milby Project, our team of researchers has published our findings on this remarkable combination.
How old are the items?
The presence of a bent piece of thick wire and a strip of red cloth – both of which are European objects – indicates that Aboriginal people were still using the Windmill Way site in the so-called “contact period” after 1873. This was the year that explorer William Hahn discovered gold on the Palmer River. About 20,000 miners came to the area over the next two decades.
About the authors
Lynley Wallis is Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University.
Christine Musgrave is an Indigenous Knowledge Holder.
Heather Burke is Professor of Archeology at Flinders University.
Roseanne George is an Indigenous Knowledge Holder.
This article was first published Conversation And it is republished under a Creative Commons license. read the original article,
Direct radiocarbon dating of 13 stars shows that the oldest fragments were created 1700 years ago, and the newest were created during the Contact Period. Fragments of charcoal recovered from campfires at the site are even older, dating back 2100 years.
After the contact period, a combination of Native Mounted Police, miners, herders, disease, and government policies decimated the local population in the area and forced most survivors into missions elsewhere or a frontier camp located just outside Laura.
Dori – What a useful thing.
Although most of the objects are now fragmented (because even the best conservation conditions have not allowed them to fully withstand the passage of time), it is still possible to recognize what many of them once were.
To do this, we compared our archaeological samples with fibercraft objects from the same area held in the Queensland Museum.
Such objects were commonly collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before tribal people’s traditional ways of living were disrupted and cheap, mass-produced consumer goods replaced handmade items.
Acting Senior Curator of Archeology at the Queensland Museum, Nicholas Hednutt (also co-author of this research) said:
“This project enabled us to take advantage of the museum’s extensive collection to help traditional owners tell their generations-old stories. This way we were able to combine ancient artefacts with more recently collected wholes.”
Many pieces of string are apparently derived from dollybags, often combining fibers from different plant species to create colorful stripes without the need for natural dyes. Delibags were the equivalent of today’s backpacks, used by Aboriginal men, women and children to carry and store items.
Other pieces appear to be pieces of netting. Although these were probably used for fishing in the nearby Laura River, the presence of feathers from captured birds in many of them suggests that they may also have been used to trap birds in nets.
The rarest pieces are probably fragments of tassel string belts. Such items were worn by adult men or women during ceremonies, or as a general pubic covering. Young boys also sometimes wore string belts while going through the various initiation stages.
Some fragments may be mourning necklaces, which were traditionally worn by men and women after death as a part of traditional ceremonies.
The form of the cord – as well as the knots, webs, gauges and loops made from it – changed little over time, which shows how the craft was passed down through the generations.
Objects from the earlier stages of string production were also preserved, such as bundles of bark divided into separate components, which would later have been turned into string.
These findings have led our team to think of this site as a kind of “string construction” workshop.
Rock art also tells a story
Surprisingly, the walls of Windmill Way also reveal fragments of information about ancient string use. The rocky surfaces of the shelter are decorated with vivid painted motifs, some of which depict dillybags.
Other paintings show women wearing tassel string belts, mourning cords draped across their chests, and headbands decorating their foreheads. These images are typical of the Quincon style, featuring solid brightly colored interiors, white outlines and decorative infill.
With large sections of the remote Cape York Peninsula now protected in national parks, and potentially given World Heritage status, these unique discoveries from the Windmill Way are an excellent example of why this part of Australia is valuable to all.