Bone and Tooth Technology In Australia : Recent Discoveries and Living Traditions

Abstract

Australia has a rich ethnographic record of bone- and tooth-based technologies. Despite this fact, such pieces of material culture have consistently been passed over in favour of stone technology in Australian archaeology. Recently, we described a worked and ochre-stained bone artefact recovered from a well-stratified context dated to beyond 46,000 calBP in northwestern Australia (Langley et al., 2016). As osseous technology in Australia was long believed to have a time depth of only 20,000 years—being ‘re-invented’ in the southeast of the continent at that time—this discovery challenged previous conceptions. It also opened up a huge range of research avenues into the role and importance of bone technologies throughout Australia’s 65,000 years of human occupation. This chapter overviews the current state of osseous technology studies in the Australian context, and highlights some of the most promising avenues for future research. Show more