Technological organisation and points in the southern Kimberley

Abstract

The anthropogenic manipulation of stone is ubiquitous in every part of the world, throughout human prehistory. The durability of stone technologies creates an enduring material link between the tool maker and the archaeologist, particularly in Australia, where stone tools are a dominant component of the extant archaeological record, and as such, provide fundamental access to our understanding of the technology and lifeways of Australia’s Indigenous ancestors. This research, which is part of the ARC Linkage project: Lifeways of the First Australians, analyses stone artefacts from excavated and surface assemblages in the southern Kimberley region. This thesis by compilation focuses on the technological development of points, which are a distinctive, Holocene component of the Australian lithic suite, in order to test a series of hypotheses, which are presented in a collection of published manuscripts, and unpublished manuscripts currently being reviewed.

Lithic artefacts are produced by reduction. When a stone is worked into a tool, it reduces in size, with some fragments resulting in usable pieces, others in debitage. The process of reduction forms the basic premise for this thesis, where reduction is quantified by a morphological methodology outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, and applied to a number of assemblages in order to reconstruct the life history of stone tools from the Kimberley region (Chapters 3 – 7). Chapter 3 presents a robust chronology for point technology in the Kimberley region, where direct percussion points first appear in the archaeological record between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, and Kimberley Points appear within the last 1,000 years. Chapter 4 provides detailed examination of a large, excavated point assemblage from the Mt Behn rock shelter. This analysis demonstrates that points were produced within a reduction continuum, where changes in reduction intensity and artefact morphology were sensitive to environmental change during the mid to late Holocene. Chapter 5 presents analyses of multiple surface assemblages across the Kimberley, where backing technology is shown to be a regular component of point technologies. The presence of the Kimberley Backed Point challenges the existing model of spatial distributions of backing in Australia. Chapter 6 presents a remarkable point from Carpenters Gap 1, which was recovered with sizable portions of adhering hafting resin, an organic resin which was directly dated. This artefact provides the most compelling evidence for hafting technology used in the mid to late Holocene, and reveals that people were hafting small, lightly reduced points with both mastic and binding. Chapter 7 employs a novel approach to model the level of pedagogy, or teaching and learning, present in two different point reduction sequences. This manuscript demonstrates that pedagogy can be gleaned from stone artefact assemblages, and shows that Kimberley Points represent a shift towards a greater emphasis on a formal pedagogy within the last millennium of Kimberley prehistory. Finally, this thesis culminates in Chapter 8, which presents a summary of the conclusions and discussions offered throughout the manuscripts, and recommends areas of research for further investigation. Show more