Stepping Stones to the Sky: Archaeological Perspectives on the Cultural Significance of the W eddin Mountains in Recent Prehistory

Abstract

Hierophanous landscape features are perceived to be points of connection with other worlds, such as the sky or underworld and/or earthly embodiments of supernatural beings. They may include springs, caves, notable rock formations, trees and most notably, mountains. In Aboriginal Australia, hierophanies and the narratives that bound them together across space were treated with reverence and respect. Sacred information was closely guarded and a host of 'dangerous places' was either avoided at all costs or demanded special codes of behaviour. Ritual conducted at these places brought into alignment spatial and temporal gateways to other worlds and served to reanimate places with ancestral power and/or provide the opportunity for communion with great beings. Numerous malignant spirits were also recognised, all having their place in the landscape, such as in holes in the ground, caves, springs, cliffs and thickets, were, in tum, feared and avoided. This is not to imply that Aboriginal people lived their lives in constant superstitious dread or were obsessed with arcane secrets (Creamer 1984: 6.6), rather it is an acknowledgment of the importance of cosmology as an influential factor in everyday life (Strehlow 1971: 594) and its expression through the landscape. Bradley (2000) has argued that it is possible to analyse such prehistoric landscape perception through an 'archaeology of natural places'. He suggests that votive deposits, rock art, production sites and monuments all provide potential information on natural features of cultural importance (Bradley 2000: 36-43). As a result, it is possible to incorporate non-humanly marked natural places into systematic archaeological analysis through interpretation of the deposits and sites found in close proximity to and in the topography surrounding them. In this manner, an attempt has been made to recreate a prehistoric Aboriginal landscape in central western New South Wales, using as its focus the culturally significant Weddin Mountains. Archaeological analysis of stone artefact scatters in the study area suggests an inherent landscape ( cf van Dommelen 1999), where hunter-gatherers made use of the great majority of environmental zones available to them, including areas around significant natural features. Artefact assemblages indicate that people were utilising a considerable variety of raw materials to produce flakes and a range of stone implements, such as backed blades, adzes, scrapers and eloueras. The stone types utilised in this fashion include varieties of chert, volcanics, silcrete, quartzite, quartz and indurated mudstone. Distribution of raw material types throughout the study area was not uniform and considerable variation was noted between different parts of the Plains and Slopes and sections ofWeddin itself.