Anthropological research reveals that the scale and complexity of Australian indigenous seascapes correlate with the scale and complexity of spiritual engagements with the sea and use of its resources. Marine specialists see and represent themselves as Saltwater People -an identification spiritually embedded within seascapes rich in cosmological meaning. For Aboriginal people, this embeddedness is underwritten by a Dreaming cosmology that formalizes seascapes as spiritscapes engaged through ritual performance. Such maritime rituals occur on the water, on tidal flats or on dry land. Rituals are the social mechanism by which Saltwater Peoples (Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders) spiritually manage and control their seas and ultimately orchestrate their seascapes. As such, an archaeology of seascapes is more than an archaeology of marine subsistence and procurement technology; it must also be an archaeology of spiritscapes and rituals that mediate human spiritual relationships with the sea. Because ritual sites often have a material expression, it is possible to investigate such sites archaeologically. This scope opens the possibility of investigating long-term developments in people's spiritual attachments to the sea and how seascapes were cosmologically constructed in a broad range of cultural settings. A new hypothesis associating spiritual control of extreme tidal regimes with previously enigmatic marine stone arrangements from central Queensland illustrates the potential value of the spiritscape approach to seascapes.
People dwell in a world of their own subjective making. For many hunters, engagement with the ‘natural’ world is a negotiated affair because animals, like people, possess spirits. A critical part of the negotiation process is mediation of the human–prey relationship by hunting magic. Torres Strait Islanders of NE Australia are skilled hunters of dugongs, a marine mammal whose capture entails a broad range of ritual practices. Following ethnographic expectations, excavation of bone mounds reveals ritual treatment of dugong bones, especially skulls, to increase hunting success. Extensive use of dugong bones in ritual sites has important implications for the extent to which ‘secular’ midden deposits are representative of Islander subsistence practices. Since dugong bone mounds provide archaeological insights into Islander spiritual relationships with dugongs, chronological changes in use of these sites inform us about historical developments in Islander ontology and their ritual orchestration of seascapes and spiritual connections to the sea.
Expansion of Austronesianspeaking peoples from the Bismarck Archipelago out into the Pacific commencing c.3300 cal BP represents the last great chapter of human global colonisation. The earliest migrants were bearers of finelymade dentate-stamped Lapita pottery, hitherto found only across Island Melanesia and western Polynesia. We document the first known occurrence of Lapita peoples on the New Guinea mainland. The new Lapita sites date from 2900 to 2500 cal BP and represent a newly-discovered migratory arm of Lapita expansions that moved westwards along the southern New Guinea coast towards Australia. These marine specialists ate shellfish, fish and marine turtles along the Papua New Guinea mainland coast, reflecting subsistence continuities with local pre-Lapita peoples dating back to 4200 cal BP. Lapita artefacts include characteristic ceramics, shell armbands, stone adzes and obsidian tools. Our Lapita discoveries support hypotheses for the migration of pottery-bearing Melanesian marine specialists into Torres Strait of northeast Australia c.2500 cal BP.
The remains of shellfish dominate many coastal archaeological sites in the Pacific and provide a wealth of information about economy, culture, environment and climate. Shells are therefore the logical sample type to develop local and regional radiocarbon chronologies. The calibration of radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates on marine animals is not straightforward, however, requiring an understanding of habitat and dietary preferences as well as detailed knowledge of local ocean conditions. The most complex situations occur where terrestrial influences impinge on the marine environment resulting in both the enrichment and depletion of 14 C (
Excavations at Mask Cave on the sacred islet of Pulu off Mabuyag in the central west of Zenadh Kes (Torres Strait) reveal four occupational phases: Phase I
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.