Aboriginal people made pottery and sailed to distant offshore islands thousands of years before Europeans arrived [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Published: April 9, 2024 4:16pm EDT



Blue Lagoon at Jiigurru (Lizard Island Group) where the first pieces of pottery were found. Sean Ulm


Pottery was largely unknown in Australia before the recent past, despite well-known pottery traditions in nearby Papua New Guinea and the islands of the western Pacific. The absence of ancient Indigenous pottery in Australia has long puzzled researchers.

Over the past 400 years, pottery from southeast Asia appeared across northern Australia, associated with the activities of Makassan people from Sulawesi (this activity was mainly trepanging, or collecting sea cucumbers). Older pottery in Australia is only known from the Torres Strait adjacent to the Papua New Guinea coast, where a few dozen pottery fragments have been reported, mostly dating to around 1700 years ago.

Why has no evidence been found of early pottery use by Aboriginal people? Various explanations have been proposed, including suggesting that archaeologists simply weren’t looking hard enough. Well now, we’ve found some.

In new research, we report the oldest securely dated ceramics found in Australia from archaeological excavations on Jiigurru (in the Lizard Island group) on the northern Great Barrier Reef located 600km south of Torres Strait. Our analysis shows the pottery was made locally more than 1800 years ago.

More:
https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-people-made-pottery-and-sailed-to-distant-offshore-islands-thousands-of-years-before-europeans-arrived-226391