‘Such caves weren’t used for ordinary living’: Rare finger grooves from ancient peoples found in glittering Australian cave
The history of the First Nations of Australia dates back several tens of thousands of years, rich in depth and diversity.
Archaeological research has revealed a lot about this deep past, but it has rarely captured the gestures of the ancestors – their movements, postures and physical movements. Material traces such as tools and homes tend to survive; Ephemeral movements generally do not do so.
Research newly published in the journal Australian archeology Revealed something different: traces of hand movements preserved in a soft rock at the bottom of Gunikurnai Country.
In a limestone cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, a team of researchers led by the Gunaikurna Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation In partnership with Monash University and international archaeologists in Spain, France and New Zealand have studied printing of the dragged fingers in walls and ceilings. They reveal the movements of the ancestors’ hand thousands of years ago.
The scintillating waribruk
The cave, called the ancients of Gunaikurnai like Waribruk, contains a dark chamber beyond the scope of natural light. To enter and mark these walls, the ancestors would need artificial light: fires or small fires.
The deeper interior walls of the cave have become soft for millions of years while groundwater penetrated limestone, slowly going and dissolving the rock into cavernous tunnels.
The remaining wall surfaces and ceilings have become spongy and malleable, just like the texture of Playdough.
Over time, bacteria living in the caves living on the soft and humid rock have produced luminescent microcrystals, so that today, the walls and ceiling glitter when exposed to light.
It is on these sparkling surfaces that the grooves of the finger are found.
We do not know exactly when they were made, but people would need artificial light to reach this part of the cave. They allegedly worn fire lights or fires on the ground.
The archaeological excavations below and near the panels did not manage to discover proofs of fire on the ground, but we found fragments of wood of wood and tiny ash plates, probably fallen from the embers of the fireplace.
These were found buried in the floor of the cave under and near the decorated walls. They date from 8,400 and 1,800 years, around 420 to 90 generations.
It is therefore the best estimate of how long the old ancestors moved through the dark tunnels of the cave, the light of fire by hand, to create the prints of the fingers on the walls.
Rare ancestral gestures
What they did when they dragged their fingers along the surfaces of soft rock deeply in the cave is remarkable, revealing rare evidence of ancestral gestures: ephemeral body movements captured in soft cave surfaces.
On a panel, 96 sets of grooves were recorded. The first brands operate horizontally, made by several fingers, sometimes both hands side by side. Later, vertical and diagonal grooves were added, crossing the previous ones.
Among them are two parallel sets of narrow impressions, only 3 to 5 millimeters [0.1 to 0.2 inches] wide for each finger. They are each fixed at a short distance, indicating that they were made by a small child. However, they are so high, the child must have been raised by an adult.
More deeply in the cave, a low ceiling panel carries 262 grooves above a narrow sloping clay bench towards a bed of stream. The grooves indicate that people have moved along the edge, crawling, sitting or balancing to reach the ceiling.
Further on, 193 grooves draw a path above the stream bed. The fingers were pressed in the soft ceiling, gradually releasing 1.6 meters [5.3 feet] Further when people were going.
All the impressions point to the same way, suggesting arms and hands raised above, capturing a deliberate and embodied gesture while the ancestors moved deeper into the cave.
A place alone could enter
In total, there are 950 sets of grooves of the fingers deep in Waribruk. Their meaning has remained clear for years, but a close analysis of the place where brands appear and where they do not, offers key ideas.
The grooves are always located in areas where calcisals of calcite coat the walls of the cave or the ceiling, sometimes extending just beyond the edges of the glitter. They never appear in the areas of the cave where the soft walls are glitter.
Above all, they occur far from all archaeological proof of domestic life: no households, there are no food, no tools.
This absence is important. Gunaikurnai’s oral traditions argue that such caves were not used for ordinary life. They were only frequented by special individuals, Mulla-Mullung – Medicine and women who exercised powerful knowledge.
Mulla-Mullung Forced and cursed by ritual, using crystals and minerals powder as part of their practice.
At the end of the 1800s, knowledge of Gunaikurnai knowledge told the pioneering ethnographer Alfred Howitt On the powers of these crystals and caves. The role of Mulla-Mullungthey explained, was generally transmitted from parent to child, and when a Mulla-Mullung have lost their crystals, they lost their powers.
Waribruk’s grooves correspond to these traditions. These are not occasional decorations. These are deliberate gestures, linked to crystal coated surfaces, made in places, only a few could enter.
The grooves reflect movement, touch and sources of power for special individuals in the community: an embodied assessment of people interacting with the sacred.
What survives is not only “rock art” old. These are the ancestors’ gestures, Mulla-Mullung It seems now, which has ventured into the deepest darkness of the cave to access the power of sparkling surfaces.
Through these finger trails, we see not only a physical act, but a cultural practice based on knowledge, memory and spirituality. A momentary movement, preserved in stone, connecting us to lives lived a long time ago – and breathing the cave to life through the actions of ancestors and culture.
Thanks: the authors are only three of the 13 authors of the magazine articleIncluding Olivia Rivero Vilá and Diego Garate Maidagan, who undertook photography to create the digital 3D models of the panels to record and measure the size of the grooves of the fingers.
This published article is republished from The conversation Under a creative communs license. Read it original article.
