The archaeology of isolation? : prehistoric occupation in the Furneaux Group of Islands, Bass Strait, Tasmania
Creators: name: Sim, Robin
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1998
Subjects: subject: GN875.A8S56 1998
subject: Aboriginal Australians AntiquitiesAustralia Furneaux Islands (Tas.)
subject: Excavations (Archaeology) Australia Furneaux Islands (Tas.)
subject: Prehistoric peoples Australia Furneaux Islands (Tas.)
subject: Kitchen-middens Australia Furneaux Islands (Tas.)
subject: Furneaux Islands (Tas.) Antiquities

description: Early European explorers were puzzled by the absence of Aboriginal populations on the larger more remote larger islands of the Bass Strait as at least King and Flinders Islands appeared capable of supporting human populations. Subsequent discoveries of stone artefacts on several of the Bassian islands were variously ascribed to human occupation during the landbridge phase or historic times, when Aboriginal Tasmanians had been taken to the islands by sealers and by G.A. Robinson for resettlement However, the discovery of shell midden sites on Flinders Island in the 1970s brought ne\v perspectives to the previous artefact finds - these prehistoric midden sites suggested people had been living on or visiting Flinders Island after the inundation of the Bassian landbridge. Radiocarbon dating of the midden sites on Flinders Island indicated that people were on Flinders Island until about 4,500 BP but absent in more recent times. The aim of the research was to investigate why it should be that evidence of human occupation on Flinders Island disappears from the archaeological record about 4,500 years ago, some 5,000 years of so after insulation. The primary step in this investigation was to determine whether the habitation ceased due to the island being abandoned, or whether it was a case of in situ extinction of the island population. Lampert (1979) had investigated a similar mid-Holocene habitation cessation on Kangaroo Island, and although concluding that the population probably died out he could not dismiss the alternative possibility that people had watercraft and had ceased visiting or living on the island about 4,000 years ago. Unlike Kangaroo Island, the Fumeaux Group had outer islands which enabled the issue of watercraft use to be investigated and thus resolve the primary question of island abandonment or extinction. Results of surveys of the Outer Islands indicated that people in the Furneaux region in prehistoric times did not have watercraft and thus the mid-Holocene middens on Flinders Island were deposited by an isolated relict population. Subsequent excavations on Badger and Prime Seal Islands in the Furneaux Group indicated that people had not only been stranded on Flinders Island by the post-glacial sea level rise, but had been occupying the area from at least 23,000 years ago in late Pleistocene times. The evidence from Beeton Rock.shelter and Mannalargenna Cave suggests relatively low levels of human occupation from about 23,000 BP until the early Holocene when the post-glacial sea level rise resulted in the formation of the outer islands and severed overland access to these peripheral Fumeaux areas. A more intense phase of occupation is evident behveen about 18,000 BP and 15,500 BP, and it is argued that this phase reflects a greater mobility of people in the region during the last glacial maximum. The adaptation of stone working techniques to locally available fossil shell resources, and the continued practice of shell working for ten or more thousand years or so, suggests that these sites may have been part of a northeast Tasmanian cultural system focused on the plains of the Bassian region. Despite the rapid onset of the terminal Pleistocene marine transgression, people remained in the Furneaux region. As the sea level continued to rise, fragmenting the Furneaux peninsula into the Furneaux Islands, people retreated toward the more upland areas that today comprise Flinders Island. The chronology of site abandonment in both the outer island excavations tracks the contracting land-use pattern in the region as areas were abandoned corresponding with retreating shorelines. Lltimately a group of people became stranded on Flinders Island and lived there in isolation until about 4,000 or so years ago. The Flinders Island habitation cessation coincides with major changes in the archaeological record in mainland Australia and Tasmania, and a similar disappearance of evidence of human occupation on Kangaroo Island. Furthermore, these changes also coincide with a mid-Holocene climatic shift associated with the onset of the ENSO (El Nifto Southern Oscillation) cycle which brought about droughts and fires to the southeast Australian region. The demise of the Flinders Island population had been previously interpreted in light of the devolutionary cultural model posited for the Aboriginal Tasmanians by Jones (1977b). These interpretations suggested that Flinders Island represented a microcosm of the purported trajectory for Tasmania, played out to its ultimate conclusion. This proposition is examined in light of the cultural and palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Furneaux region and a number of case studies of island extinctions and abandonments. These other examples include a range of chronologically, geographically and culturally diverse societies and provide both biogeographic and cultural models for human habitation cessation on islands.