GunaiKurnai cave rituals traced back 25,000 years
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- Cloggs Cave in southeastern Victoria contained layers of grass ash stretching back 25,000 years, suggesting the GunaiKurnai people conducted ceremonies involving magic, healing, and cursing there for over 1,000 generations.
- Bruno David at Monash University and Russell Mullett, a GunaiKurnai elder, identified thousands of silt-sized phytoliths (preserved plant cells) in the cave, with grasses making up 97% of burnt specimens — indicating whole grasses including roots were brought in and burned.
- Ash-burning became markedly more frequent and widespread across the cave floor between 4,400 and 1,600 years ago, shifting from earlier sporadic use involving stalactites and miniature fires lit with single fat-smeared sticks.
- A standing stone was erected inside the cave around 2,000 years ago, with grass subsequently burned all around it for roughly the next 400 years.
- The team linked the ash practice to ceremonies recorded in the 1880s by anthropologist Alfred Howitt, who described powerful GunaiKurnai medicine men and women as "wizards" using ash in their rituals.
- Anna Florin at the Australian National University called the study a strong example of weaving phytolith science with GunaiKurnai cultural knowledge, noting archaeobotanical research has been underrepresented in Australian archaeology.
Why it matters: This study documents what may be the longest continuous ritual tradition archaeologically traced in Australia, with the GunaiKurnai practice — including a 2,000-year-old standing stone — persisting across 1,000+ generations and still recognizable in 19th-century ethnographic accounts. It directly validates Indigenous cultural knowledge through scientific analysis in a field, archaeobotany, that Anna Florin says has been understudied in Australia.
