JULY 12, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 2

Written In Stone?
A new survey of Australian prehistory records the dramas of the distant past--and the debates of the present
By ELIZABETH FEIZKHAH

Ask John Mulvaney why he loves archaeology, and likely as not he'll show you a picture. Painted some 7,000 years ago on a rockface in the Northern Territory's Kakadu National Park, it shows a man in a baggy headdress hurling a spear at a large emu. Dashes trace the weapon's flight; a spray of shorter dashes erupts from the bird's beak. "Either the dots represent the emu's life force or it's saying 'Ouch!'" says Mulvaney. "But it's just like a modern comic." Which makes him wonder about the mind behind it. "Here is an artist putting all this detail into the picture, but also putting motion into it--and emotion as well. To me, that is a masterly painting."

At 74, Mulvaney has spent half his life urging his fellow citizens to look--and marvel--at the traces of their continent's ancient past. A pioneer of Australian prehistory (he was foundation professor of the subject at the Australian National University), he's also fought to conserve those traces, lobbying for the preservation of sites and remains, and for the World Heritage listing of areas like Kakadu. "He's passionately dedicated to prehistory and Aboriginal studies," says Isabel McBryde, who succeeded Mulvaney at A.N.U. in 1985, "and he's always put them in their broadest context." Those stone and ocher hints--dated and interpreted with the aid of 20th century science--tell a story that is, for Mulvaney, "one of humankind's inspiring epics": the colonization of Australia by the ancestors of the Aborigines.

The third edition of Mulvaney's groundbreaking Prehistory of Australia (Allen & Unwin; 480 pages), written with fellow archaeologist Johan Kamminga, sets out the evidence from which prehistorians are trying, often amid fierce debate, to reconstruct that epic. The book's new heft--it's three times as long as the first, 1969, edition--reflects not only the "startling and rapid" pace of discovery, but also, Mulvaney believes, the greater weight the deep past deserves in the Australian consciousness. "In this time when we're trying to get some reconciliation [with indigenous people]," he says, "it's of immense value to realise that what went on in Aboriginal Australia was of considerable significance. Aboriginal society did change through time; it was not lacking in initiative; it was complex and sophisticated."

Before Mulvaney began his career in 1953, most Australians saw Aborigines' lack of pottery, metal tools, monuments and writing as proof that their past wasn't worth studying. For Mulvaney, the absence of these things meant there was all the more to be learned. "In other countries the evidence for hunting-collecting society is hidden by a great overlay of agriculture, urban development and industrialization," he says. In Australia, that original human lifestyle evolved in near total isolation for more than 1,500 generations--and has survived well into this century. That continuity, write the authors, affords "potential clues to many issues common to all races," allowing us not only to glimpse how our distant forebears lived but to appreciate their achievements.

If the first arrivals more than 40,000 years ago were able to cross the sea from Indonesia to northern Australia, they must have had language and social organization; in other words, says Mulvaney, they were "fully modern, with thinking brains." Within a few millennia, he adds, descendants of these tropical seafarers were living near glaciers in Tasmania (then joined to the mainland), "which shows how adaptable human beings can be." Australia's oldest grave, at Lake Mungo in western New South Wales, testifies that these people also had burial rites, he says: the fact that the corpse had been daubed with ocher brought from a great distance "suggests quite sophisticated contact between people." And in Kakadu, 30,000-year-old rock art points to "the origins of creativity in the human mind."

Creativity and adaptiveness are bywords of Prehistory. Far from being abject prisoners of nature, the authors point out, Aborigines from an early date were its alert custodians, using fire to tend the land and adjust the supply of food plants and animals. Aborigines adapted and elaborated basic hunting-and-collecting technology to exploit vastly differing environments, sometimes, says Kamminga, "in superbly efficient ways."

Over time, people in different regions developed distinctive cultures and customs. By the time European settlers arrived in 1788, Mulvaney has written, these societies "probably differed as much from each other as did the states and countries of Europe at the same time." Within the last five millennia, Aborigines in the fertile Murray river valley were living in near-sedentary communities and burying their dead in large cemeteries, while those in arid central Australia roamed vast areas in search of food and water. In central Victoria, Aborigines quarried hard greenstone to make hatchet heads; in the Murchison region of Western Australia they tunneled into the earth to extract sacred ocher. Near Sydney, people fished with shell hooks; in Tasmania, fish eating appears to have become taboo around 3,500 years ago. Different tribes exchanged local materials and artifacts, sometimes over hundreds of kilometers: ocher, sticky resins, grindstones, shell pendants, finely made stone spearpoints, the nicotine drug pituri. Some groups formed alliances, others fought regularly.

So, less violently, do archaeologists, over what Kamminga calls "the old questions"--many of which, after 30 years, "are still as contentious as ever." They include when the first people arrived, where they came from, whether there was more than one wave of immigrants, and what happened to the giant marsupials that became extinct late in the last Ice Age. Some of these issues continue to stir vehement debate--which Mulvaney has seldom shied away from. Says the Australian Museum's Richard Fullagar, whose team made the much-doubted claim that human deposits in a Northern Territory rock shelter were 116,000 years old: "Mulvaney has very strong views, and he loves an argument."

There are plenty of those over dating. The best reliable evidence, the authors say, puts the age of Australia's occupation at around 40,000 years. "Add a few thousand years and you've got 45,000," says Kamminga. "But beyond 40 is really speculation." Fullagar says that approach is "very conservative--there are a lot of people who'd say the evidence is good enough to accept 60,000 years."

The dating issue has been of intense interest to ordinary Australians--particularly Aboriginal people. Says Mulvaney: "It obviously bolsters an argument of any people who claim land if they can claim their ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years." But not all archaeological findings have been so eagerly embraced. The ideas that Aboriginal people's forebears originated elsewhere and that their ancient past is part of humankind's common heritage have collided with traditional beliefs that indigenous people were created in Australia and that their heritage belongs only to Aborigines.

As a scientist fervently committed to universal human values, Mulvaney rejects the idea that free inquiry should bow to ethnic chauvinism. He has attacked the trend for Aboriginal groups to insist on reburying excavated human remains, and criticized museums and the Australian Archaeological Association for meekly giving in to such demands. For Aboriginal people to insist on ownership and control of the past, he writes in Prehistory, "is a form of reverse cultural imperialism" by which "future Aboriginal societies will be deprived of crucial genetic and cultural information."

Still, he's confident reason will prevail. "At the moment these issues have become tied up with land claims and so on," he says. "But I do believe that in another generation Aboriginal people will come to see what I'm talking about." On the timetable of Australia's human occupation, it's not long to wait.