Bininj, the local Kundjeihmi word for Aboriginal people, have returned to the Madjedbebe rock shelter in the Northern Territory.
The environment around the rock shelter has changed a lot over the years.
Our paper, published last week in Quaternary Science Reviews, uses ancient scraps of plant foods, once charred in the site's fireplaces, to explore how Aboriginal communities responded to these changes.
The story of resilience is told in this cooking debris.
The rock shelter is at the base of a sandstone outlier. There is a dark, ashy floor from hundreds of past campfires at the site.
The back wall has colorful rock art. Some images, such as horsemen in broad-brimmed hats, ships, guns, and decorated hands, are recent. Many are thousands of years old.
The site is on the edge of the wetlands. It was located on the edge of a vast savanna plain with Australia and New Zealand in the middle.
At this time, the world was going through a period called the Marine Isotope Stage 4. The monsoon vine forest vegetation, common at other points in time, would have retreated if Kakadu had been well-watered.
The Last Glacial Maximum would be followed by an interglacial period.
The weather became much warmer and wet in the 10,000 years ago. Sea levels rose rapidly as a result of the proliferation of monsoon vine forest, open forest, and woodland vegetation.
The sea approached Madjedbebe just 5 km away as Australia and New Guinea were severed from each other by 7,000 years ago.
The rapid transformation of the Kakadu region followed. The river systems near the site became estuaries and mangroves were etched into the lowlands.
These were replaced by patches of freshwater wetlands. The wetlands of today were formed by 2,000 years ago.
Our research team wanted to learn how people lived in this environment.
We sought a rare archaeological treasure: charcoal. It is not something that comes to mind for the average camper, but when a fireplace is lit many of its components can transform into charcoal.
The charred remains will survive long after the campers have left. In the past, this happened many times. Bininj left behind charred and fragmented fruit, nuts, palm stem, seeds, roots and tubers.
We used high-powered microscopes to compare the structure of the charcoal pieces to the Mirarr Country foods that are still being grown today. We learned a lot about the foods past people ate, the places they gathered them from, and even the seasons in which they visited the site.
People ate a broad range of anme from the earliest days of camping at Madjedbebe. This included plants such as pandanus nuts and palm heart, which require tools, labor, and detailed traditional knowledge to collect and make food.
Edge-ground axes and grinding stones were used. The oldest axes and grinding stones in the world were found in the oldest layers at the site.
The communities at Madjedbebe relied more on these harder-to-process foods during the two drier glacial phases. People would have had to make do with foods that took longer to process as the climate was more dry.
When the monsoon vine forest and freshwater vegetation got closer to Madjedb, a lot of important elements of the diet were lost. They were also sought from more distant places.
The formation of freshwater wetlands was the biggest shift in the plant diet eaten at Madjedbebe. Bininj started to include more freshwater plants in their diet about 4,000 years ago.
Rather than coming to the rock shelter when fruit trees such as andudjmi (green plum, Buchanania obovata) were fruiting, they began visiting from the other side of the country.
When the floods are over, the resources found at the edge of the wetlands become available. The emergence of patchy freshwater wetlands 4,000 years ago led to communities changing their diet to make the best use of their environments.
The wetlands are important to the Mirarr and other Bininj. A range of seasonal animal and plant foods are featured at dinner time.
The First Australians probably shaped their environment by responding to it. Bininj use cultural burning to modify their landscape in the Kakadu region.
Fire is a cultural tool that can be used in many ways, such as hunting, generating vegetation growth, and cleaning up pathways and campsites.
The reduction of wet season biomass is one of the most important functions and it becomes fuel for dangerous fires at the end of the dry season.
Our data shows the use of a range of plant foods at Madjedbebe throughout most of the site's occupation from 65,000 to 4,000 years ago.
The practice of cultural burning is an ongoing one, as it suggests communities managed fire-sensitive plant varieties, and reduced the chance of high-intensity fires by practicing low-intensity cultural burns before the hottest time of the year.
The Mirarr are still in Madjedbebe. New generations continue to shape this incredible cultural legacy because of their knowledge of local anme.
We would like to thank the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, the Mirrar, and our co- authors May Nango and Djaykuk Djandjomerr.
Anna Florin is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, Andrew Fairbairn is a Professor of Archaeology at The University ofQueensland, and Chris Clarkson is a Professor of Archaeology at The University ofQueensland.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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