Pottery dating back at least 2000 years has been discovered on a tiny Great Barrier Reef island, turning on its head the notion that Indigenous Australians hadn't developed the technology for pottery manufacture before European settlement.
Archaeologists found dozens of pottery sherds less than a metre beneath the surface during a dig on Jiigurru (Lizard Island).
They have been dated to between 2000 and 3000 years old, making them the oldest reliably dated ceramics in Australia.
Geological analysis of the ceramics showed the pottery was not imported but locally made, using clays and tempers sourced from the island itself.
The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) archaeologists published their findings today in Quaternary Science Reviews
Jiigurru is a significant cultural site for the local Dingaal and Ngurrumungu communities, who collaborated with archaeologists on the dig.
The archaeologists spent two years excavating the 2.4-metre-deep midden where the pottery was found.
They also found the remains of fish and shellfish eaten by people on the island, which have been dated as 6000 years old.
This makes Jiigurru the earliest known offshore island on the northern Great Barrier Reef to be occupied by indigenous Australians.
The age of the ceramics overlaps with a period when the Lapita people of southern Papua New Guinea were known to have produced pottery.
The lead investigator on the project, Professor Sean Ulm from James Cook University, said the discovery provides strong evidence that these Aboriginal communities had connections with the pottery-making communities of New Guinea.
"The discovery gives us insights into the sophisticated maritime capabilities of First Nations communities in this region, and these objects are crucial in understanding the cultural exchanges that occurred on Jiigurru thousands of years ago," Ulm said.
"We think that the ancestors of contemporary traditional owners were engaged in a very widespread trading system.
"So they traded technology, goods and ideas, knew how to make pottery, and made it locally."
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Evidence of trade between the local Indigenous community and New Guinea would also point to advanced open-sea navigation skills and canoe voyaging beyond what was previously believed.
