SerpApi.Org
The GunaiKurnai, an Australian Aboriginal nation, are the acknowledged traditional custodians of Gippsland and the southern Victorian Alps. Within their territory are caves known from 19th-century ethnographic reports and oral traditions to have been settings for magic, healing and cursing rituals by powerful learned women and men called "mulla-mullung," as well as by other spiritual practitioners. Archaeologists have shown that people have been visiting one of these caves, Cloggs Cave, for such activities over the past 25,000 years.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest sci-tech news updates.
"Here we show that the Old Ancestors selected whole grasses from the wider landscape and carried them into Cloggs Cave to spread out in thin layers and burn. Over time, sediments covered these burned layers, preserving each layer on top of another over thousands of years," said Dr. Elle Grono, a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University and the corresponding author of a new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
Phytoliths and a standing stone
Grono and colleagues from Australia, France and New Zealand studied the phytoliths—microscopic silica bodies from plant tissues—recovered from buried deposits in Cloggs Cave.
The study was part of archaeological excavations undertaken in 2019 and 2020 that aimed to understand how people gathered plants for use inside the cave in the past. These excavations had been requested by the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation, with representatives of the GunaiKurnai community taking part in the study design, fieldwork, interpretations and dissemination of the results.
"Unlike pollen, which is dispersed by wind or insects, phytoliths mostly accumulate at the spot where a plant decays. No plants grow inside the cave due to a lack of light, so the phytoliths must have been carried in by people or by animals such as possums on their fur or through their scats," explained Grono.
"We focused on half-burned phytoliths from ashy layers, which can only have been brought in by people, as unburned ones might have arrived through either means."
The scientists used microscopy to assign taxonomic groups to thousands of phytoliths from two pits, respectively 1.5 m (4.9 feet) and 2.3 m (7.5 feet) deep.
The top strata of these pits consisted of 73 thin ashy layers laid down by people between approximately 4,400 and 1,600 years ago, as calculated by optically stimulated luminescence and carbon dating via accelerator mass spectrometry. Within those ashy layers, they unexpectedly uncovered a 28-cm-high (11-inch-high) standing stone, subsequently shown to have been erected in the cave by Old Ancestors for ritual purposes around 2,000 years ago.
Grasses preferred
In total, the authors found 29 different types of phytoliths from a range of plant groups including grasses, herbs and woody plants. They were mostly well-preserved, with even the most delicate silica structures, such as hair cells, surviving intact.
The most abundant, up to 97%, were from grasses, both from the subfamily Pooideae, which prefers temperate or cool climates, and from Panicoideae, which mostly grows under warm and humid conditions. Phytoliths from the Chloridoideae subfamily, drought-resistant grasses that grow well in warm, dry environments, were less common, while those from woody plants and herbs were rare.
The Old Ancestors were very selective about which types of plants they brought into the cave. They avoided diverse species from the riparian forest and open woodland found in the vicinity of Cloggs Cave before European settlement, and instead targeted grasses that would have been available a short distance from the cave entrance.
"The phytoliths found at Cloggs Cave were from different parts of grass plants such as stems, leaves, flowers and roots, indicating that whole grasses were brought in, including the inedible parts," said Grono.
Overall, nearly a fifth—up to 18%—of the phytoliths were burned or melted. Their presence throughout the dated deposits implied that people had brought plants into the cave and burned them there over the entire time span of the past 25,000 years.
Professor Bruno David from Monash University, who co-led the excavations with GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation, concludes that "their burning is consistent with GunaiKurnai traditional practices of using ash to perform magic and rituals, and also to track the footsteps of anyone coming in, including spirit-Beings. Other macro-botanical evidence, such as fat-smeared trimmed wooden sticks from Casuarina trees, was also found in deeper and older deposits, indicating that other kinds of rituals using woody plants were also performed."
More information: Phytoliths from Cloggs Cave, GunaiKurnai Country (southeastern Australia) reveal the gathering of whole grasses for burning practices inside the cave, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology (2026). DOI: 10.3389/fearc.2026.1871928. www.frontiersin.org/journals/e … rc.2026.1871928/full
Provided by Frontiers
This story was originally published on Phys.org.
