The GunaiKurnai, an Australian Aboriginal nation, are recognized as the traditional custodians of Gippsland and the southern Victorian Alps. Caves within their lands have long been linked to spiritual practices. Accounts recorded in the 19th century, together with oral traditions, describe them as places where powerful learned women and men known as 'mulla-mullung', along with other spiritual practitioners, carried out rituals involving magic, healing, and cursing.
Archaeological evidence now shows that one of these sites, Cloggs Cave, was used for such activities over an extraordinary span of roughly 25,000 years. "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 burnt 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.
Grono and researchers from Australia, France, and New Zealand examined phytoliths recovered from buried sediments inside Cloggs Cave. Phytoliths are microscopic silica structures that form within plant tissues and can survive long after the plants themselves have disappeared. The research grew out of archaeological excavations carried out in 2019 and 2020.
Those excavations were designed to determine how people collected and used plants inside the cave in the distant past. The work was requested by the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation, and GunaiKurnai representatives were involved in the research design, fieldwork, interpretation, and communication of the findings. "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-burnt phytoliths from ashy layers, which can only have been brought in by people, as unburnt ones might have arrived through either means." Because vegetation cannot grow naturally inside the dark cave, the burned plant remains offered especially strong evidence that people had intentionally carried grasses into the site. Using microscopy, the researchers classified thousands of phytoliths collected from two excavation pits measuring 1.5 m and 2.3 m deep.
The upper sections of those pits contained 73 thin layers of ash deposited by people between approximately 4,400 and 1,600 years ago. Researchers established those ages using optically stimulated luminescence and carbon dating via accelerator mass spectrometry. Hidden among the layers was another striking discovery: a standing stone measuring 28 cm high.
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