Original Article
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: Mapping the Mungo lands
Cheryl Jones 
IN 2004, a grazier found a human skull jutting out of the sand in the vast dunefields of the Willandra Lakes of south-western NSW, home of the famous 40,000-year-old Mungo Lady and Mungo man remains.
When traditional owners and Australian National University dating specialist Rainer Grun visited the site some months later, they found that wind and rain had reduced the delicate bones to fragments.
One elder was “shocked and nearly in tears”, Grun told the recent Legacy of an Ice Age conference, held at Lake Mungo as part of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the World Heritage listing of the region.
“She said, ‘We have to do something.”‘ The incident put Aborigines and researchers on the path to a grand, four-dimensional survey in urgent action to conserve a place seen by indigenous people as the centre of creation and by scientists as a repository of answers to big questions about human evolution. The surveyors will deploy satellites, lasers, aircraft, powerful computers and the deep physics of dating, along with geomorphology and traditional knowledge, says Grun, renowned for his work dating the teeth of ancient hominids.
They hope the survey will lead to a strategy to save remains, hearths and middens eroding constantly from dunes holding a 50,000-year continuous record of the first Australians and their interaction with the environment.
The scientists and traditional owners won a $570,000 grant in the latest Australian Research Council funding round. They will chart the dunes, which stretch 300km along the shorelines of five huge lakes, dry now for 18,000 years but once the centre of an inland economy.
The ANU is to administer the project, funded under the linkage grants scheme. The NSW Department of Environment and Conservation has put up an additional $161,000. The DEC and the Willandra Lakes’ Three Traditional Tribal Groups, or 3TTGs – a coalition of the Mutthi Mutthi, Paakintji and Ngiampaa people – will be equal partners with the university.
Competition is fierce for linkage grants, designed to stimulate collaborative research across public and private sectors. Winning the grant was a major victory for traditional owners and scientists.
A scheme to train indigenous people in the latest surveying technology will form a major part of the program.
No one has yet attempted an archaeological survey of such scale in Australia. The project marks a convergence of traditional owners and scientists after differences – over the sensitive issue of studies on human remains – that have limited research for decades.
But it is unclear in the early stages of this alliance whether traditional owners will authorise research on skeletons they see as their ancestors’. And the future of that line of investigation rests largely on getting funding for a facility at Mungo to house a “keeping place” and laboratory to hold remains “in country”.
The Willandra Lakes region has been described as Australia’s Rift Valley. The dunes on the eastern shorelines of the lakes have delivered up the remains of 100 human individuals, along with countless hearths and middens, or garbage dumps, which document the lives of Aborigines from 50,000 years ago, through the height of the last Ice Age to the contact period.
Mungo Lady and Mungo man, discovered in the late 1960s and early 1970s by geomorphologist Jim Bowler, then at the ANU, but now at Melbourne University, are the oldest Aboriginal remains known. Mungo Lady woman is the world’s oldest known cremation, while Mungo man, said amid much controversy in 2001 to have yielded DNA, is the earliest known ritual ochre burial.
The dating of the lowest artefacts in the sediments puts people at the site 50,000 years ago, and Willandra is central to the debate about the date of colonisation of Australia. It is also at the heart of arguments about human evolution – whether Homo sapiens evolved recently in Africa and spread out across the globe, replacing Homo erectus expatriates who had left the homeland earlier, or whether our species evolved simultaneously in several regions, with gene flow pushing populations down the same evolutionary pathway.
The region could also help settle palaeo-environmental arguments – the debate over the role of humans in the formation of the deserts and in the extinction of the megafauna, the giant animals, like the carnivorous “marsupial lion”, that once inhabited Australia.
But conservation is the top priority, and the skeletons of at least 50 other individuals are known to remain in the sand.
Mutthi Mutthi elder Mary Pappin says, “We, the elders and custodians of the Willandra, wish to see our important sites managed, conserved and protected under our direction. We welcome research partnerships on our heritage and country where it fits our aspirations and wellbeing.”
Dave Johnston, chairman of the 3TTGs Elders Council and a lecturer in archaeology at the ANU, says indigenous people prefer conservation in situ. They are open to salvage excavations in urgent cases, but these will be carried out as part of a separate project led by the 3TTGs, Johnston, who is one of only about eight Aboriginal archaeologists, and who was the first to qualify in the discipline, says.
The ARC project will reveal how quickly the dunes are eroding and give clues to how to conserve burials on site, he says. “Besides just excavation, which has destroyed some of the sites, there is the option of looking at sand stability programs with the aim of protecting some of these sensitive locations. Future custodians might decide they’d like to do further research with new techniques.”
The survey will start from the air. A lidar (light detection and ranging) remote-sensing unit will pulse laser light on to points on the ground from an aircraft flying low along flightpaths forming a grid over the landscape. A computer will generate a topographic map from distance readings calculated from the time taken by light reflected from the points to return to the aircraft.
On the ground, surveyors with GPS receivers and hi-tech theodolites will fill in the detail to produce a relief map with accuracy measured on the centimetre scale.
When the conservation problems are solved, the focus will shift to the deep past. Dating experts will add the time dimension to the map, putting ages on sites while geomorphologists extend the huge body of work by Bowler and colleagues interpreting the complex climatic history of the region written in sand, clay pellets, gravel, ancient shorelines and the signatures of lake organisms. Superimposed on the map will be archaeological data gathered since the 1970s revealing the lifestyles of the people – where they lived, their diet and technology and how they tended their dead.
Palaeontologists studying animal bones and palaeobotanists studying seeds and charcoal will add the fauna and flora to complete a succession of virtual landscapes of the past.
However, research on the human remains – the more accurate direct dating of teeth and bones, isotopic analysis to glean information about diet and environment, and DNA studies – is off the agenda for now.
A keeping place could smooth the path to such research, but the Federal Government recently knocked back a 3TTG application for funding. “It is a concern,” Johnston says, “because it will be a centre where research can be carried out under the custodianship of the elders. That was one of the aims of having a keeping place – so that this work could be carried out in country.”
Cheryl Jones is a science journalist based in Canberra. Go to links
Source: The Canberra Times