Australia's Living Technologies: Bone Tools from First Peoples to Contact (transferred to Griffith)

This project will be the first major study of Indigenous Australian technologies made from animal bone and tooth. Through employing sophisticated use wear techniques, it aims to deduce the cognitive, social, and technological processes behind their manufacture and use, thereby providing new insights into pre-contact Australia, as well as the development of human ingenuity. This project forefronts the role of Modern Humans in Australia in global narratives of human cultural development and supplies a new material culture based perspective on the cultural behaviour of our earliest ancestors.