Bulletin

Issue: October 2006

Research in Action

13,000BC – The menu at Chez Kutikina

The menu is at least 15,000 years old, but the dishes are quite clearly written – roast leg of wallaby ‘bleu’, bone marrow ‘cru a la baguette’ and wombat brains.

Dr Garvey at work

These were some of the dishes eaten by nomad Aborigines during the last Ice Age between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago when they sheltered from winter chills in Kutikina Cave near the Franklin River in south west Tasmania.

Roast wallaby tail or wallaby tail soup? Sorry. Not available! The tails may have been cut off in the field with the fat around their base consumed by hunters.

How do we know so much about the diet of Tasmania’s Ice Age Aborigines? Because archaeologists at La Trobe University are now reading the menu – in the form of 256,200 fragments of bone – unearthed from the cave floor and now housed at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart.

Postdoctoral fellow, Dr Jillian Garvey of La Trobe’s Archaeological Program helped by archaeology students, worked their way through 42 kg of bones excavated in 1981, many of them tiny fragments. Preliminary results from this project were recently published in Australian Aboriginal Studies.

‘The kinds of bones, their markings, how they were broken, and whether they were charred enable us to make fairly detailed deductions as to which animals, and what parts of them, the Aborigines ate,’ Dr Garvey said.

Aided by 12 undergraduate students who spent two weeks working at the Museum, Dr Garvey found that the 25,000 fragments they were able to identify came from 18 species.

Between 52 and 80 per cent were from Bennett’s Wallaby, which are about 80 cm high with brown fur and a reddish neck and are the only wallaby in Tasmania. Wombats accounted for another 10 per cent and the remainder comprised Forester’s Kangaroo, the now extinct Tasmanian emu, and different species of native rats, marsupial mice, quolls and possums.

‘The small animals may have been carried into the cave by owls but humans most definitely brought in the wallabies and wombats,’ says Dr Garvey.

‘The wallaby bones were mainly from the thighs, obviously because these are the parts with most meat. There were some tibiae and femurs but only very minor traces of tails or skulls, indicating these were less popular foods.

‘All the bones were broken and the majority uncharred which leads to two conclusions. One is that the meat was only lightly cooked – served rare or bleu”. The other is that the bone marrow was not cooked, enabling the bones to be broken so the marrow could be extracted with a stick. This could not have happened had the marrow been well cooked. Hence marrow cru a la baguette” (raw marrow served on a stick).

‘Wallaby meat is very lean so it is possible the Aborigines had learned to eat the marrow for its nutrients.

‘They carried home the entire hindquarters because we found many bones from wallabies’ feet, suggesting they may also have eaten these. We found a lot of cut marks, made by stone tools, on bones from lower limbs, enabling us to determine how they were butchered. ‘There was an over representation of wombat skulls among the wombat bones, suggesting that Aborigines bought back the whole carcase, including the head. We would conclude from this that they ate the wombats’ brains as well as other parts.

‘Another interesting conclusion is that Ice Age Aborigines in Tasmania don’t appear to have been stressed for food given their systematic methods of food collection and the parts of the animals they accepted or rejected. ‘

Dr Garvey has recently spent six weeks at Vassar University, New York, working with Professor Anne Pike-Tay studying wallaby teeth found in other Tasmanian caves.

Professor Pike-Tay has worked for a number of years with Dr Richard Cosgrove, a senior lecturer in Archaeology at La Trobe, and Dr Garvey, analysing bones from Kutikina and other Tasmanian caves.