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SURVIVING AN ICE AGE: THE ZOOARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD FROM SOUTHWESTERN TASMANIA

¹ Archaeology Program, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia, 3086 j.garvey@latrobe.edu.au

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Zooarchaeology is an interdisciplinary field studying past animal populations and ecology and their interactions with people, through the skeletal remains of animals and other traces in the archaeological record. The zooarchaeological record from southwestern Tasmania is one the world's richest late Pleistocene sequences, allowing detailed understanding of behavioral ecology of humans and animals during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)—between 18–30 kyr. This rich record became apparent during the late 1970s, when, partly motivated by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Company's plans to dam the Gordon River below its junction with the Franklin River, several expeditions were made into southwestern Tasmania to record caves and rock shelters that would be destroyed by the impounded water (Ranson, 1983; Jones, 1987, 1990). One of these sites was Kutikina Cave (Fig. 1), which was subsequently excavated by Rhys Jones and colleagues in 1981. The excavation was very rich, with approximately 40,000 stone tools and 250,000 bone fragments collected from less than a cubic meter of sediment (Jones, 1987). It was estimated that these artefacts and bones might represent only 1% of the entire artefact-bearing deposit, making Kutikina one of Australia's more prolific archaeological sites (Kiernan et al., 1983). The fauna was dominated by Bennett's wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus) and, to a minor degree, the common wombat (Vombatus ursinus). Radiocarbon dates indicate that the site was occupied between 14,840 ± 930 and 19,770 ± 850 BP; the first indication that people were able to penetrate and survive in the mountainous southwestern interior during the last ice age (Kiernan et al., 1983) when winter temperatures may have dropped to –15 °C, while summers were cool and short, and enormous ice sheets were approximately 1,000 km south (Cosgrove, 2004; Garvey, 2007). . . . [Full Text of this Article]