Anything more than a picnic? Re-considering arguments for ceremonial Macrozamia use in mid-Holocene Australia.

Abstract

Influential arguments have been advanced in Australian archaeology concerning the origins and development of social and economic change in the mid-late Holocene (Lourandos 1997). One example used to support this claim is the perceived existence of ceremonial feasting events held in the semi-arid and rugged sandstone gorge systems of central Queensland, attended by large groups of people for extended periods, and underwritten by large quantities of kernels from the cycad Macrozamia moorei (Beaton 1977, 1982; see also Lourandos 1997). However the reexamination of the macrobotanical evidence from archaeological sites in this region using taphonomic analysis, replicative processing experiments, recalculations of seed density and estimations of the minimum numbers of seeds, does not support this model. This re-examination questions the role of Macrozamia seeds in the context of socio-economic change and suggests new interpretations of Macrozamia resource use.

Keywords: ceremony, intensification, Macrozamia, central Queensland, mid-late Holocene

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Large-scale communal public rituals and ceremonies supported by feasts have been argued to have played an important role in the social, economic and political arenas of ancient cultures (Jennings 2005; Potter 1997). In Australia, continent-scale models concerning the development of mid-Holocene ceremonial events and resource intensification have been strongly influenced by Beaton's interpretations of the archaeobotanical records of Cathedral Cave, Wanderer's Cave and Rainbow Cave in the Central Queensland Highlands (CQH). These sites appeared to provide direct archaeological evidence for frequent, large-scale inter-group ceremonial feasting events supported by the processing and consumption of toxic Macrozamia seeds, dating back to the mid-Holocene (Beaton 1977, 1982, 1993). Beaton's arguments were highly influential and have been widely cited by researchers arguing for continental-scale transformative social processes in the mid-late Holocene (Jones 1978; Lourandos 1980a, 1980b, 1983a, 1983b, 1988, 1997; see also David and Denham 2006; Ross 2006).

There has been significant debate about ways of testing high-level models of intensification of socio-political complexity in Holocene Australia (Beaton 1995:798; Bird and Frankel 1991a, 1991b; Bird et al. 1997; Edwards and O'Connell 1995:776; Frankel 1988, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1995:654; Godfrey 1989; Hiscock 1981, 2002, 2008; Holdaway et al. 2002; Jones 1980; Lilley 2000; Pardoe 1995). However there have been few detailed reexaminations of archaeological data using the kinds of analytic approaches called for in these debates (although see Attenbrow 2004 and Hiscock 2008).

This paper presents the results of a detailed reexamination of the Macrozamia assemblages from these three sites from the Central Queensland Highlands, excavated by John Beaton in the mid 1970's, and held by the Queensland Museum. The first section of this paper presents an overview of the original model of ceremonial cycad use in the CQH. The second section of the paper presents the methods and results of experimental replicative processing techniques, taphonomic analyses to identify the non-human component of the assemblages, analysis of site formation, and techniques used to derive more accurate density and MNI estimates. The third section argues that the results of the reanalysis fail to support Beaton's arguments for either the use of large quantities of Macrozamia seeds over the last 4300 years, or the regular occurrence of Macrozamia supported ceremonial events in these sites, and argues for the subsistence use of these seeds by small groups of foragers.