On the seabed off the coast of Western Australia, in waters 11–15 metres deep, archaeologists have discovered stone tools that lay there for thousands of years. These finds lie in a place where land once stretched, and which is now the seafloor, submerged after the end of the last ice age.
Researchers from the universities of Flinders, Western Australia and other institutions, together with rangers from the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, surveyed two sites near Murujuga. One of them is a former freshwater spring, the second is an outcrop of rocks by an ancient riverbed. Here people gathered by the water and obtained stone for tools.
The tools include cores, flakes and worked pieces. Some of the raw material came from local rocks, and some samples came from places more than 20 kilometres away. X-ray fluorescence analysis showed differences in materials between the sites, which points to different kinds of activity and the movement of resources across territory now hidden by water.
The flooding began more than nine thousand years ago, when sea levels rose after the ice age. More than two million square kilometres of the Australian shelf went under water, but people had lived on these lands long before that. The finds add to the picture obtained during the Deep History of Sea Country project in 2020 and 2023.
The work was carried out in close cooperation with Indigenous people — five rangers trained as scientific divers. One of them, Malik Chernside, himself found one of the artefacts. Such an approach strengthens the scientific conclusions and helps to better understand the cultural landscape, which for the Ngarda-Ngarli people extends to the sea spaces as well.
The discovery shows how ancient communities adapted to a changing environment, moving in search of resources and using a network of connections between territories. Finds like these remind us that human history is closely interwoven with the changes in climate and landscape that occurred long before our era.
The study of such underwater monuments helps modern generations to better appreciate the continuity of knowledge and to treat with care the heritage hidden beneath the water.
