Interview with Russel Mullet

05 Tools and Shelter

Russel talks about the archeology and tools used in the region

Transcription

and it’s you know i know that the tools that i saw at Buckety plain were coming from mount tambo which is sort of the headwaters of of the tambo river so mount tambo sits and you can see it from banana yeah and there was a quarry site there uh there’s another quarry site on the um uh the old Omeo highway that runs out to the blue duck now that material i’ve traced all the way to Buckety plane uh that sort of uh granite and silk creek aren’t um aren’t found on on the bargain southern Bogongs okay yes if there’s granite there there’s nice uh there’s some quartz but the quartz is really shocking quartz uh but the materials being carted up there from lower really high quality materials look that was uh located in 2003 when we were doing uh the surveys after the great divide or the great alpine fires uh and we targeted it because it was a rock shelter mount gym was also another targeted area we wanted to go back to uh it was next to an asturbation um site for a bargain moth this mountain Jim and there was a rock screed uh obviously with mountain pigment possums uh close by uh the snow gums there were huge uh just you know well protected and and it was open treeless plain around it but the eastern section of mount Jim was really well protected and then we thought about okay you know where the best location to get some dates and open sights generally not really difficult to get good dates on so the rock shelter became the focus there were quite a few other rock shelters below the one that we’d chosen but we thought well this probably the better of of the shelters there so we put in a small excavation where we thought we could find a fire half and uh and yeah carbon dated uh well able to get uh tools and charcoal in the deposit now that was dated and it’s once again hasn’t been a published paper around it but we know uh from the dates that’s the oldest site at that altitude in Australia um then you know I think the small square we put in there wouldn’t have you know we didn’t target any more than getting that information you know i always thought it’d be interesting to go back and put another um excavation in but look you know it’s it the results were the results we were looking for without doing a lot more harm to the because archaeology is arming uh to the site so you know there’s potential for further research there um and obviously now Jim so um you know i guess um it dispelled a few myths uh that aboriginal people weren’t at that altitude and it was fairly close to i guess um you know 6 000 years that’s um not long after the last you know um i think glacial maximum so you’re talking 10 -11000 years when the last ice age finished so you know it was pretty good dating