Archaeologists and Indigenous Rangers have located stone tools at two underwater sites near Murujuga in Western Australia, a region with World Heritage status. Rising seas covered both places at least 9,000 years ago, so the tools could be far older. The results appear in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Researchers from Flinders University, the University of Western Australia, James Cook University and the University of York carried out the work with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation. Five of the corporation’s Rangers trained as scientific divers for the project. Two of them, Malik Churnside and Richard Variakojis, surveyed the sites underwater and co-wrote the paper. Churnside spotted one of the stone artifacts himself.
Both sites sit in water 11 to 15 meters deep. Before the seas climbed after the last Ice Age, this ground was dry land, and more than two million square kilometers of Australia’s continental shelf went under the ocean. First Nations people lived across these lands for generations before the flooding began.
The first site centers on a freshwater spring, close to a spring found earlier in Flying Foam Passage. A spring like this supplied fresh water, so people would have gathered there. The second site, called Maitland River Hummock, lies farther offshore. Boulders cover a rock outcrop beside an old river channel, which made the spot a good place to quarry stone.
The team mapped the seafloor with marine survey tools and then sent divers down to record what they found. The artifacts include cores, flakes and shaped tools. Some came from local rock, while others came from sources more than 20 kilometers away. X-ray fluorescence testing showed the two sites held different ranges of raw materials, which points to different uses for each place. Some pieces trace back to stone near Rosemary Island, about 23 kilometers from where they were found, so people carried prized stone across land that now lies on the seabed.
Researchers don’t know yet how the stone moved. Individuals could have carried the material themselves, or neighboring groups could have traded for it. The evidence doesn’t settle the question, but it does show a busy network of resource use across the archipelago, likely shaped by the way the islands formed as the water rose.
The study builds on landmark finds reported in 2020 and 2023 by the Deep History of Sea Country project. Those earlier sites were not isolated cases. They belong to a larger drowned cultural landscape. Lead researcher Jonathan Benjamin of Flinders University says working beside trained Rangers made the science stronger. Vincent Adams of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation says the Ngarda-Ngarli people have cared for Murujuga for at least 50,000 years, and their cultural landscape reaches out into Sea Country.
The work adds depth to the record of Australia’s oldest known underwater archaeology. The Ranger diver partnership also offers a model for Indigenous research teams in other countries, and gives land managers a stronger base for protecting submerged heritage.