From the deep south of Australia to the far north two treasures have been
unearthed, both of gobal significance.
In Hobart, Tasmania, the southern-most state of Australia, the owners of
the Cracked and Spineless bookshop found a handwritten soldier’s journal in a
pile of books in an old cupboard. Mike Gray, the bookshop owner, said the
journal was found a few weeks ago. It was left by the previous owner. Noone
knows how long the journal had been in the shop – maybe 20 years – or how it
got there.
Royal Engineer Lieutenant Colonel John Squire, a soldier of the British
army, was a prominent figure and keen writer. When he wrote the journal in
1811, Britain was involved in the Napoleon Wars, and Tasmania was called Van
Dieman’s Land after the Dutch explorer. Some of Squire’s letters are in the
British Library, and a handwriting match will confirm or refute the
authenticity of the journal.
The journal details the English-Portuguese army’s second siege of the
Spanish city of Badajoz in May and June 1811, at the Peninsular War during the
Napoleonic Wars. John Squire died of fever in 1812 in the Peninsula, soon after
the third and successful British siege of Badajoz.
Gavin Daly, an expert in the Peninsular War, from the University of
Tasmania, said he believed the journal was genuine. From his research he knows
that John Squire was in Egypt in 1801 when the French surrendered Alexandria,
in South America in 1807, in Sweden in 1808, in The Netherlands, and in the
Peninsular. He was present when the Rosetta Stone, found in Egypt in 1799
(thought to be dated to 196 BC), was given to the British. He wrote a paper on
Roman antiquities, he accompanied William Richard Hamilton on his travels, and
he was involved in bringing some of the Elgin Marbles to Britain (from Greece,
dated to 447-438 BC). If authenticated it represents a significant find.
From the far northwestern area of Australia archeologists have found a tiny
basalt stone flake, believed to be a remnant of the earliest known axe with a
handle. It is the size of a fingernail, ground smooth at one end, and appears
to date from 44,000 to 49,000 years ago – not long after humans first appeared
in Australia, and several thousand years earlier than previous similar
discoveries.
Other older axe flints have been found in Europe and Africa, but
archaeologists say that these were different tools. Axe blades are made from
harder stone, and battered into a blade, and have been found in northern Asia,
the Americas, and Australia. The axe blade was usually attached to an axe
handle, like a hatchet. However, this current find pre-dates these specimens.
Professor Sue O’Connor of the Australian National University first
excavated the axe fragment – the stone flake – in the 1990s from a rock shelter
in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In 2014 O’Connor and her
colleagues were studying this find, and other artefacts, in more detail and the
analysis showed that the tiny piece of polished stone could be a chip from the
blade of a stone axe. The results were published in the Australian Archaeology
journal.
O’Connor said that Australian stone artefacts were usually characterized as
simple, but this stone flake reveals new evidence that the axe stone tecnology
was more evolved than originally thought. Although humans spread across
Australia, axe technology did not spread with them – they may have been only
made in the tropical north of Australia. Archaeologists say this evidence
suggests that there may have been two different colonizing groups of people or
that the technology was abandoned as people spread into the inland desert and
sub-tropical woodlands of Australia.
However, at present, there is only one small flake of stone, which is not
enough evidence to draw confident conclusions. If substantiated, it could show
that the First Nations ancestors who made the axe blade were ‘more clever than
past archaeologistis were willing to give them credit for.’
MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:-
The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends
(2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan
Curse (2009).
Comments
Post a Comment