Did Tasmanians Lose The Ability To Make Fire?

Eating fish and losing technologies, addressing the archaeological record of Tasmania

Tasmania belongs to that class of locations which sit at the ‘end of the known world’. Along with the Chatham Islands and Tierra del Fuego, it was a last stop for the ever expanding waves of humans before Antarctica. The island separated from the main body of Australia somewhere between 12-8,000 BC, as global sea levels rose in response to the end of the Pleistocene. Aboriginal Tasmanians (Palawa) had been living on the island since perhaps 40,000 BC - although the exact dates for Australian settlements as a whole are murky. A land bridge between Australia and Tasmania was slowly engulfed by the seas, prompting cosmological tales of a Great Flood, like many peoples around the world.

A detailed map of the land bridge between Tasmania and Australia.

Palawa traditions recorded by the Cottons describe Tasmania as a sandbank in the southern sea, recalling the presence of icebergs around the coast. The Cottons state that Vena (the first wife of Parnuen, the Sun-man) was sitting on an iceberg when it melted, and she drowned. In his anger Parnuen melted all of the icebergs, which never returned. Then came a woman named Vetea, who arrived in a canoe with her people:

“from the distant land of Moo-Ai, which had been swamped by the Teeunna Niripa Leea Tarighter (Big Sea Water Flow). She came in a large canoe with others of her race, the Vetea Parlevar (Moon People), and was wrecked on the rocky outer shore of Poyananu. All the others were lost: Vetea alone survived.”

-The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene (2023) Hamacher et al.

As the sea cut the island off from the mainland, the Tasmanians began to move away culturally from the rest of Aboriginal Australia. The extent of these differences was so dramatic that early explorers and later researchers puzzled over whether the Tasmanians represented a branch of the Aboriginal family, or whether they came from elsewhere. They were shorter and had ‘wooly’ or curly hair, in contrast to the straighter hair on the mainland. They also lacked a large number of technologies that their Aboriginal cousins possessed, including:

• Dingoes

• Boomerangs

• Ground or hafted stone tools

• Spearthrowers / atlatls

• Bone tools such as needles or awls

Aboriginal Australians in general lacked pottery, the use of bows-and-arrows (with limited exceptions), metal tools and sails, so removing even more from this limited tool kit left the Tasmanians quite destitute in terms of technological capacities. Without hafted tools carpentry becomes very difficult, and without needles it is much harder to make clothing. Tasmanian canoes and vessels seemed to be robust enough to visit nearby islands, but could not possibly have ventured out into open waters.

A modern replica of a Tasmanian canoe

Beyond the tools and materials themselves, there appears to be three ‘forgetting’ events which have become linked to the supposed decline of Tasmanian culture in general. These are - the loss of making and using bone tools, the abrupt cessation of eating scaled fish and the loss of the ability to make fire. Together these have entered the general academic and wider cultural memory as a kind of warning, that isolated societies could regress so far that they might even forget how to make fire - the ultimate symbol of human mastery over nature.

We will explore each of these in turn.

The end of using bone tools

The archaeological puzzle of Tasmania really began as a discontinuity between the anthropological record and the physical objects being dug out of the ground. At a number of shell midden sites, where shellfish, bones and other detritus accumulated over millennia, a clear sequence of events was noted time and again:

Within the lower units there were numerous bone tools, consisting of sharp points and spatulae made from wallaby fibulae, which may have been used as awls and reamers, possibly for skin cloaks (60). These tools became less numerous as time went on and were absent during the last 3.5 kyr. Ethnographically, there is no record of Tasmanians using bone tools, and although they used unsewn skins of wallabies over their shoulders, there were no skin capes like the ones used by the Aborigines of southeastern Australia (51).

-Tasmanian Archaeology: Establishing the Sequences (1995) Rhys Jones

Other sites recorded the same phenomena, at Sister’s Creek, Little Swanport, Hunter Island and Louisa Bay to name but a few.

Tasmanian bone points have also been recovered from Wareen , dating to between 33,610 ± 370 (Beta 46873) and 22,370 ± 470 years BP (Beta 26962), at Cave Bay Cave (c. 20,800–c. 18,500 years BP), Kutikina (19,770 ± 850 [ANU 2785]–14,840 ± 930 years BP [ANU 2781]), and Mannalargenna (c. 18,000–c. 15,000 years BP).

-Bone Projectile Points in Prehistoric Australia: Evidence from Archaeologically Recovered Implements, Ethnography, and Rock Art (2016) Allen et al.

For our timeline then, it seems clear that the earliest Tasmanians used bone tools such as projectiles and awls for making clothes from their earliest days. This technology abruptly disappears around 1,500 BC.

The end of eating scaled fish

As above, the archaeological exploration of shell middens and other coastal cave sites revealed a sequence of events which changed dramatically around 3,500 years ago.

The other discontinuity was a sharp one occurring between 3.8 and 3.4 kyr ago. The lower units contained evidence of the systematic exploitation of fish, whereas after this period, fish bones were absent (58, 62). Subsequent research has confirmed that this absence of fishing in upper Holocene times was a general trend in Tasmania (19, 40, 83), and ethnographically the Tasmanians were recorded as not eating fish (57, 62)

-Jones, 1995, as above

Both shellfish and seals continued to be consumed, as well as ‘muttonbirds’ or petrel seabirds, which would have provided a rich source of dietary fats.

The end of making fire

This astonishing claim, that Tasmanians had to go to their neighbours if their fire ever died out because they could not make one by themselves, must count as one of anthropology’s most persistent myths. The claim originally surfaced after the disease and violence which accompanied European settlement had reduced Tasmanian numbers to a fraction of their original size. Post 1830’s descriptions of Tasmanian customs, languages and lifeways includes the occasional reference to their inability to make fire. This claim was resurfaced by the archaeologist Rhys Jones in the 1970’s, who outlined the theory of cultural degeneration and maladaption, following earlier ideas about the Tasmanians representing an essentially static, Palaeolithic form of life.

Some quotes include:

James Backhouse, following his journey to Tasmania from 1832 to 1838, wrote that the Aborigines 'had no artificial method of obtaining fire'

Thomas Dove, after talking to Aborigines at the Flinders Island settlement, concluded in 1842 that “their memory supplies them with no instances of a period in which they were obliged to draw on their inventive powers for the means of resuscitating an element so essential to their health and comfort as flame”

James Calder (quoted by Roth) claimed in 1874 that the Aborigines of Tasmania 'were ignorant of any method of procuring fire'

In his 1878 edition of Researches into the History of Mankind, Tylor reported that Joseph Milligan, who compiled a significant vocabulary of Tasmanian Aboriginal words in 1859, thought, in Tylor's words, 'the Tasmanians never produced fire by artificial means at all'

-The polemics of making fire in Tasmania: the historical evidence revisited (2008) Rebe Taylor

Making sense of the claims

Starting with the easiest - the claim that Tasmanians could not make fire simply has no basis in fact. Not only are there multiple descriptions of the various ways in which they did, but we even have some of their original artefacts.

One wonderful source of information is the archive of the amateur scientist Ernest Westlake, an Englishman who travelled to Tasmania and produced huge volumes of notes and papers about the people who lived there and their culture. (You can find out more about his archive here) He recorded nearly 100 conversations with different Tasmanians in his papers, and 27 of them include detailed descriptions of their firemaking techniques. These include percussive methods, fire-sticks, drills, boards and all the nuances of which plants and woods to use and when.

However - the recurring insistence on this idea of a loss of fire making skills is shouldered by the ubiquitous references to Tasmanians carrying bundles of fire sticks with them, and relighting fires using sticks from other camp sites. There are several points to be made here. Firstly, Tasmania is a damp environment, full of cold rainforest, regular rainfalls and coastal winds - hardly ideal for fire lighting. Seasonal fire making may have been the norm, rather than ad hoc, given the weather conditions. Secondly, the art and practice of fire lighting has rarely been utilitarian. Prometheus is not the only deity who stole fire, and control over who can make fire and when can be a matter of great secrecy. Paradoxically the use of fire to burn the rainforest, to provide more ideal hunting and living territories, seems to have been perfected around the time (2000-1500 BC) that bone tools and fish disappear in the record.

Hope comments (1978:507) that the rain forest elements appear to be  "marginally more important before 3300 B.P." It is possible that the initial  expansion of the rain forest was something with which people were unable to cope.

Tasmanian rain forest is dense and damp, and its manipulation by fire is no mean feat, and would hardly have been learned overnight. The decrease in  pollen elements after 3300 B.P. may reflect successful rain forest manipulation,which allowed people to make an intensive adaptation to the south and west  coasts. Along the north coast, rain forest came right down to the coast in  places. To visit Hunter Island regularly, it is possible that paths to suitable embarkation points had to be kept open by firing. Thus, it is  perhaps only after the rain forest is able to be manipulated that we see the  emergence of Jones's coordinated northwest regional system; it is only after  3000 years ago  that west coast spongolite begins to appear at Rocky Cape.

-Prehistoric Archaeology in Tasmania (1982) Sandra Bowdler

Jones’ argument has become infamous within Australian archaeology for its blunt characterisation of Tasmanian culture as undergoing a tragic spiraling decline into oblivion. For Jones, the absence of other more advanced toolkits such as hafted and ground tools already marked out the Tasmanians as a people who were ‘stuck’ in a rut. The decision to reject fishing and bone tool manufacturing was, in his schema, a path to destruction.

With this abnegation, part of the economic heritage of early Tasmanians  slipped away. An intellectual event caused a contraction in their ecological  space.

Like a blow above the heart, it took a long time to take effect, but slowly but  surely there was a simplification in the tool kit, a diminution in the range of  foods eaten, perhaps a squeezing of intellectuality....

Were 4000 people enough to propel forever the cultural inheritance of Late Pleistocene Australia? Even if  Abel Tasman had not sailed the winds of the Roaring Forties in  1642, were they in fact doomed - doomed to a slow strangulation of the mind? (Jones  1977:200). 

However, despite the simple toolkit, and perhaps even an ability to make fire during the wet season, it is possible to interpret the Tasmanian situation as stable, rather than declining. The taming of the rainforest may have made it possible for them to begin exploring the islands around Tasmania. All evidence for occupation on Hunter and Maatsuyker Islands seems to have occurred after the loss of bone tools and fish, and there are suggestions that the Tasmanian canoe was a relatively recent invention, propelled by increasing access to good shorelines.

Archaeologist Harry Allen critiqued Jones as early as 1979, pointing out that the move from protein-rich scaled fish to fat-rich seals and seabirds made good economic sense. In a similar vein researcher Ron Vanderwal argued that bone tools were primarily used for making clothing, and that moving from fur clothes to layers of grease and ochre applied to the skin was simply more efficient. It could be that all these new adaptations were bound together - access to the sea meant more emphasis on fat and fatty animals which in turn prompted an economic reorganisation away from fishing to sealing and seabird harvesting. This is speculative of course, but it is worth exploring the hypothesis that these ‘losses’ in technology were no necessarily maladaptive. Many other hypotheses have also been put forward, including a mass poisoning event from some kind of toxic bloom prompting a new food taboo, but we lack more focused archaeology from the present to confirm or deny any of these.

Conclusions

It would take a much longer set of articles to do justice to the full archaeology and anthropology of Tasmania, including the languages and different waves of arrivals. However, in addressing the narrow claims of technological losses I think we can make the following conclusions:

• The Tasmanians never lost the ability to make fire, but they may have struggled to make it all year round

• Their toolkit was extremely limited in comparison to Australian and global hunter-gatherer technological repertoires.

• Somewhere around 3,500 years ago there was a switch from fishing and making bone tools to a different economic mode.

• One can read the archaeology of Tasmania as a story of cultural decline, but other alternatives are available.

Tasmanians do occupy a unique and rather tragic place in archaeological history. Most early theorists wanted to read into them a just-so story of Darwinian evolution and a warning story of cultural decline. We should be fair and balanced here - they were an extremely isolated population with a very limited set of technologies, but they were not as limited as some have made them out to be.