Assessing the spread and uptake of tula adze technology in the late Holocene across the Southern Kimberley of Western Australia

Abstract

One of Indigenous Australia’s unique stone tools, the tula adze is traditionally viewed as a hafted woodworking tool of the arid zone. Unlike most stone tools in Australia and around the world, the spread and adoption of the tula adze has been described as rapid and instantaneous. The conditions which underlie this technological change are critically assessed in this study, using risk minimisation and diffusion models. The focus of the paper is a study area with unclear tula distribution—the southern Kimberley of Western Australia. The spatial distribution of these tools is reviewed and new discoveries outlined. Reduction sequences and morphological trends observed elsewhere are examined, and compared to the Kimberley record. Some of the archaeological sites analysed also preserve evidence of woodworking activities, such as wood shavings and wooden tools. We use these records, augmented by the association of hardwood species from macrobotanical records, to associate tulas with hardwood species availability in the late Holocene archaeological record of the Kimberley. We conclude that woodworking craft production proliferated in the late Holocene, as a likely result of both diffusion of information and foraging risk minimisation.

Keywords:

• Lithic
• tula adze
• woodworking
• Australian archaeology
• Holocene

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Aboriginal groups on whose lands archaeological excavations were conducted and thank them for their collaboration. The authors pay their respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The excavations featured in this study were funded by the Australian Research Council ‘Lifeways of the First Australians’ project [LP100200415]. Thanks also go to support from the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, ‘The unknown “Ice Age” artists of Borneo’ [FT170100025].