In societies without writing, ethnographically known rituals have rarely been tracked back archaeologically more than a few hundred years. At the invitation of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders, we undertook archaeological excavations at Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Australian Alps. In GunaiKurnai Country, caves were not used as residential places during the early colonial period (mid-nineteenth century CE), but as secluded retreats for the performance of rituals by Aboriginal medicine men and women known as ‘mulla-mullung’, as documented by ethnographers. Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artefacts made of Casuarina wood smeared with animal or human fat, matching the configuration and contents of GunaiKurnai ritual installations described in nineteenth-century ethnography. These findings represent 500 generations of cultural transmission of an ethnographically documented ritual practice that dates back to the end of the last ice age and that contains Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts.

在没有文字的社会中，民族志上已知的仪式很少能从考古学上追溯到几百年前。应GunaiKurnai原住民长老的邀请，我们在澳大利亚阿尔卑斯山麓的Cloggs Cave进行了考古发掘。在古奈库尔奈县，在早期殖民时期（公元十九世纪中叶），洞穴并没有被用作居住地，而是被原住民男男女女作为隐秘的隐居处进行仪式，称为“mulla-mullung”，据文献记载民族志学家。在这里，我们报告了埋藏在地下的微型壁炉的发现，这些壁炉具有 11,000 和 12,000 年的历史，其中有突出的修剪过的木制工艺品，由木麻黄木制成，涂有动物或人类脂肪，与 19 世纪民族志中描述的 GunaiKurnai 仪式设施的结构和内容相匹配。这些发现代表了民族志记录的仪式实践的 500 代文化传承，其历史可以追溯到最后一个冰河时代末期，其中包含澳大利亚已知最古老的木制工艺品。