Graman Revisited Once Again: A Reanalysis of the Late Holocene Legacy Faunal Assemblage From GB4 Rockshelter, New South Wales

Abstract

The archaeological site Graman B4 provided one of the first records of substantial dietary change in ancient Australian Aboriginal society. Initial examination of the faunal remains from this site suggested that Late Holocene hunters reduced their focus on high-ranked kangaroos to increasingly rely on arboreal possums; and that these subsistence changes were concurrent with changes in foragers’ toolkits, namely discontinuation of backed artefacts and adoption of ground-edged axes. These phenomena apparently echoed technological and subsistence developments observed elsewhere in Australia during the Late Holocene. Recent analysis of material from elsewhere in the Graman complex (GB1) did not match this pattern. However, differences in the chronology of the two sites meant that GB4 itself required reexamination to resolve this issue. Here, we describe a zooarchaeological reanalysis of GB4's faunal assemblage. Reanalysis shows that this site contains a substantially greater diversity of fauna than originally published and or which is known from GB1. Both sites, however, indicate that large macropods were always the main source of animal protein at Graman, with an emergent specialisation on possums from ∼3250 calBP. There is little evidence of adverse environmental change at Graman, and hunting activity or productivity appear to increase at the onset of the ENSO intensification and with the arrival of the dingo. We explore the possibility that novel extractive technologies, including tamed dingoes used in hunting, may be connected to the economic restructuring observed during the Late Holocene at Graman.