Aboriginal Sites In A Submerged Landscape At Lake Jasper, Southwestern Australia

Abstract

Western Australian Museum diver/archaeologists have identified submerged Aboriginal sites at depths to 10 m on the floor of Lake Jasper, a 4 sq km freshwater lake located in the D'Entrecasteaux National Park, 6 km from the Southern Ocean coast in the extreme southwestern corner of Western Australia (Lat. 34° 24'30 S. Long. 115° 40'30 E.). The lake is in a swampy corridor of coastal sand plain between a low plateau (40-60 m a.s.l.) to the north, and, on its seaward side, high coastal dunes (150-195 m a.s.l.) having a massive calcarenite substrate. One of us (C.D.) first saw some of the sites in April 1988. At this time severe 1987-1 988 drought conditions had lowered the water level at Lake Jasper, exposing parts of its floor and revealing, above water and at shallow depths ( 1 m), scatters of flaked stone artefacts and numbers of large tree and blackboy ( Xanthorrhoea preissii ) stumps in growth position. It was suspected that the stumps were essentially the remains of a pre-inundation landscape, since it is improbable that trees and blackboys could have become established in an inshore zone of fluctuating water levels. This probability seemed greater when, a few months later, wood samples from two submerged tree stumps - one from Site 3 on the southwest side of the lake, and the other at Site 1 on the lake's opposite shore, 2 km east, yielded a pair of c. 3800 BP radiocarbon dates. No Aboriginal sites had been recorded previously around Lake Jasper, and there are no ethnohistorical or ethnographic data for the locality.

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