Teewah Beach: New Evidence For Holocene Coastal Occupation In Southeast Queensland

Abstract

This paper presents the results of excavations undertaken at Teewah Beach Site 26, situated along the Cooloola coast, southeast Queensland. The open site yielded a stone artefact sequence dated from 5531 BP to 316 BP (calibrated), with fauna1 remains (shellfish and fish) appearing at ca 900 BP. Major inferences drawn from the excavations are: 1. despite a human presence in southeast Queensland for at least 20,000 years, ca 5500 BP marks the first major human occupation of Coolda. Such a pattern resulted from the localized adaptation of an existing coastal settlement-subsistence system which had been fdlowing the transgressing coastline westwards until its relative stabilization at ca 6000 BP; 2. fishing may have been of equal or greater significance during the mid-Hdocene compared to the last 1000 years; 3. the distinctive southeast Queensland artefact type, bevel-edged tool (‘bevelled pounder’) has an antiquity of at least between 5000 BP and 4000 BP, not ca 1500 BP as previously thought, thus making it one of the ddest, continuously used plant food processing tool types known in Australia; 4. increased relative use of local resources (shellfish and stone) across Codoola and other parts of coastal southeast Queensland during the last ca 1000 years conesponds to the development of regionally isolated settlement-subsistence systems and associated socioitical entities similar to those recorded istorically; and 5. while most of these condusions complement Hall and Hiscock’s (1988) model of cultural change for southeast Queensland, I argue that their use of intrinsic population increase as a prime mover is theoretically problematic.

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