Upon realizing I didn't know anything about funerary (so often mis-typed as funary, an uncommon combination of fun and canary which is entirely out of place here) practices of Australian Aborigines, I did some quick researching. The first thing I learned was that most of the information pertains to modern aborigines. Not having been dead for very long (or at all), they are not quite so interesting as they could be. To find the better articles, I did some deeper research. Deep research as a naive is a difficult and inefficient process requiring, in this case, access codes to all the university databases in Victoria and Ontario (we should all join the Ontario sharing system), a dozen search combinations, and a pocketful of refinements. The result was this:
Hunter-gatherer burials and the creation of persistent places in southeastern Australia
A good read with pros and cons. Editing, first off, was not very well done. The absence of periods in some places wreaked havoc on understanding, doing away with all concepts of proper nouns and continuity of thought. Fortunately, the writing itself was far better than what one most often encounters. A rather casual yet concise style.
For those who weren't tempted by a degree in English, I'll cease with the deviations. The paper made it quite clear as to why there was little ease in finding a paper. There is little work that has been done on the subject, especially where dating is concerned. Few of the sites discussed had any dating done and even less had multiple dates, rendering those that had been done of little use. Most of the records were made before the nice dating technology we have now, and the locations chosen for burials make stratigraphy an irrelevant point. Sand, which is prone to shifting, exposing, and reburying, was the preferred substrate for burial. This means that layers only are of use if the sand levels had been recorded faithfully over the last six or so thousand years. As such, information about the relation of burials to eachother is limited.
Of course, spoken history, which was quite extensive (see the paper for an example of how extensive), could have filled many of the gaps, allowing for good guesses at the least. Unfortunately, history had only as good a record here as local survivorship from smallpox (not very good and rather patchy). Some of the early ethnographies made a good attempt, when not being racist, at records, but there wasn't much they could do. Interestingly, the shifting sands allow for evidence of the memory that existed. As any markers of graves could only ever have been short lived, the locations and patterns of burials would have remained hidden. As the paper points out, the locations of burials could easily have become common knowledge (a sign of long conservation itself), but the particulars could only have been known by insiders. Across many generations, though, graves in the same location had obvious relation. This means that knowledge of how (and probably who, for a good while at least) a person is buried in a place passed from mouth to (listening) ear with conservation any historian would be embarrassed by.
My favourite point in the paper is in relation to this consistency. More importantly, in it's (yes it's, and adamantly so. The dropping of the apostrophe was a common mistake that stuck, resulting in serious consequences and frightful ambiguity.) flexibility. While traditions were conserved, they were flexible enough to suit a nomadic life and baffle archaeologists. They seem to have been (to me and from this paper only) a solid set of good rules that can be applied to real life. As I'm sure all of us can think of rules about burial that don't get along so well with reality, this is something to be impressed by.
For fear of going beyond my understanding, I'll stop with this paper here. A book, most likely, could be written, but not without a little more research and perhaps some timely radiocarbon dating. Also, don't trust me. I've not referenced anything here, so you should probably read the paper for yourself. All I can say with certainty is that I wish I had thought of this for my main project instead.
Devin
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