For more than 100 generations, people returned to Melburnian ancestors dug deep into the red earth of Sugarloaf Hill, chipping away at layers of stone harder than steel and finer than most surgeons' scalpels. now, Flinders University researchers and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation have given this ancient workplace a name: one of the longest-running Aboriginal stone quarries in southern Australia.
Their just-published study, "7,000 Years of Aboriginal Mining at Sugarloaf Hill in the Riverland Region of South Australia," documents the first detailed archaeological investigation of a chert and silcrete quarry along the Murray River corridor. The verdict: Aboriginal miners worked Sugarloaf Hill for seven millennia, extracting fine-grained stone to craft tools, weapons, and objects for trade across distances far beyond the Riverland.
The research was co-authored by Flinders archaeology lecturer Dr. Craig Westell and a team that included Amy Roberts of the university's Centre for Transforming Human Origins Research and Sheryl Giles, speaking as a spokesperson for the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation. The collaboration deliberately wove together-community knowledge with scientific methods, a pairing Westell says made the timeline possible.
"The key outcome from our research has been establishing a plausible timeline for the mining of these materials at Sugarloaf Hill," he said. Chronologies from quarries elsewhere in Australia offered context, but what emerged from Sugarloaf Hill deepens understanding of Aboriginal economies and the social structures embedded in stonework.
The new chronology also invites comparison. Researchers plan to study other Riverland quarries to learn whether Sugarloaf Hill's 000-year span reflects a broader pattern in how Aboriginal people drew on the region's stone sources.
For Giles, the findings resonate beyond the academic. "The relationships that Aboriginal people share with their ancestors, the river and land shaped connections and responsibilities to country, and ultimately systems of traditional land ownership," she said. "Stone quarries are an essential part of this inheritance."
Roberts put it in even sharper focus: "This timeline demonstrates both the deep time and long-term connections that our ancestors have maintained with all aspects of our riverscape," she said.
The study appears in Archaeology in Oceania.