New research has revealed evidence of 7,000 years of Aboriginal mining at Sugarloaf Hill in South Australia’s Riverland, offering fresh insight into the long history of stone quarrying, toolmaking and trade along the Murray River corridor.
Flinders University researchers, working in partnership with the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation, have carried out the first detailed investigation into an Aboriginal chert and silcrete quarry in the Riverland region.
The research points to thousands of years of mining activity at Sugarloaf Hill, where hard, fine-grained rocks were sourced by Aboriginal people to craft tools, weapons and items used for trade.
Riverland-sourced materials are believed to have been redistributed well beyond the area, highlighting the importance of the quarry within wider Aboriginal society and economies across the southwestern Murray Darling Basin.
The Sugarloaf Hill Quarry is one of several known sources of silcrete and chert traditionally used by Aboriginal people in a localised region of the Murray River corridor, stretching between Berribee in northwestern Victoria and Overland Corner in South Australia.
Despite the scale of the quarry, researchers say the site has received less attention in historical literature than its significance warrants.
“The key outcome from our research has been establishing a plausible timeline for the mining of these materials at Sugarloaf Hill,” lead researcher Dr Craig Westell, from the Archaeology discipline at Flinders University, said.
Dr Westell said chronologies established at quarries elsewhere in Australia had helped provide important context around Aboriginal life and the social, cultural and political systems connected to quarrying.
“We believe similar outcomes can be achieved in the Riverland through further integration of ethnohistorical, archaeological and contemporary community views,” Dr Westell said.
The new timeline also allows researchers to compare Sugarloaf Hill with other stone quarries across Australia.
The team will now carry out further research into other Riverland quarries to determine whether the Sugarloaf Hill timeline reflects broader use of stone sources across the region.
Co-author Professor Amy Roberts, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre for Transforming Human Origins Research at Flinders University, said stone quarries were an important part of cultural inheritance.
“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. Stone quarries are an essential part of this inheritance,” Professor Roberts said.
Sheryl Giles, a spokesperson for the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation, said the findings demonstrated the enduring connection between Aboriginal people and the Riverland landscape.
“This timeline demonstrates both the deep time and long-term connections that our ancestors have maintained with all aspects of our riverscape,” Ms Giles said.
The research, titled 7000 Years of Aboriginal Mining at Sugarloaf Hill in the Riverland Region of South Australia, has been published in Archaeology in Oceania.
