EXCAVATIONS IN THE ROYAL NATIONAL PARK, NEW SOUTH WALES: A FIRST SERIES OF RADIOCARBON DATES FROM THE SYDNEY DISTRICT

Abstract

DURING 1962-63 a preliminary series of excavations was carried out at the coastal rock shelter site of Curracurrang Cove, Royal National Park, N.S.W. (p roject code designation : cu/-) about miles south of Sydney (340 8' 5 S. Lat.X]5x° 6' 25 E. Long.). The excavations were part of a programme of selective field work in the south Sydney area under the writer's general direction, funds being provided exclusively by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies as part of its inaugural series of research projects (Megaw, 1963) ; a brief abstract of results to date was presented in absentia to the 1964 Canberra meeting of A.N.Z.A.A.S., Section H, and a few of the C14 dates have appeared in a recent checklist (Dury, 1964). The rock shelter (PL la), positioned some 250 yards from the shore line on the 70' contour at the mouth of a small well-watered gully, faces due east, tie midden material from the various phases of occupation having formed an extensiv s downhill slope now covered with buffalo grass. The deposit under the actual overhang of the shelter, which is about 6' 6 high at the lip, has been somewhat disturbed by casual campers and the interest of a local collector, Mr. Paul Price of Sutherland, N.S.W. The writer is indebted to Mr. Price for first indicating the potentialities of the site and giving his subsequent whole-hearted co-operation, including the loan of human skeletal material as well as a range of stone artifacts containing the v rell-known back-blades and other microlithic forms of the Bondaian industry as defined by McCarthy (1948, 1961). The excavation in 1962-63 was restricted to obtaining a transverse section of the extent of the occupational material from the back of the rock overhang to a point some 50 feet downhill. Some interim notes on a series of radiocarbon dates for the various layers revealed in the trial section and the general nature of the cultural objects recovered may be of interest in view of two other N.S.W. dates recently published by Tindale (1964) ; the Curracurrang series is the first indication of the antiquity of the various periods of Aboriginal settlement in the Sydney district and the first to establish a chronology for a representative Bondaian stone tool kit. In its way, then, as a result of fortunate chance and ready co-operation the site has played some small part in, to quote Mulvaney (1962), advsincing the frontiers of Australian archaeology. Curracurrang exhibits a well-defined tripartite stratigraphical division at the upper, that is, rock shelter end of the section (PL 1b). The general layering is as