Saltwater People: spiritscapes, maritime rituals and the archaeology of Australian indigenous seascapes

Abstract

Anthropological research reveals that the scale and complexity of Australian indigenous seascapes correlate with the scale and complexity of spiritual engagements with the sea and use of its resources. Marine specialists see and represent themselves as Saltwater People – an identification spiritually embedded within seascapes rich in cosmological meaning. For Aboriginal people, this embeddedness is underwritten by a Dreaming cosmology that formalizes seascapes as spiritscapes engaged through ritual performance. Such maritime rituals occur on the water, on tidal flats or on dry land. Rituals are the social mechanism by which Saltwater Peoples (Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders) spiritually manage and control their seas and ultimately orchestrate their seascapes. As such, an archaeology of seascapes is more than an archaeology of marine subsistence and procurement technology; it must also be an archaeology of spiritscapes and rituals that mediate human spiritual relationships with the sea. Because ritual sites often have a material expression, it is possible to investigate such sites archaeologically. This scope opens the possibility of investigating long-term developments in people’s spiritual attachments to the sea and how seascapes were cosmologically constructed in a broad range of cultural settings. A new hypothesis associating spiritual control of extreme tidal regimes with previously enigmatic marine stone arrangements from central Queensland illustrates the potential value of the spiritscape approach to seascapes.