Test Excavation At The Oyster Harbour Stone Fish Traps, King George Sound, Western Australia: An Investigation Aimed at Determining the Construction Method and Maximum Age of the Structures

Abstract

Several stone structures on the northern foreshore of Oyster Harbour, King George Sound, Western Australia, are documented in ethnohistorical accounts and traditionally regarded as ‘fish traps’ maintained and used by resident Aboriginal groups, around the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century. Test excavation at one structure (‘Trap 7’), undertaken at the request of the local Aboriginal community, did show the structure’s mode of construction, though failed to uncover datable materials in incontestable primary position whose radiocarbon age would show when the structure was built. The age of this structure’s original construction and fi rst use remains unknown, though it and other structures at this site presumably post-date mid-Holocene sea-level rise to present height, as is the case with other stone weir or trap complexes on the Southern Ocean coast.