A stone scraper uncovered on Springbank Island has reinforced Canberra's status as a traditional meeting place for Aboriginal people and suggests they occupied the area alongside early European settlers.
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The thumbnail scraper was among 35 stone artefacts undergraduate archaeology students and community members found in an excavation of the island as part of a joint project last year by the Australian National University and Canberra Archaeological Society to find remnants of a homestead and Indigenous occupation on the site.
ANU lecturer Dr Duncan Wright said the large number of stone artefacts uncovered among rubble, bricks and early to mid-19th century ceramics from the homestead was a surprise.
Six of the stone pieces were found in the same context of the homestead layer uncovered by the group, suggesting Aboriginal people had been in the area at the same time Europeans lived in the homestead
"It's something the traditional owners have been telling us for years, there were obviously Aboriginal people on the country during this period," he said.
Dr Wright said the thumbnail scraper was a composite tool that may have been a barb on a spear, and researchers believed it had been brought from outside the district, potentially pointing to Canberra's status as either a trading or meeting point.
"We get this wonderful picture of someone coming to the site with the spear and the fact that's it's made with chalcedony [a type of quartz] - which to my knowledge is not a local rock - suggests they were coming from some distance away," he said.
"This is giving us a story about the role of pre-European Canberra as either a trading point or probably more likely a place where meetings and ceremonies were happening and people were coming from far and wide to this area. That was really fantastic."
Another "wonderful little time capsule" uncovered from the homestead period was a glass bottle stopper which the researchers found was probably manufactured between 1880 and 1890 in Sydney.
"It would have come all the way as a Club Sauce bottle to Canberra where it was used by one of the occupants of the homestead," he said.
Dr Wright said he had been heartened by the level of community interest in the community dig from descendants of the homestead's occupants and local traditional owners.
"During ACT Heritage Week we had an open day and we had to turn people away, we had more than 100 people who came out to the island," he said.
"It was quite eye-opening how keen the Canberra public are in their own cultural heritage. Canberra's history is something we can celebrate not just as a European thing but as something's that's much older."
Dr Wright said it was hoped the artefacts uncovered on the island would be displayed in the ANU's School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and students involved in the project would continue further testing to ascertain the source of the stones.
The project was funded by ACT Heritage.
