SEMINAR: Baler shell knives in northern Australia

This paper explores the archaeological evidence for the making of baler shell (Melo spp.) knives found in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene deposits in Boodie Cave on Barrow Island, northwest Western Australia. While such knives have been reported in surface midden contexts the archaeological signature of baler shell knife manufacture as not been described and these artefacts are rare. This study aims to determine how the knives were made, characterise the manufacturing debris and investigate how they were used using three sets of data – Barrow Island knives, knives made by Kaiadilt people and experimentally made knives. This presentation will discuss these three data sets in detail. In the 1960s Tindale both filmed and collected knives and their manufacturing debris made by the Kaiadilt on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In late 2018 Fiona Hook and Sean Ulm recorded the collected knives held in the South Australian Museum. Using this ethnographic information, a series of knives were made by Kim Akerman. The experimentally made knives were used in butcher and woodworking experiments to capture usewear patterns. The ethnographic and experimental data was then compared with the Boodie Cave knives. This paper will discuss the initial results of the analysis showing that the experimentally made knives have been key to understanding manufacturing debris patterns, providing the basis for possible identification of shell knife manufacture in the Boodie Cave deposits where whole knives were not found.