Cave Dust Backed GunaiKurnai Knowledge of a Sacred Place

The Grass Inside the Stone

Cloggs Cave in eastern Victoria was not an Ice-Age home. It has no ordinary food refuse, and GunaiKurnai knowledge identifies caves like it as secluded places used by mulla-mullung — learned men and women associated with healing, ritual and spiritual practice.

A 2026 study in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology tested that history at microscopic scale. Researchers examined phytoliths, tiny silica bodies formed inside plants, throughout cave deposits spanning about 25,000 years. They also analysed preserved possum droppings to separate plant traces carried by animals from those left by people.

The grass vanished. Its stone skeletons stayed in the ash.

Whole Plants Were Carried In

Burnt phytoliths provided the clearest human signature. The cave's ash layers held silica bodies from grass leaves, stems and flowering parts, showing that people deliberately gathered whole grass plants, carried them into the cave and burned them in thin spreads. Woody-plant traces were scarce.

The new result strengthens a wider pattern already preserved at the site:

• A standing stone dating to about 2,000 years ago was surrounded by 73 thin ash layers deposited across roughly four centuries.
• Flowering plants with known cultural and medicinal roles were carried into the cave.
• Two miniature fireplaces held trimmed Casuarina sticks smeared with animal or human fat.
• Those buried installations date to roughly 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.

The last pair is especially important. A 2024 Nature Human Behaviour study, requested and led with the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation, found that the concealed fireplaces match ritual installations documented in nineteenth-century ethnography. The sticks and invisible fat could not have remained on display for later copying. The researchers interpret the match as about 500 generations of cultural transmission.

What the Evidence Says

The archaeology does not prove that one ceremony remained unchanged for all 25,000 years of cave visits. The phytolith study itself warns that unburnt plant traces can mix human and possum activity, and it cannot identify every grass species.

What it does show is stronger than a loose resemblance imposed from outside. Community knowledge, historical records, buried structures, plant chemistry and microscopic ash converge on the same kind of place: a cave set apart for specialised practice, not daily life.

Modern science did not rescue a forgotten story here. It learned where to look because GunaiKurnai knowledge was already holding the map.