ABSTRACT
At the opening of the twentieth century Thomas Whitelegge was walking near Sydney’s beaches when he discovered small, regularly shaped artefacts of stone in wind-blown erosion areas. These were flakes of stone with a long sharp edge opposite a blunted edge, creating objects like a penknife blade (Figure 8.1). Whitelegge went to Robert Etheridge, then Curator at the Australian Museum, who inspected the localities and identified ancient workshops for manufacturing the tiny, neatly shaped stone implements. In 1907 Etheridge and Whitelegge published a description of these artefacts and concluded they had been surgical knives, scalpels, because of their sharp edges and small size. Etheridge realized these artefacts had never been used by Aborigines during the historical period; they were evidence of a time when people used different tools and led a different lifestyle. Now called ‘backed artefacts’ by archaeologists, these tools are found on archaeological sites across much of the continent. Their discovery initiated a century-long debate about where they came from, when they appeared, why they were made, and when and why they stopped being used. These questions were the focus of many investigations into technological change during the Holocene.
