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AIRLIE WARD, PRESENTER: Without construction of the $180 million Brighton bypass, Aboriginal stone artefacts up to 40,000 years old might still be buried in layers of silt beside the Jordan river near Brighton.
Preliminary tests show the site could be of international significance, revealing a snapshot of human life during a relatively unknown part of human history.
Tests next week are expected to confirm the find as the oldest in Tasmania and one of the oldest the nation. Fiona Breen visited the site this morning with archaeologists Cornelia de Rochefort, one of the team commissioned by the State Government.
FIONA BREEN, REPORTER: What is significant about the landscape of this particular area?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT, ARCHAEOLOGIST: It's significant because it's an alluvial landscape and all that means is that the Jordan River over here has built up this land form over a long period of time and as Aboriginal community groups would visit this particular site, they'd leave their stone tools and then in-between flooding events they would get buried and obviously it just gets a snap shot in time of different culture visitations to this site.
FIONA BREEN: So can you show us, you know, where you've been digging?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: We have in this profile a good 30 cm of undisturbed sediment. So it hasn't been altered difference it was deposited 40,000 years ago, 30 and up to 28,000 years ago. So we have over a period of time different activity floors that are separated by at least 10,000 years.
FIONA BREEN: So a map of ages really.
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: Yes, a map of ages. And ordinarily that map of ages in most other sites has been sort of squashed or disturbed and everything gets mixed together and you can't tell what has come from, so we may find that at 40,000 years people were coming her to do different things then what they were doing at 28,000 years.
FIONA BREEN: So how exciting is that as an archaeologist?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: It's very exciting because it's very, very rare that you'll get in an open site, you will get a stratified site that you can see through the ages and time different activity floors.
Most open sites around Australia, as I said, have been disturbed and you don't get that kind of information. It's a very old, potentially very old site, even if the site was just at 28,000 years it still puts it at a great antiquity. There are only a handful of sites in Tasmania that are of great antiquity and also on the mainland.
FIONA BREEN: You were saying before that one of the oldest or some of the oldest sites in Tasmania south west are actually about 30,000 years so this potentially could be older?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: Yes that's correct.
FIONA BREEN: What would Tasmania have been like at that point?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: Well basically Tasmania would have been joined to the mainland of Australia, there would have been a land bridge or people would have at least been able to hop through shallow seas across to Tasmania. It would have been very cold and it would have been very dry.
FIONA BREEN: So we don't know a lot about this period of time?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: We don't, we don't. The majority of our sites are from when the sea levels rose during the Holocene period so when the sea levels stabilised and when conditions became a lot nicer to live in. Pleistocene sites have been destroyed, they're quite rare and this is why this site is so important.
FIONA BREEN: Is it significant internationally?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: It will be because significant internationally, because again, it relates to the colonisation of Australia and the spread of humans from out of Africa, Europe, down through Asia and into Australia.
FIONA BREEN: Can you tell us about some of the, the different bits and pieces you've found in this area?
CORNELIA DE ROCHEFORT: Yep, sure this is an example of a flake. So basically this has been produced by a human.
It would have once been a cobble or a rock and someones come along and they've knocked it on here, to produce a cutting edge, a nice sharp edge. It came from about here, so probably about at 40, just above the 40,000 mark so it's potentially very, very old.
The majority of the finds have been of this size class here. Quite small. Possibly you know just tool maintenance, someones come along and sharpened up their tool to collect some resources from the Jordan River valley and perhaps gotten their food and gone somewhere else and they've left behind these flakes which we're then buried by the sands and preserved.
This is a small flaked piece of European glass. It's sort of what we call contact archaeology. And it's the interaction of Aboriginal people and Europeans when they first came to this country. It was found quite high up. So it's not in any kind of important context but the point is, it's in the historic layer and that just shows continuity of Aboriginal presence from 40 to 30,000 years right through to the present day. And it's a really important thing that it's got that continuity of presence of Aboriginal people here which makes it quite important.