UNEX 1000-year-old coins found in Northern Territory may rewrite Australian history

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/techn...stralian-history/story-fn5jhw50-1226646189425


1000-year-old coins found in Northern Territory may rewrite Australian history

by: Barbara Barkhausen
From: AAP
May 19, 2013 2:46PM




A find of 1000-year-old coins (not pictured) had led archaeologists to launch an expedition that may rewrite Australian history.

Expedition to uncover history of found coins
Coins not of monetary value, priceless to archaeologists


FIVE copper coins and a nearly 70-year-old map with an "X" might lead to a discovery that could rewrite Australia's history.

Australian scientist Ian McIntosh, currently Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in the US, plans an expedition in July that has stirred up the archaeological community.

The scientist wants to revisit the location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed.

Back in 1944 during World War II, after Japanese bombers had attacked Darwin two years earlier, the Wessel Islands - an uninhabited group of islands off Australia's north coast - had become a strategic position to help protect the mainland.

Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg was stationed on one of the islands to man a radar station and spent his spare time fishing on the idyllic beaches.

While sitting in the sand with his fishing-rod, he discovered a handful of coins in the sand.

He didn't have a clue where they could come from but pocketed them anyway and later placed them in a tin.

In 1979 he rediscovered his "treasure" and decided to send the coins to a museum to get them identified.

The coins proved to be 1000 years old.

Still not fully realising what treasure he held in his hands, he marked an old colleague's map with an "X" to remember where he had found them.

The discovery was apparently forgotten again until anthropologist McIntosh got the ball rolling a few months ago.

The coins raise many important questions:

How did 1000-year-old coins end up on a remote beach on an island off the northern coast of Australia?

Did explorers from distant lands arrive on Australian shores way before the James Cook declared it "terra nullius" and claimed it for the British throne in 1770?

We do know already that Captain Cook wasn't the first white seafarer to step on Australia's shores.

In 1606 a Dutch explorer named Willem Janszoon reached the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, closely followed a few years late by another Dutch seafarer Dirk Hartog.

And the Spaniard Luiz Vaez de Torres discovered the strait between Papua New Guinea and Australia, which was later named Torres Strait in his honour.

However, none of these explorers recognised that they had discovered the famed southern continent, the "terra australis incognita", which was depicted as a counterweight to the known land masses of the northern hemisphere on many world maps of the day.

McIntosh and his team of Australian and American historians, archaeologists, geomorphologists and Aboriginal rangers say that the five coins date back to the 900s to 1300s.

They are African coins from the former Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania.

Kilwa once was a flourishing trade port with links to India in the 13th to 16th century.

The trade with gold, silver, pearls, perfumes, Arabian stone ware, Persian ceramics and Chinese porcelain made the city one of the most influential towns in East Africa at the time.

The copper coins were the first coins ever produced in sub-Saharan Africa and according to McIntosh have only twice been found outside Africa: once in Oman and Isenberg's find in 1944.

The old coins might not be of monetary value, but for archaeologists they are priceless, says McIntosh.

Archaeologists have long suspected that there may have been early maritime trading routes that linked East Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands even 1,000 years ago.

Or the coins could've washed ashore after a shipwreck.

When Isenberg discovered the copper coins he also found four coins that originated from the Dutch East India Company - with one dating back to 1690 raising memories of those early Dutch seafarers that stepped on Australian shores well before Cook.

McIntosh wants to answer some of these mysteries during his planned expedition to the Wessel Islands in July.

And it's not only about revisiting the beach that was marked with an "X" on Isenberg's map.

He will also be looking for a secret cave Aboriginal legends talk about.

This cave is supposed to be close to the beach where Isenberg once found the coins and is said to be filled with doubloons and weaponry of an ancient era.

Should McIntosh and his team find what they are looking for, the find might not only be priceless treasure, but relics that could rewrite Australian history.

The Aborigines up North in Australia used to be cannibals. So the Dutch might have go eaten.


One place in Australia named after the Dutch.

Groote Eylandt was first sighted by Europeans in 1623, by the Dutch ship Arnhem, under Willem van Coolsteerdt. However, it was not until 1644, when Tasman arrived, that the island was given a European name. The first European settlement on the island was established at Emerald River in 1921, in the form of a Christian mission by the Church Missionary Society. During World War II, in 1943, the mission moved to Angurugu, as the RAAF required the use of the mission's airstrip. The ruins of the RAAF base are still evident today. The island was also used as a flying boat base by Qantas for a period of time. In 1979, control of the island was transferred to the local Aboriginal Town Council.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groote_Eylandt

China Connection said:

The Aborigines up North in Australia used to be cannibals. So the Dutch might have go eaten.

Click to expand...

I never knew that. Was it only N. Australia, and when did that cease?

IUPUI led expedition seeks source of thousand-year-old coins in Aboriginal Australia

Like a detective working a cold case, an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis anthropologist hopes to unravel the mystery of how a handful of coins, some dating back more than 1,000 years, wound up on a remote beach along Australia’s northern coastline.

Armed with a grant from the Australian Geographic Society, Ian McIntosh will lead an expedition in July to the long-abandoned Wessel Islands where the coins were found.

The ancient copper coins have little monetary value, but in archaeological terms they are priceless, McIntosh said. The coins may even touch upon the arrival of Europeans in Australia, as British explorer James Cook is credited with being the first European to have encountered the country’s eastern coastline in 1770.

The coins raise the possibility of shipwrecks that may have occurred along an early maritime trading route and bring to mind the ancient trading network that linked East Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands over 1,000 years ago. Aboriginal folklore also speaks of a hidden cave near where the coins were found that is filled with doubloons and weaponry of an ancient era, McIntosh said.

In any case, McIntosh begins his quest for answers with a nearly 70-year-old map where X marks the spot but few other clues about the coins that now reside in a box in the back of a museum in Sydney, because people don’t know what to make of them, he said.

McIntosh, who is Australian, will be returning to the area where he lived for several years while working on his Ph.D.
Mcintosh is an adjunct anthropology faculty member in the IU School of Liberal Arts.

The coins were found in 1944. Maurie Isenberg, an Australian soldier assigned to a forward radar station at Jensen Bay on the Wessel Islands, spotted several coins in the sand while fishing in his spare time one day. Having little interest in coins at the time, he placed them in an airtight tin, where they remained until 1979, when he sent the coins off to have them identified.

Shortly after finding the coins, Isenberg drew an X on a map of the area that had been drawn by another soldier. McIntosh now possesses that map.

Four of the coins were identified as Dutch East India Company coins, with one dating back to 1690. The other five coins, dating from the 900s to 1300s, were African coins from the once flourishing Kilwa Sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin south of Zanzibar in Tanzania. The copper coins, the first to be produced in sub-Saharan Africa, were never in use beyond the immediate locality of East Africa, and only one has ever been found elsewhere, in Oman.

How and why do five Kilwa coins find their way to the Australian Outback? McIntosh said he believes an archaeological site survey, which has never been done, and an excavation will begin to answer those questions.

In partnership with the senior Aboriginal custodians for the Wessel Islands, McIntosh’s team, composed of Australians and Americans, will include a historian, anthropologist, archaeologist and geomorphologist, as well as Aboriginal rangers. They will survey the site where the coins were found, with a view to applying for an excavation permit from the relevant heritage authorities and planning the logistics of the excavation. The initial work to be done includes site surveys, mapping, recording, soil testing and coastal erosion analysis.

There are so many unanswered questions regarding to the African coins' discovery, McIntosh said. “Multiple theses have been put forward by noted scholars, and the major goal is to piece together more of the puzzle. Is a shipwreck involved? Are there more coins? All options are on the table, but only the proposed expedition can help us answer some of these perplexing questions.”

http://newscenter.iupui.edu/5945/IU...thousandyearold-coins-in-Aboriginal-Australia

"...Four of the coins were identified as Dutch East India Company coins, with one dating back to 1690. The other five coins, dating from the 900s to 1300s, were African coins from the once flourishing Kilwa Sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin south of Zanzibar in Tanzania. The copper coins, the first to be produced in sub-Saharan Africa, were never in use beyond the immediate locality of East Africa, and only one has ever been found elsewhere, in Oman..."

"New" coins with old coins kind of PHOGS things up, one would think.

Australia Aborigines were mainly cannibals in the infertile areas in Australia. Down in NSW and Victoria they were not as it is more fertile there. They liked eating Chinese that came to Australia in the gold rush days. Why? Simple the Chinese were mainly vegetarian so they tasted better.


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CANNIBALISM IN AUSTRALIA



There is no doubt that cannibalism existed among them until recent times, and possibly in such dangerous areas as Arnhem Land, in the far north of Northern Territory, may exist to this day. Motives for the eating of human flesh, as elsewhere, are varied, and often closely intertwined. The need for sacrifice; the demands of magic; the desire for revenge; all these are present, as elsewhere; but in the case of the Blackfellows they are perhaps less clearly evolved and crystallized.

Garry Hogg, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, p. 179



The eating of human flesh was not practised by the Australian native to the extent that it was by the South Sea Islander. The term ‘cannibalism’ is usually taken to mean gorging on human flesh, and with relish; and that seems a valid description of the cannibalism of the Melanesian indigènes of New Caledonia, who appear to have regarded man-meat much as we regard the Sunday-joint. Not all cannibalism is the same in purpose.

In hard summers, the new-born children were all eaten by the Kaura tribe in the neighbourhood of Adelaide, according to Dr McKinley. In 1933 I was able to talk to old men who had eaten human flesh. The chief of Yam Island described to me how he had eaten finely-chopped man-meat mixed with crocodile-meat, at his initiation. He added that it had made him sick. The purpose, as he put it, was ‘to make heart come strong inside.’

In the Wotjobaluk tribe, a couple who already had a child might kill their new-born and feed its muscle-flesh to the other one to make it strong. The baby was killed ritually, by striking its head against the shoulder of its elder brother or sister.

Human flesh-eating among many tribes was a sign of respect for the dead. At a Dieri burial, relatives received, in strict order of precedence, small portions of the body-fat to eat. ‘We eat him,’ a tribesman said, ‘because we knew him and were fond of him.’ But revenge cannibalism is typified in the custom of the Ngarigo tribe, who ate the flesh of the hands and feet of slain enemies, and accompanied the eating with loud expressions of contempt for the people killed.

Colin Simpson, Adam in Ochre, Angus & Robertson, 1938



The body [during burial rites] was dried over a fire or in the sun, after the internal organs had been removed through an incision and it had been packed, bound up and, usually, painted. It was then made up into a bundle, and is carried around by the mourners until their grief had been assuaged. It is finally disposed of by internment, cremation, or by being put inside a hollow tree. In some districts, the preparation is complicated by cannibalism, so that the bundle consists only of the bones, or the bones and the dried skin.

Cannibalism forms a ceremony, not only in connexion with mummification in parts of Queensland, but also precedes the exposure of the body on the tree-stage among other tribes. Parts of the body have to be eaten by prescribed relations. Practised in Queensland, as part of burial, cannibalism was considered a most honourable rite, to be used only for persons of worth. It was, incidentally, a quick method of preparing the ‘mummy,’ the flesh being eaten instead of merely being dried in the sun or over a fire.

A. P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, The Australian Aborigines, Angus & Robertson, 1938



The first case was at Apawandinna, halfway from Cowarie. A very fat Blackfellow chased an emu and became overheated in the chase, and died. The other Blackfellows were very worried over the death. They examined the man, but could not find anything to show as a cause of his death. He was a good-natured man, very popular with the tribe, so that it was unlikely that he had been ‘boned’ – a form of magic widely practised among the Wonkonguru tribe.

Finally, the old men of the tribe decided to cook the body. They cut it up and distributed it right round the camps of the tribe, which at that time extended from Killalpaninna to Birdsville in Queensland. The idea of the old men was that if the dead man had been ‘boned,’ his flesh would poison the man who had ‘boned’ him, and anyone who was innocent would be protected from such a death by eating a piece of him. I talked it over with one old man who had eaten it in order that the rest would not think him guilty of ‘boning’ the dead man. He put it to me this way: ‘'Spose 'em me no eat 'em. 'Nother fella say, Him kill 'em. Me eat 'em, then all right.’

Horne, G. and Aiston, G., members of the Australian Mounted Police, Savage Life in Central Australia, Macmillan, 1924



It appeared that a white man by himself on such a mission as mine might easily find himself wrapped in pandanum-leaves and roasting quietly on the ashes of an Arnhem-Land fire. ‘From well corroborated evidence, a form of cannibalism is still practised by three groups between the Blyth and Liverpool Rivers,’ Gordon Sweeney, a Patrol Officer in the Native Affairs Branch, one of my predecessors, wrote. ‘The bodies of all except the children, old people, and the diseased are cut up after death, the bones taken out and the flesh cooked and eaten. There appears to be no special ceremony at the time, or ceremonial significance attached to this practice, at least among two groups, the Manbuloi and the Gumauwurrk. A third group, the Rauwarang, do not allow the children to eat. The bones are shortly afterwards handed to the relative who is to carry them at the usual Buguburrt corroboree, which under this name is practised throughout the social area. The reason given for the cannibal practice in all three groups is that the people think that eating human flesh will make them clever at hunting, at spearing kangaroos, finding wild honey, getting yams, etc.’

I wondered about Sweeney's warnings of Cannibalism. I had known the Australian aborigine for too long to believe that he was a blood-thirsty, man-eating savage. Provoked, he was savage. But I did not mean to be provocative. As for man-eating, I discovered later that this was only partly true. The Liverpool River natives did not kill men for food. The ate human flesh largely from superstitious beliefs. If they killed a worthy man in battle, they ate his heart, believing that they would inherit his valour and power. They ate his brain because they knew it represented the seat of his knowledge. If they killed a fast runner, they ate part of his legs, hoping thereby to acquire his speed.

S. Kyle-Little, Whispering Wind, Hutchinson 1957



Among the native tribes of Australia, the bodies of those who fall in battle, honoured chiefs, and newborn infants, are frequently consumed to obtain their qualities, just as in the Torres Straits (which separate the northernmost territory of Australia from the southernmost part of New Guinea) the tongue and sweat of a slain enemy are imbibed to get his bravery.

E. O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, John Murray, 1933

http://www.heretical.com/cannibal/australi.html