A stone quarry is a site in which Aboriginal people collected suitable types of stone for the manufacturing of tools, ceremonial and sacred items. Some types of stone taken from quarries include silcrete, chert and some fine volcanics.
Stone artefacts are evidence of stone modified or used by Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the past. Aboriginal people quarried particular stone outcrops or collected stones from river beds and coastal zones to create a sophisticated set of tools.
Aboriginal people made stone tools by removing a sharp fragment of a piece of stone. Find out how to spot and protect them.
Traditional Aboriginal Tools is an informative poem using descriptive language to explain the different Aboriginal tools, how they were used and the natural materials they were made from.
What are microliths? Debate has raged about their age, origin and uses, but now researchers have used them to demonstrate that Indigenous Australians were fashioning these types of tools at least as far back as the last Ice Age.
Before colonisation, our people invented many tools, pieces of equipment and technology to use in everyday life.
In Central Australia, there were three kinds of ochre used in the main. They were yellow ochre, white ochre – or white pipe clay – and red ochre. One of the most widely used ochres was red ochre, which was extensively used on the body. And in some particular mines in Central Australia, the ochre has a mica component, and when it’s placed on the body, particularly on the face, it gives off quite a shiny look. And that’s still used today in ceremonies, and is traded all around Central Australia and beyond.
Curator Barb Paulson and Ngunnawal man Wally Bell discuss Indigenous stone tools, as part of the National Museum's Defining Moments in Australian History project.
Join host Phil Breslin on First Weapons, as he learns all about this tool, heading out bush to give it a try himself.
Stone tools provide an intimate link to the past behaviours of First Nations Australians. According to Professor Clarkson from University of Queensland, stone tools are ‘window to the past’.
Kerry Neill teaches about the use of ochre by native Australian peoples.
Not all types of stone could be used for making tools. The best types of stone are rich in silica, hard and brittle.These include quartzite, chert, flint, silcrete and quartz.
Aboriginal quarries are places where Aboriginal people took stone from rocky outcrops to make chipped or ground stone tools for many different purposes. Not all types of stone were suitable for making tools, so an outcrop of good stone that could be easily quarried was a valuable resource.
For more than 40 000 years before the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour, Australian Aboriginal peoples had been mining the land for ochre and stone.
Aboriginal people quarried rock for making tools such as axes. They used ochre and clay for body decoration or painting on rock surfaces and objects.