Chris Clarkson could barely believe his eyes.
"It was the most beautiful archaeological object I'd ever seen," he says now, two years later, the wonder of it still strong in him.
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Hidden from the light for 65,000 years
An astouding archeological find places Australia's Indigenous culture 65,000 years in the past.
He and his team had been digging for six weeks in the hot dry of the Top End.
They had worked within clouds of mosquitoes and had learnt to ignore the ache that came with squatting for hours at a stretch in a roasting hole in the ground, sweeping at the dust of ages.
![Associate Professor Chris Clarkson with traditional owners May Nango and Mark Djanjomerr.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170825214702im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/c/b/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxf2x6.png/1500731643184.jpg)
Above them soared a sandstone massif, 50 metres high, its wall a gallery of Aboriginal rock paintings.
Ahead was the scrub of a tropical plain sizzling in the sun, stretching about 20km to the northern Australian coast.
Over tens of thousands of years, the plain had alternately been the shore of an encroaching sea, a wetland surging and receding and – 65,000 years ago when a great ice age had descended, drastically reducing sea levels – the start of a dryland walk that extended all the way to New Guinea.
All those millennia of restless movement of water and sand and soil had covered to a depth of almost three metres the evidence of countless campfires, feasts and stone-tool workings that had taken place beneath the shelter of the great rock massif.
![The discovery of this axe-head grindstone inside the Kakadu National Park has rewritten the history of Australia.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170825214702im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/f/6/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxf2x6.png/1500731643184.jpg)
And now the digging was coming to an end.
It was Clarkson and his colleagues' second six-week period of fossicking in this ancient Aboriginal campsite called Madjedbebe which sits, incongruously, within the Jabiluka uranium mining lease in Kakadu National Park.
![Traditional owners Simon Mudjandi, Rosie Mudjandi, May Nango and Mark Djanjomerr at the Kakadu rock shelter where ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170825214702im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/c/b/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxf2x6.png/1500863296685.jpg)
Clarkson had been there back in 2012. Other archaeologists had dug there in the early 1970s and in 1989, their findings proving inconclusive.
Now it was more than halfway through 2015, and laboratories waited to examine and prove – or disprove – what Clarkson and his colleagues believed the campsite signified, which was that it contained the oldest evidence of the occupation of Australia, so old it would rewrite everything about the continents' human history.
![The axe-head grindstone found at the site.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170825214702im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/c/c/0/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxf2x6.png/1500731643184.jpg)
The elders of the Mirrar people didn't need history to be rewritten. They'd lived it.
Mark Djandjommer, an old man with a grey beard, remembers sleeping at Madjedbebe when he was a boy of eight or nine, just like his ancestors.
It was a well-established stop-over on an ancient track his family took when, he says, they wanted to avoid the parties of armed white men hunting the buffalo that once roamed Kakadu in huge numbers.
And yes. Among the rock paintings of turtles and crocodiles, catfish and stick figures holding spears adorning the wave-like wall at Madjedbebe, are pictures of white men with guns.
But when the archaeologists came and wanted to find out more, the Mirrar community figured they had the right to ownership of whatever was discovered.
They weren't to be trifled with.
The Mirrar had, after all, stood up in the late 1990s to a mining giant that wanted to dig uranium out of their country just a couple of kilometres from Madjedbebe
The stance of the Mirrar, supported by several thousand protesters and organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth, effectively stopped the Jabiluka uranium mine
Rio Tinto inherited the mine in 2000 when it took over the uranium producer Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) as part of its purchase of the iron ore giant North Ltd. In 2002, Rio's chairman Sir Robert Wilson, made clear his company didn't want more fuss: he declared there would be no mining at Jabiluka without the consent of the Mirrar.
In 2005, the traditional owners got it in writing: the Jabiluka Long-Term Care and Maintenance Agreement states there will be no mining without the informed, written consent of the traditional owners. The mine site is now returning to nature, and the Jabiluka mining lease begins to expire in 2024.
The Mirrar want that lease gone as soon as possible from their country.
If Madjedbebe turned out to be a site of major significance to the world, it couldn't hurt their cause.
Justin O'Brien, the CEO of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation which represents the Mirrar, says archaeology is seen widely in Aboriginal Australia as exploitative. Some archaeologists held the view that ancient sites and artefacts were of universal significance and access to them should be automatic.
That's not the way the Mirrar saw it.
The archaeological team was given a choice by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation. Agree to share everything found at Madjedbebe with the people who have always owned that country, or go somewhere else.
The archaeologists would be required to provide access to field notes and images taken in the field. The Mirrar would have an editorial say – apart from matters of strict science – over the way they and the site were portrayed in publications. They would be included in decisions about how artefacts would be curated, and what would be returned to the soil.
"This landmark agreement is a recognition that the work is taking place on Mirrar country, that they have both a physical and spiritual link to it and they should have a say," says O'Brien.
Clarkson's team – which also won permission from the ERA mining company to dig within the mining lease – signed up.
It turned out to have significant benefits.
When human remains began to turn up – the ancient bones of 17 people would eventually be unearthed – Clarkson and his colleagues feared the dig would be over immediately.
By then, however, the Mirrar felt they had a stake in knowing of what might lie beneath. They granted permission for the bones to be removed and stored, so long as they were returned to the earth when the work was complete.
O'Brien was awed at what was being found. He recalls standing within the pit where a campfire had been established tens of thousands of years ago.
"Here was the fireplace, clear as day, and scattered around were the stones used to grind the seeds of waterlillies, which are called anden," says O'Brien, who is married to an Indigenous woman.
"These people still do exactly that today. They make a paste out of the ground seed, make it into a bread and bake it on the coals.
"You get a sense of the great antiquity and continuity of this culture because aspects of this lifestyle exist to this day. That's time immemorial, right there."
As the 2015 dig neared its end, Associate Professor Clarkson, to give him the title that comes with his position at the University of Queensland, thought the hole in the ground beneath its majestic sandstone overhang had given up all its secrets to him.
Such secrets they were.
Stone hatchets piled against the back wall at different periods separated by tens of thousands of years, their cutting edges still polished sharp. The earliest of these hatchets would prove to be the first such tools fashioned anywhere in the world by maybe 20,000 years.
That fireplace surrounded by grinding bowls.
A fat midden containing shells and animal bones, the remains of countless feast.
Finely wrought stone spear heads. Yes. And 17 sets of human bones.
But there at the last minute, right at the bottom of the hole, 2.5 metres down, sat a stone carefully chipped into a perfect rectangle, its flat surface turned to the light for the first time in longer than is properly imaginable.
"This was really exciting," says Clarkson.
"It was a grindstone, grooved on one side from shaping axe heads – you could see all the scratches from the stone-on-stone action.
"The people who had lived there would have laid it on the ground and spent enormous amounts of hours shaping their axe heads.
"It looked as if it had been laid there the day it had been finished with … and left for 65,000 years."
The idea that a modest rectangle of stone could be "beautiful" may not resonate with those who expect their archaeology to come in intricately worked gold and dug from Roman and Viking settlements.
But the Romans and the Vikings, the Egyptians building pyramids and even the neolithic people who raised the stones of Stonehenge lived only yesterday compared with those Australian Aborigines who crafted the grinding stone that lay at the bottom of the pit beneath the great sandstone massif that had sheltered at least 2600 generations.
Clarkson himself was much moved last year when he spent the night of the northern summer solstice within the great circle of Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England.
But Stonehenge, like the pyramids, is only about 5000 years old.
At the bottom of his dig in Kakadu, Clarkson had an axe-head grindstone, which the archaeological team would prove, through a dating process known as "single-grain optically stimulated luminescence", had been left behind 65,000 years ago; a tool no other people would figure out how to use for another 20,000 years or so.
Really beautiful.
* Tony Wright travelled as a guest of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation.