Welcome back to my blog :D
Now, I will talk about tribe from Australia,yep,it's Aborigin!
Australia's Aboriginal culture probably represents the oldest surviving culturein the world, with the use of stone tool technology and painting with red ochre pigment dating back over 60,000 years. Australians never developed an "iron age", "bronze age", or pottery, and the terms "palaeolithic" (old stone age) and "neolithic" (new stone age) are not used in Australia, because stone technology did not progress in the same way as the rest of the world.
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| Ancient Aborigin Tribe |
Humankind's most ancient stone tool technology, the percussion method of chipping away at the edge of a rock to make a sharp edge for cutting, dates back 2.5 million years, and was still practiced by Aborigines until the 1960s and later. Many stone choppers and flake scrapers commonly made until the last few decades are similar to these earliest tools. These flaked tools are used to shape wooden weapons and implements. The manufacture and use of ground edge axes, still occasionally made today, date back over 20,000 years on the northern mainland, and back to 40,000 years in Papua New Guinea, once attached to present day Australia. However, on present evidence, it appears that the manufacture of ground edge axes spread slowly south, dating back only 4,500 years in southern Australia, and not being used in Tasmania, which was cut off from the mainland by rising seas about 11,000 years ago.
A new technology, creating stone blades, was developed about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and led to the addition of stone spear points, small stone spear barbs, and blade shaped stone knives and scrapers.
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| Wall-painting used with red paint |
It was once thought that Modern Man (Homo sapiens sapiens) began with the arrival of Cro-Magnon man in Europe about 40,000 years ago. However, current thinking, based on archaeological finds and genetic studies of mutations of mitochondrial DNA in populations of different people of the world, is that Modern Man evolved in Africa about 190,000 years ago, moved into the Middle East by 120,000 years ago, then into Asia, and on to Australia at least 60,000 years ago. This was at a time when Neanderthal Man was the dominant hominid in parts of Europe. Modern Man later moved into Europe about 40,000 years ago and into the American continent about 14,000 years ago. While other world cultures developed and changed, the Australians remained relatively isolated on their island continent. Still more isolated were the Tasmanian Australians, left alone from the other Australians 11,000 years ago when the seas rose and created the island of Tasmania in Australia's south. The Aborigines who once colonised Asia and Indonesia were displaced by later waves of people who have developed into modern-day Chinese, Indonesian, and the many other cultures of those regions.
The longest continuing religion in the worldbelongs to Australia's Aborigines, with the Rainbow Serpent mythology recorded in rock shelter paintings believed to be 7,000 years old in the Kakadu National Park region, where this Ancestral Being is still important to local people. Other ancient rock art shows the many customs and Ancestral Beings (deities or gods) important in Aboriginal religion tens of thousands of years ago.
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| Another wall-painting,painted on a rock |
Although lacking a formal written language, for thousands of years Aborigines have recorded their culture as rock art. Their art shows images of the environment, such as the plants and animals, including images of animals believed to have become extinct 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. This rock art tradition, mainly as paintings in rock shelters and as engravings on exposed rocks, has continued to the present. Some of the most ancient paintings, in rock shelters in northern Australia, depict people dressed for ceremony and dancing, with similar body decoration and accoutrements to those worn in ceremonies to this day, again revealing the great age of Aboriginal culture.
We can only suppose how ancient people of the past lived and thought by what is left behind of their culture. For mankind in different world regions 60,000 years ago, there is generally just the stone tools and camp fires remaining. However, by understanding Aboriginal societies, one can see how stone tools are just a very small part of any culture. Stone and wooden industries provided most tools and weaponry, but there was knowledge and technology connected with the use of shell and resins, and the making of string, rope, bags, baskets, and weaving. Furthermore, as well as the technological side of life, it seems very likely that mankind had already developed art by 60,000 years ago.
Aborigines did not build large stone monuments, did not farm animals and did not cultivate the soil for crops. Because they did not form cities, their culture is not described as a "civilisation", yet it contains all the elements of a civilised world. The arts – great paintings, lengthy songs and dances with accompanying stories that continue for days like great operas, are all present. Law and order was strict and religion is of greatest importance.
Religion
Aboriginal religion, like many other religions, is characterised by having a god or gods who created people and the surrounding environment during a particular creation period at the beginning of time. Aboriginal people are very religious and spiritual, but rather than praying to a single god they cannot see, each group generally believes in a number of different deities, whose image is often depicted in some tangible, recognisable form. This form may be that of a particular landscape feature, an image in a rock art shelter, or in a plant or animal form.
Wandjina bring the Wet Season rains to the people of the Kimberley.
Landscape features may be the embodiment of the deity itself, such as a particular rock representing a specific figure, or they may be the result of something the deity did or that happened to the deity in the Creation Period, such as a river having formed when the Rainbow Serpent passed through the area in the Creation Period, or a depression in a rock or in the ground representing the footprint or sitting place of an Ancestral Being.
Aboriginal people do not believe in animism. This is the belief that all natural objects possess a soul. They do not believe that a rock possesses a soul, but they might believe that a particular rock outcrop was created by a particular deity in the creation period, or that it represents a deity from the Creation Period. They believe that many animals and plants are interchangeable with human life through re-incarnation of the spirit or soul, and that this relates back to the Creation Period when these animals and plants were once people.
The Lightning Brothers in the Victoria River District, Northern Territory.
There is no one deity covering all of Australia. Each tribe has its own deities with an overlap of beliefs, just as there is an overlap of words between language groups. Thus, for example, the Wandjina spirits in the northern Kimberley of Western Australia belong to the Ngarinyin, Worora andWunambal tribes. These Wandjina are responsible for bringing the Wet Season rains, as well as laying down many of the laws for the people. As one travels east, this function is taken over by Yagjagbula and Jabirringgi, The Lightning Brothers of the Wardaman tribe in the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory, then by Nargorkun, also known asBula, in the upper Katherine River area, and by Namarrgun, the Lighning Man in the Kakadu and western Arnhem Land regions.
Aboriginal deities have many roles and no single description or term can describe all of these. Based on their primary role, they fall into three main categories, and any one deity may belong to one, two, or all three of these categories:
Namarrgun, the Lightning Man in the Kakadu region.
(a) Creation Beings (also: Creation Figure). Many are involved with the creation of people, the landscape, and aspects of the environment, such as the creation of red, yellow or white pigments, so can be called “Creation Figures” or “Creation Beings”.
(b) Ancestral Beings. In many examples, these deities are regarded as the direct ancestors of the people living today and so they are “Ancestral Figures”, “Ancestral Beings”, “Ancestral Heroes”, or “Dreamtime Ancestors”. Here, the one term “Ancestral Being” is used to describe these deities.
Ancestral Beings have taught the first people how to make tools and weapons, hunt animals and collect food, they have layed down the laws that govern their society, and the correct way to conduct ceremonies.
Even though regarded as ancestors of the people, such deities may not appear in a human form, but may be plant or animal, for example. In Aboriginal religious belief, a person’s spirit may return in human, animal or plant form after death. So an Ancestral Being may have the appearance of a plant or animal, but have done deeds similar to a human in the past.
(c) Totemic Beings. / Totemic ancestors. A Totemic Being represents the original form of an animal, plant or other object (totem), as it was in the Creation Period. The concept of a Totemic Being overlaps with that of a Creation Being and an Ancestral Being because the Totemic Being may create the abundance of species, and people see themselves as being derived from the different Totemic Beings.
Society is divided into two groups, called moieties, each with specific Totemic Beings belonging to it. Every person belongs to one or the other moiety. These moieties are further divided into sections or subsections, sometimes based on totemic beings. Every individual has come from at least one Totemic Being, and these help define a person’s origins and connections with the world, their relationships with the past, present and future.
For example, a person connected with a yam (native potato) totem might believe that he was a yam in a previous life, that some yams are his relatives, and that a particularly prominent rock feature in his clan estate represents the embodiment of his yam ancestor. This, or another area nearby, might also be an “increase centre” where rituals are performed to ensure the maintenance of this food supply. Each clan will have several totems, so this person will have a close human relative living on the same clan estate who is not of the yam totem. That person might belong to the kangaroo totem and similarly be related to kangaroos and have another feature of the landscape representing their kangaroo totem.
To this day, ceremonies play an important part in Aboriginal life. Small ceremonies, or rituals, are still practised in some remote parts of Australia, such as in Arnhem Land and Central Australia, in order to ensure a supply of plant and animal foods. These take the form of chanting, singing, dancing or ritual action to invoke the Ancestral Beings to ensure a good supply of food or rain.
The most important ceremonies are connected with the initiation of boys and girls into adulthood. Such ceremonies sometimes last for weeks, with nightly singing and dancing, story telling, and the display of body decoration and ceremonial objects. During these ceremonies, the songs and stories connected to each of the Ancestral Beings are told and retold, some being “open” for women and children to see and hear, others being restricted or “secret-sacred”, only for the initiates to learn.
Ceremony
Funeral ceremonies. Another important time for ceremonies is on the death of a person, when people often paint themselves white, cut their own bodies to show their remorse for the loss of their loved one, and conduct a series of rituals, songs and dances to ensure the person’s spirit leaves the area and returns to its birth place, from where it can later be reborn.
Burial practices vary throughout Australia, people being buried in parts of southern and central Australia, but having quite a different burial in the north. Across much of northern Australia, a person’s burial has two stages, each accompanied by ritual and ceremony.
Men covered in white clay, preparing the bones of two deceased, which will be placed in the two decorated hollow logs. Yirrkala, Arnhem Land. 1947.
The primary burial is when the corpse is layed out on an elevated wooden platform, covered in leaves and branches, and left several months for the flesh to rot away from the bones. The secondary burial is when the bones are collected from the platform, painted with red ochre, and then dispersed in different ways. Sometimes a relative will carry a portion of the bones with them for a year or more. Sometimes they are wrapped in paperbark and deposited in a cave shelter, where they are left to disintegrate with time. In parts of Arnhem Land the bones are placed into a large hollow log and left at a designated area of bushland. The hollow log is a dead tree trunk which has been naturally hollowed out by the action of termites.
Aboriginal rock art records ceremonies dating back tens of thousands of years, yet still continued to this day. A man dances a pose with his arms outstretched, holding a short stick in each hand, this photo being taken in Darwin in about the 1920s. Early Kimberley rock art in Western Australia records the same pose with a person holding short sticks in each hand.
