Dugongs and turtles as kin: relational ontologies and archaeological perspectives on ritualized hunting by coastal Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australia has a rich ethnographic record that provides opportunities for archaeology to better understand and appreciate past human–animal relationships and the worldviews in which they are based. These ethnographic accounts indicate that marine hunting of large prey such as dugongs and turtles was often highly ritualized. These rituals increased hunting success but also included fecundity rituals to increase and/or maintain the distribution and frequency of particular taxa. Such rituals were founded on an understanding of fundamental kin relationships between hunters and prey that were validated cosmologically, authorized by ancestral power, enabled by mutually understood sentience and dialogue, and operationalized by a social and moral contract of respect, trust, etiquette, social obligation, and reciprocity. The richness of the anthropological record for Torres Strait in northeastern Australia has provided an opportunity for archaeology to explore past dugong and turtle hunting rituals via shrines of mounded stone and bone dating to the past 500 years. These sites provide rare windows into human–animal ontologies and associated sentient worlds and kin-centric ecologies.