Paradigm shifts and ontological turns at Cloggs Cave, GunaiKurnai Country, Australia

In 1971–1972, excavations at Cloggs Cave, a classic Australian archaeological site, revealed new archaeological evidence on the subsistence economy and environmental adaptations of southeastern Aboriginal peoples during and after the Last Glacial Maximum. A re-thinking of the site’s original sequence coupled with new excavations in 2019 now offers a very different picture of the archaeology, a reading more akin with ethnographic and current GunaiKurnai worldviews. This re-reading signals more than a paradigm shift, but rather an ontological turn that challenges researchers to not reduce archaeological records, including symbolic expressions, to the logic and language of “habitat and economy,” but rather to recognise that other fundamental factors such as kinship, social relations, and the spirit-world, all informed by cultural world views, also fundamentally shape the archaeological record.