Journal article
Island tales: culturally-filtered narratives about island creation through land submergence incorporate millennia-old memories of postglacial sea-level rise
World Archaeology, Vol.54(1), pp.29-51
2022
Abstract
In many long-enduring coastal cultures, there are stories – sometimes mythologized – about times when pieces of land became separated from mainlands by submergence, a process that created islands where none existed before. Using examples from northwest Europe and Australia, this paper argues that many such stories recall times, often millennia ago, when sea level in the aftermath of the Last Glaciation (last ice age) was rising and transforming coastal landscapes and their human uses in exactly the ways these stories describe. The possibility that these may have arisen from eyewitness accounts of these transformative processes, hitherto thought to be understandable only by scientific (palaeoenvironmental) reconstructions, should encourage more systematic investigations of such stories by scientists. It also suggests that science has traditionally underestimated the capacity of oral (pre-literate) cultures to acquire, encode and sustain their observations of memorable events with a high degree of replication fidelity.
Details
- Title
- Island tales: culturally-filtered narratives about island creation through land submergence incorporate millennia-old memories of postglacial sea-level rise
- Authors
- Patrick Nunn (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and SocietyMargaret Cook (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Sustainability Research Centre
- Publication details
- World Archaeology, Vol.54(1), pp.29-51
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Date published
- 2022
- DOI
- 10.1080/00438243.2022.2077821
- ISSN
- 1470-1375
- Organisation Unit
- Sustainability Research Centre; School of Law and Society; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research; Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99649579102621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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