Technology of Pitjantjatjara people and their neighbours

While digging stick and spear remained of particular importance, Western Desert people used a distinctive hardware. It differed from that used in coastal regions in a number of obvious ways, such as the absence of marine and inland aquatic technologies; large facilities were thus generally absent. Wooden containers replaced net and twined ones. Another distinctive characteristic was the dominance of seed grinding in the food preparation technology, making the muller and grindstone of particular importance, as among Yuwaaliyaay speakers. Toxic plant foods made edible by leaching do not seem to have been used.

Portability

Western Desert technologies appear at the top of the portability scale, and tools were multi-functional. People were very mobile, largely because of the scarcity of water, hence portability was a major consideration. As a result, Western Desert people had relatively few types of tools and weapons, and several implements were multifunctional. The spearthrower incorporated a dish or scoop, a hafted adze, and a fire-saw. Brokensha reproduces a photograph of a Pitjantjatjara man in the 1930s who carried only a spearthrower, two spears, and an adze. Early photographs of women walking, typically show them with piti dishes on their heads (Brokensha 1975:9).

Energy          

The side of the spearthrower served as a fire-saw. Hayden reports different categories of hearths among Pinubi people: the “dinner camp” hearths for cooking meat, and the campsite (ngurra) fire. The same hearth area was regularly used at camps which people regularly revisited (Hayden 1981:154). People lit ephemeral fires to keep flies away (1981:155)

            Gould (1980) gives some emphasis to the varied use of fire as a versatile “tool”. People used it for cooking, warmth and illumination, and widely in hunting. Hunters flushed game into the open by lighting fires; smoky fires were sometimes used to chase animals out of their burrows; and hunters signalled to each other with smoky fires. Bush fires were always left to burn themselves out. In Gould’s view an important effect of this was to burn off the climax spinifex vegetation, allowing a succession of species to appear as soon as rains fall, some of which were edible. The Solanaciae were particularly important among these. Straight new growths of stems used for spears were also a succession phenomenon after fire (Gould 1980:81).

Raw materials

Plant fibres do not seem to have been used in the Western Desert, but rather hair and fur for pubic coverings and carrying rings, and sinews for binding. Sinews were used (pulku) for binding repairs, or joining two parts of composite implement.

            Stone as a raw material included kaltjiliri, a coarse grained siliceous rock, used for flaking; kanti, flint or opal; pilari(the Pintupi term), a non-cryptocrystalline siliceous stones including some cherts, and coarse-grained siliceous rocks suitable for flaking (Hayden 1981:174).

            Adhesives included kiti gum from spinifex (Triodia basedowii), and resin from mulga trees (Acacia aneura), used for hafting, and repairing dishes. The gum was beaten from the spinifex, and winnowed in a kanilypa dish, the chaff burned off on an anvil stone, and the result pounded (see Brokensha 1975:64-5).

Manufacturing tools

Tools included hammer stones, for flaking stone (Hayden 1981:85). Pitjantjatjara people did not apparently use the edge-ground, hafted stone axe (Brokensha 1975:19). The one described by Hayden was made by a Warlpiri man (1981).
            Chopping implements (walarta) of metamorphic rock, opal, or flint were used primarily for woodworking, especially removing the heartwood in the manufacture of bowls and dishes. Chopping implements, in a variety of shapes, were carried by men, both as a tool and as a source of flakes. They were used for cutting down trees and removing slabs, as well as shaping (Hayden 1981:15; Thomson 1964:405).
            Adzes were hafted on a curved shaft (lunku), and at the end of the spearthrower. The simple shafted adze mounted on one or both ends of a curved shaft (lunku, also tjinkalpa or tjunamangkara) was used mainly for adzing-chopping, while the spearthrower was mainly for scraping and other light wood-working. Hafting involved the use of resin (Hayden 1981:12).
            Hand-held “scrapers” of stone were used as shaving tools for wood, and included scrapers, notches, denticulates and burins. Hayden notes functional equivalence of a variety of edge forms, and that the side of burins was used to shave wood, especially shafts. He comments that “scrapers” were used to shave rather than scrape (1981:13).
            Stone knives were slightly oval in form and unretouched (Hayden 1981:167; Gould, Koster and Sontz 1971; Tindale 1965).
            Pintupi people used flakes with a lateral working edge as saws for undercutting barbs on karimpai spears (Hayden 1981:13).
            Grinding was a wood-working technique used to sharpen digging sticks among Pintupi people, and for finished implements used by women, including dishes, and fighting sticks (Thomson 1964; Hayden 1981:14). Slabs of wood, for shields for example, were removed from the tree using stone and wood wedges after an initial cut. Stone choppers were used as wedges (Hayden 1981:52, 61).
            Makers used fire to straighten spear shafts and help remove bark, and to aid in finishing (Hayden 1981:76)
            Hayden describes the seating position during implement making, and work against the foot as a bench, described also by Tindale, depicted in his photographs and films (Hayden 1981:76; Tindale 1974). Hayden notes the digging of small pits in which to rest an implement while working on it (1981:168).
            Adhesives and mastics included  kiti resin obtained from spinifex, winnowed by women, made into a block by men; or from trees, used for hafting.
            The kinds of techniques used elsewhere with vegetable fibre as well as hair were devoted to products of hair and fur in the Western Desert. Women used a spindle with a cross (kuntil) set perpendicular to the spindle (inti) to stabilise the ball of spun human hair and fur. The spindle was twirled against the thigh. A two-ply yarn was produced, for the manufacture of manguri head-rings (to aid in carrying a dish), women’s pubic coverings (mawulyari), men’s penis ornaments (maranga) and hair belts (nanpa) (Hayden 1981).
            The use of tools was highly gendered. The adze was regarded as a man’s tool, but used by women in the colonial era at least. Women used and made wooden dishes, men used the larger ones. Men used the adze, unhafted stone flake, retouched choppers while women used the unretouched chopper. The hand-held axe was regarded as a men’s tool, but also used by women. Both men and women used the small grindstone for ochres and tobacco.

Transport

There is little to say about transport in the Western Desert except that people went on foot. The absence of any but transient bodies of water made water-craft unnecessary.

Containers

There were also relatively few types of container. In the absence of suitable fibres for basket making the wooden bowl was the general-purpose container, carried on the head with the aid of a hair or grass ring. Women did not make netbags or twined baskets, but used wooden dishes as carriers for foodstuffs and water, for digging, in food preparation, and as bassinets. They also used skin bags as containers. A man’s spear thrower served as a container as well as a weapon and a tool.

Communication

Writers on desert adaptations in Australia commonly take the view that myths about the journeys of ancestral beings encode knowledge of the location of water sources, and serve as mnemonic devices which assist survival. Novices memorised place names and the location of landmarks associated with spirit beings as part of their instruction in the sacred life. It has even been suggested that the physical ordeals of initiation act as mnemonic techniques as well (Gould 1980:84).
            Among communication technologies, two are especially worth noting. Sand-drawing was a ubiquitous adjunct to story-telling, especially among women (Munn 1973). The sign systems used in sand drawing bore a strong relationship to painted and incised designs in ritual. The important feature here was the multivalency of signs - their ability to encode many meanings. This feature was important in the ways in which the country was “read” as the traces of ancestral activity and in terms of the presence of ancestral substance and powers. It was also central to the ways in which people enacted those connections in story-telling, song and ritual.
            A second communication technology developed in this region was sign language, especially that used by widows under speech prohibition, fully equivalent to spoken language (Kendon 1988).

Shelter

Several windbreak construction methods were used, using boughs, and bark and grass covering. The floor was often formed into a basin (Hayden 1981:173). Types of structure included:

yu or yunta bough or grass windbreak – simply a pile of branches or grass;

half dome formed by boughs stuck in the ground, with others interlaced;

lean-to of branch boughs, against posts and rail support.

Tindale (1974) and Hayden (1981:172) provide maps of camp layout.

Production technologies

Tools and weapons
Extractors
The digging stick, wana or tjalpira, was of hardwood. Pitjantjatjara people and their neighbours used the edge-ground, hafted axe. Hayden describes hafting in split mulga, bound on either side of the head rather than being enclosed in a fold, as is found elsewhere in Australia (Hayden 1981).
            Women used wiru bowl-scoops in conjunction with digging sticks to extract roots from the ground, as well as clean out soaks (Hayden 1981:110). The men’s spear-thrower had a similar use.

Immobilisers
The range of spear types was much smaller than in coastal regions, maximising portability; the following are described (Hayden 1981; Brokensha 1975):

kolata hunting spear, one or two-piece with wooden blade (tjilkali), wooden barb (nyunngu in Pintupi) attached to blade with sinew. An indentation at the end (kunawi, tjinpa) received the wooden peg on the spearthrower. The separate shaft of the composite spear is the tepu in Pintupi.

Yurtanpa hunting spear, usually one-piece, sometimes with attached barb.

Karimpa or katji hunting spear, with one to four barbs carved into the solid wood.

            Men used the meru spear thrower in conjunction with spears. It was leaf-shaped with a curved cross-section, an adze hafted at one end, and nyunngu peg at the other, which is inserted into the end of the spear. The spear thrower was also used as a receptacle.
            The kupulu (tjuna, kuntji or wati) throwing stick and club had rounded to pointed ends, used to kill small game and dispatch larger animals  (Hayden 1981:103, 174, Thomson 1964:410).
            Apparently Pitjantjatjara people did not use the fluted boomerang in the early years of colonisation, but it is reported for other areas of the Western Desert. However, it does feature in Pitjantjatjara mythology (Gould 1969:89 describes this as a “throwing stick”.)

Facilities
Large facilities seem to have been absent in the Western Desert, except for hides made of branches etc.

Poisons
Duboisia hopwoodii was used for poisoning waterholes used by emus (Hayden 1981).

Dingoes
Dingoes were not used for hunting in the Ngaatjatjarra region according to Gould (Gould 1980:82; Hamilton 1980:7).

Food processing
Hayden found that large, unsharpened stone blocks were of more use for removing ribs than flakes were, though flakes were also used for cutting meat (1981:122).
            Murilpa pounding stones or hammerstones were used in conjunction with the tjiwa slab for grinding and pounding seed and small reptiles. The grindstones were up to 20 kg. in weight.
            Brokensha describes the process of making damper from Panicum decompositum [revised taxon?], small black seeds contained in pod on the main stem of this grass. The pods are pulled off the main stem, crushed by hand into a container, and some of the straw discarded. The coarse chaff is separated from the seeds by winnowing. The fine chaff and seeds are transferred into a kanilypa dish, and the seeds separated by oscillating the dish about its long axis, combined with a slower seesaw motion, and an occasional bump with the knee; the seed moves to one end of the dish, and the chaff to the other. The seeds are mixed with water, placed on a flat grinding stone (tjiwa) and worked into a paste with a rolling and oscillating movement with a round grinding stone (tjungari). The resulting paste is shaped into a flat pate, and cooked in the ashes of a fire for about 20 minutes. He estimates a total time of 9 person hours to collect under 2 kg of seed (three women working solidly for three hours). The preparation of the damper took one woman two hours (Brokensha 1975:25; see also Hamilton 1980; photographs in Tindale 1974).

Storage
Western Desert people possessed the technology to prepare and store many of their plant staples, used in Gould’s view primarily for emergencies such as prolonged droughts. Foods were also stored “in the field” in the form of desiccated bush tomatoes left on the vine or dried on skewers. Fruits could be pulverized into storable balls. Meat was stored short-term by thorough cooking, wrapping in leaves, and placing in a tree (Gould 1980:68; Berndt and Berndt 1945:68; Myers 1986:74; Tonkinson 1991).

Military technologies

The only club for men was the non-return boomerang, and for woman one type of fighting stick, plus the digging stick. The non-return boomerang and shield were apparently not used in the Pitjantjatjara area.
            The winta (or wurinpuru or mangulpa in Pintupi) was a short, heavy, broad-bladed stabbing spear, with a blade of mulga heart-wood, 2-2.5 metres in length.
            Women’s fighting sticks (makulpa or kuturu) were of mulga or bloodwood.
            Early observers thought that shields were not used by Pitjantjatjara people (Brokensha 1975:60), although Pitjantjatjara men insisted that they were. The kurtiji was a soft-wood shield (Pintupi). Men also used a wide shield of bloodwood or mulga, with incised designs (recently made for craft sales and ceremonies, Pitjantjatjara). The tjara narrow hardwood shield (western Pintupi) was made of soft wood at Cundelee (southwest of Great Victoria Desert: Hayden 1981:51). The narrow shield had a handle carved in the back and was decorated with incised designs.

 
References

Berndt, R. M. and C. H. Berndt, A Preliminary Report of Field Work in the Ooldea Region, Western South-Australia, Australian Medical Publishing Co., Sydney, 1945.

Brokensha, P. The Pitjantjatjara and their Crafts, Aboriginal Arts Board, North Sydney, N.S.W., 1975.

Gould, R.A., D. Kostern and A. Sontz, ‘The lithic assemblages of the Western Desert Aborigines of Australia ‘, American Antiquity vol. 36, no.2, 1971, 149-169.

Gould, R.A., Living Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.

Hamilton, A.,  ‘Dual social systems: technology, labour and women's secret rites in the eastern Western Desert of Australia’, Oceania, vol. 51, no. 1, 1980, 4-19.

Hayden, B. D., 'Stone tool functions in the Western Desert', in R. V. S. Wright eds, Stone Tools as Cultural Markers: Change, Evolution and Complexity, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1977.

Kendon, A., Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

Munn, N., Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1973.

Myers, F., Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Smithsonian Institution Press, Canberra and Washington, 1986.

Thomson, D.F., ‘Some wood and stone implements of the Bindibu tribe of Central Western Australia’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol. 17, no. 1964, 400-422.

Tindale, N., ‘Stone implement making among the Nakako, Ngadadjara and Pitjandjara of the Great Western Desert ‘, Records of the South Australian Museum, vol. 15, no.1, 1965, 131-164.

Tindale, N., Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974.

Tonkinson, R., The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia's Desert, 2nd edit., Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Fort Worth, 1991.

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