Preliminary investigation of Indigenous campsites in late Quaternary dunes, Port Augusta, South Australia

A series of late Quaternary dunes are located in the vicinity of Port Augusta in the mid-north of South Australia. Observations of deflating archaeological material were first recorded by Norman B. Tindale during the 1939 Harvard- Adelaide University Anthropological Expedition (Tindale 1939:827).         A mile & 3/4 beyond the Port Augusta Bridge on the side of the road to Iron Knob, we hunted over a site where we had on a previous occasion found several old Kangaroo Island type implements. Found an old earthy layer from which series of large crude quartzite flakes were eroding also a few large and much altered shells. Much of the implements was already dropped onto a hard pan and the rest was on the surface of the weathering earth layer, so that absolute results not obtainable but it seemed likely that most if not all the    material weathering out belonged to a single period.  Records of similar material at nearby Dempsey's Lake were made by Cooper (1953) and Lampert (1976). Dempsey's Lake was the focus of palaeontological investigations during the 1950's from which time a certain amount of Diprotodon skeletal material was recovered. Stone tools described as consistent with 'Kartan' industries have also been recovered and are generally characteristic of the core tool and scraper tradition (Lampert 1976). Lampert (1976) also noted the absence of small tools 'such as pirris and tulas'. The fossil bone and stone tools were exposed on an "eroded red sand dune running in a straight line from north west to south east" (Lampert 1976: 12).  In 1997 a series of similar deflations exposing stone tools and small amounts of animal bone were identified in eroded red sand dunes trending generally north west to south east and bordering on the runway at Port Augusta Aerodrome (Walshe 1997; Walshe and Evans 2001). These sites are located approximately 3 km from the Port Augusta Bridge on the northwestern side of the Stuart Highway and may well be the same sites referred to by Tindale in 1939 and mentioned above. This paper reports on a salvaged assemblage from these dunes prior to their destruction, addresses the likely age range of the sites, and identifies the need for further research on Indigenous sites associated with late Quaternary dunes.