The silver dollar site, Shark Bay: An interim report

Shark Bay is the most westerly part of the Australian continent. Before 1985 little was known archaeologically of this region. Since then, I have been carrying out archaeological fieldwork, of which the general results have been summarised in two research papers (Bowdler 1990a; 1990b). In the first of these, prepared for a workshop in early 1989,1 conjectured that the fact that no evidence of human occupation older than c.5,000 BP had been found in the Shark Bay area may have been because the area was not occupied during the Pleistocene. The lack of fresh water in recent times has been described as a limiting factor for human occupation; this would have been considerably exacerbated during the Pleistocene, which we know to have been a period of considerable aridity (Wyrwoll 1979).