After two years of fieldwork, a group of researchers and First Nations Australians have announced the discovery of centuries-old carvings on 12 boab trees in Australia’s Tanami Desert.
Carvings on boabs were first reported in the mid-19th century, but they weren’t investigated thoroughly until a century later. The carvings depict snake figures believed by the team to be the King Brown Snake, a character in Indigenous oral traditions, among geometric patterns and other representations of animals. The team’s research describing the carvings is published this week in the journal Antiquity.
The boab (or bottle) tree (Adansonia gregorii) may live over 1,000 years, based on the dating of the closely related baobab trees in South Africa. They have very thick, often squat trunks that give them their nickname.
Unlike many trees, the boab’s soft inner trunk does not record seasonal growth rings, making it difficult to precisely date them. Instead of normal dendrochronological methods, getting a precise age for these trees requires radiocarbon dating.
Despite how long some of the carvings—and the trees on which they were carved—have persisted, their existence is fragile. “Unlike most Australian trees, the inner wood of boabs is soft and fibrous and when the trees die, they just collapse,” said Sue O’Connor, an archaeologist at the Australian National University, in an Australian National University release.
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