ANCIENT MURDER WEAPON
The Boomerang Effect:
What Killed Kaakutja?
Tantalizing glimpses into life and death in pre-colonial Australia are
written on the bones of a skeleton found in New South Wales.
When William Bates, an elder of the Baakantji
people of New South Wales, found a skeleton
by a river in 201.4, he identified it as an Aboriginal male. The mouthwas wide open.”To me, he was crying for help;’ Bates recalls,”so I said, FE help you!’
The bones bore obvious signs of violence. In most murder mysteries, establish- ing the time of death is one of the first things detectives do, and in the course of an initial study, researchers assumed he had been killed during the bloodshed between British colonizers andA-ustralia’s in- digenous peoples in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
But these early assump- tions would be challenged when the body, now named Kaakutja, meaning “older brother,” was examined by
Dr. Michael Westaway, a pa-leoanthropologist at Griffith University in Queensland. “He was obviously someone that a lot of people cared for,” Westaway comments, not-ing that in the burial, his head had been tenderly placed on a cushion of sand.
At first glance, Westaway reasoned that Kaakutja’s le-thal injury, a long wound on his skull, had come from a cutlass blade, most likely dealt by the British militia. It turns out that the t ime of death was earlier—much, much earlier. When the remains were sub-mitted for lab tests, thepicture radically changed. Analysis revealed he had been killed in the 13th century—hundreds of years before Europeans arrived in Australia and introduced metal objects. What, then, had killed Kaakutja in the prime of his life?
Westaway, who co -
authored a report on Kaakutja for the journalAntiquity, was intrigued by the cause of the fatal injury. One theory centered on the 111-Ii!, a sharp-ened club. On balance, however, Westaway has singled out the most iconic Aborig-inal symbol: the boomerang, a weapon with a long, surprisingly sharp edge. Per-haps it had been wielded by Kaakutja’s adversary to whip around his shield and smash into his head.
Although study of inter-
tribal violence in precontact Australia is still largely based on accounts rather than ar-chaeological evidence, Kaa-kutja’s death does have a prec-e dent. Just under a decade ago, a skel eton was unearthed near Sydney. It belonged to a man wholived 4,000 years ago, beIieved to have been killed with stone-tipped spears.
“I don’t know if it was a
continent-wide phenome-
non,” says Westaway. “But we do see evidence in this part of [Australia] that ...supports intertribal conflict.” One such proof is a series of rock paint-ings near where Kaakutja was found, depicting two tribes painted in different colors wieldin.gboomerangs, shields, and clubs.
Throughout the investiga-
tion into what befell Kaakut-
ja, William Bates’s Baakantji community played a direct
role in the excavation, con-
tributing to the emerging picture of Aboriginal culture.
“If it was not for their inter-
est in their heritage, an d their support of theNational Parks Service Westaway notes,” an important part of their past would. have been lost”.   




