So, basically I grew up with a mariner father, on a tiny island surrounded by the ocean; which I had to travel across every day to get to school. I spent my summers fishing and swimming on other tiny little islands where we owned a ramshackle cabin that we also had to boat too. The ocean is an important part of my heritage, and I've grown up eating salmon, prawns, mussels, clams, oysters, cod.. etc, harvesting seasonally and subsiding off of these natural resources. Missing this lately, I've been thinking about other peoples and their mortuary practices in relation to the sea, and how incredibly essential it must be for some indigenous groups. How do archaeologists study the mortuary practices of past Saltwater Peoples? It must be incredibly difficult for archaeologists to study these constantly fluctuating seascapes so critical to some whose life and being revolves around the sea and therefore, their mortuary practices. How can sea burials be studied? I found some of my answers in "Saltwater Peoples: spiritscapes, maritime rituals and the Archaeology of Australian indigenous seascapes" by Ian J. McNivan (2003).
Torres Strait Islanders of northeastern Australia are marine specialists and are "one of the most marine-oriented and sea-life dependent indigenous societies on the planet" (McNiven 2003: 330). Their specialized environmental knowledge relates not only to the seasonal cycles and the ecology of plants and animals, but also long and short term weather and tidal cycles (McNivan 2003). Little research has been directed towards how marine specialists perceived the sea and conceptually constructed their seascapes, as most anthropologists have traditionally focused on terrestrial issues, even when coastal peoples have been studied (McNivan 2003). Torres Strait Islands have an elaborate system of customary marine tenure operating at different scales of household, clan, island community and island group in their cultural area. Associations between Islander groups and reef systems (different tracks of the sea) are validated by creation myths and "oral deeds of title" (McNivan 2003).
Ethnographic information on Australia's indigenous Saltwater Peoples reveals a wide range of ritual sites associated with spiritual engagement with the sea (McNivan 2003). Most rituals attempted to form a sort of spiritual control over the elements and marine animals. Many ritual sites have an archaeological expression in the form of modified features such as the arrangement of stones, bones and shells(McNivan 2003). In some situations, the framework for some of these sites of stone arrangements are enigmatic without rich local oral testimony as to their reason (McNivan 2003). In the case of central Queensland stone arrangements (see Fig. 1), the features of some inter-tidal zone arrangements are inconsistent with those expected at fish-trapping facilities (McNivan 2003). These marine sites are made from small stones arranged in curvi-linear lines on late Holocene marine sands and muds in quiet backwater areas, usually behind mangrove forests near the upper high-water mark (McNivan 2003). While many of them incorporate characteristics of tidal fishtraps, they are unlikely to function simply as subsistence facilities (McNivan 2003). The reasoning for this is that their features face the wrong direction to trap fish, their stones are often spaced apart with no inter-linking walls able to trap fish, their stone features such as circles, cairns and complex mazes provide no technical aid to trap fish and the sites tend to be located near areas only especially large tides would reach; not conducive to capturing fish (McNivan 2003). For these reasons, it is thought that these areas are locations for sea burials, marking a new level of intimate contact with the sea and the way it was spiritually engaged with (McNivan 2003). McNican believes these sites were created to spiritually engage with local tidal waters and tidal forces that were critical to local Aboriginals (2003).
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