Murujuga's Drowned Stone Tools: A 9,000-Year-Old Landscape Beneath the Sea
Two stone-tool sites on the seabed off Western Australia have turned a pair of isolated finds into a landscape. In a study published in October 2026 in Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers from Flinders University, the University of Western Australia, James Cook University and the University of York, working with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, document new underwater archaeological sites in Murujuga Sea Country, in the Dampier Archipelago off the Pilbara coast. The ground they stand on has been underwater for at least 9,000 years. The tools themselves could be considerably older.
The two sites show different parts of the same lost world. One centres on a freshwater spring, a place where people would have gathered, in water 11 to 15 metres deep. It sits about 140 metres from a spring found in an earlier survey of Flying Foam Passage. The other, called Maitland River Hummock, is a rocky outcrop beside an ancient river channel, a good place to quarry stone. Before the seas rose after the last ice age, this was dry land, and the archipelago was connected to the mainland. More than two million square kilometres of Australia's continental shelf went under in that transformation, and generations of First Nations people had lived across it.
The detail that carries the argument is transport. Divers brought up 158 stones from the spring site and confirmed nine as tools: eight flakes and one core. Most were made from local granophyre, but the rest came from rock around Rosemary Island, about 23 kilometres from where they were found. People did not simply pick up whatever was underfoot. They arrived carrying stone from elsewhere, and they kept returning to the springs. The authors read the springs as gathering places, not accidents of geology. That is what turns scattered artefacts into evidence of a lived-in landscape, with routes, preferences and meeting points.
The people doing the finding matter as much as the finds. Five Murujuga rangers trained as scientific divers for the project, and two of them, Malik Churnside and Richard Variakojis, surveyed the sites underwater and co-authored the paper. Churnside spotted one of the artefacts himself. The Ngarda-Ngarli people have cared for Murujuga for at least 50,000 years, and as Vincent Adams, director of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, put it, the research shows that their cultural landscape extends far beyond the shoreline and into Sea Country. Murujuga is a World Heritage-listed region, and the submerged country is part of the same story, not a separate one.
That reframing is the reason this paper is worth more than a curiosity item. Earlier underwater discoveries at Murujuga, reported in 2020 and 2023, could be read as one-offs. This study shows they were not. The same coastline that holds one of the world's densest collections of rock art on land now has a matching record underwater, and lead researcher Jonathan Benjamin's assessment is blunt: the team is only beginning to understand the scale of Australia's submerged cultural heritage. The work is slow by necessity. Dives happen on neap tides, when currents are low enough to work in, in a region with a tidal range above four metres, and divers must pick out worked stone from rock coated in marine growth in low light.
So here is my prediction, stated plainly enough to be checked: by 31 December 2028, at least one further peer-reviewed study will document another submerged archaeological site in Murujuga Sea Country or elsewhere on Australia's continental shelf, beyond the two sites in this paper. The cadence points that way, with finds in 2020, 2023 and now 2026, and a trained ranger-diver team already in place. The constraints point the other way, since every new site depends on narrow diving windows and slow, careful survey. I put the odds at about 60 percent, which is a genuine bet, not a certainty. If it lands, the map of the drowned landscape grows by another dot. If it misses, the silence will itself be informative about how hard this archaeology is.