Interpreting a Legacy Fossil Assemblage Excavated From Waribruk (New Guinea II Cave), GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Country, Snowy River National Park, Southeastern Australia

ABSTRACT In this paper we report on faunal remains recovered from a legacy archaeological excavation undertaken in the rockshelter entrance of Waribruk (New Guinea II Cave), a GunaiKurnai site located on the west bank of the Snowy River, East Gippsland, southeastern Australia. From 1980 to 1985, archaeologist Paul Ossa undertook a 5 m‐deep excavation in the cave's rockshelter entrance, but due to a poorly defined stratigraphy and insufficient radiocarbon ages, he was unable to establish a reliable chronostratigraphy and the excavated materials were never analysed in any detail. Here we present a series of new accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon ages on charcoal collected and bagged by Ossa. We show that the dated portion of one square and the upper third of an adjacent square are in excellent chronostratigraphic order, but the deeper levels are not. Taphonomic characteristics of the deposits indicate that animal bones were primarily accumulated by owls and people. The Late Pleistocene and Holocene faunas were dominated by forest and woodland species, but warmer, wetter Holocene conditions correlate with an influx of grassland, heath and swamp‐adapted taxa. The subtle faunal changes observed in sediments dating to the Late Pleistocene–Holocene transition may be explained by local environmental shifts that accompanied post‐glacial warming, and/or changing configurations of local GunaiKurnai hunting and foraging catchments. The taxonomic range of Waribruk's pre‐colonial archaeological fauna was more diverse than its modern counterpart, indicating that colonial settlement has led to the local extinction of several species and global extinction of at least one.