“Everything Has Changed Now. Everything”

Abstract This chapter explores the convergence of oral histories and traditions, archaeological practice and interpretations, and climate change through the lens of ancestral burial practices and their recent erosion out of the dunes in the Kaurareg Archipelago of the Torres Strait in far northeastern Australia. Drawing on long-standing collaborative research with Kaurareg Traditional Owners, the authors examine how oral histories not only inform the understanding of past lifeways but also provide culturally grounded frameworks for interpreting the exposure of ancestral burials linked to contemporary environmental change. In recent years, rising sea levels and intensifying king tide events have led to significant erosion of coastal dune systems on the home island of Muralag (Prince of Wales Island), exposing human remains that had long been interred in the dunes of Gaibayath (North Beach) in accordance with Kaurareg customs. These exposures, while deeply traumatic, have also reactivated community-held narratives and practices surrounding burial, memory, and ancestral responsibility. In this chapter the authors position oral tradition not as a supplementary source to the archaeological record but as a co-equal interpretive framework—one that holds its own authority, structure, and continuity. As scholars have argued, the privileging of text-based evidence in archaeology has often marginalized Indigenous epistemologies. This chapter builds on those critiques by centering Kaurareg ways of knowing and responding to heritage change and by tracing how oral traditions are used not only to explain the past but also to interpret the present and guide future action.