Origin of Australia’s 1,400-year-old mysterious ‘earth rings’ finally revealed

Mysterious ancient earth rings located on the outskirts of Melbourne were made by Australia’s Aboriginal Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people hundreds of years ago, a new study finally reveals.

The origin and purpose of these large rings rising out of hills in Australia’s Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country in the suburb of Sunbury have remained a mystery.

Strange rings have been spotted in many parts of the world, including in England and Cambodia.

They are thought to have been created by ancient people living in these regions by digging out and clumping together earth forming a large circle, or circles, sometimes measuring hundreds of meters in diameter.

Hundreds of such earth rings are believed to have once existed across Australia, many of which were destroyed following European colonisation.

The nearly hundred that remain across the continent now hold immense significance to different Aboriginal language groups reflecting on a history of occupation, colonisation, self-determination, adaptation, and resilience, researchers and elders of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung culture say.

For the Indigenous people, the concept of a country includes consideration of several elements including “land, water, sky, animals, plants, artefacts and cultural features, travel routes, traditions, ceremonies, beliefs, stories, historical events, contemporary associations and ancestors”.

Researchers say it is not possible to understand the earth rings completely without tying together different strands of the culture’s knowledge about the landscape, and their ancestral activity traces preserved in the region.

“While previous studies indicate these rings are sacred locations of ceremony, little is documented from cultural values and landscape perspectives – particularly in southeastern Australia,” scientists say.

A new first-of-its-kind excavation of one such ring has revealed that it was constructed “sometime between 590 and 1,400 years ago”.

Researchers found that the Aboriginal people carefully cleared land and plants in the area, and scraped back soil and rock to create the ring mound, proceeding then to create stone arrangements by layering rocks.

The findings, published recently in the journal Australian Archaeology, suggest the Indigenous people of the region lit campfires, as well as made and used stone tools to move items around the ring’s interior.

Such tools were also likely used on plants and animals as well as to create feather adornments and scar human skin during ceremonies, researchers say.

Results of this study shed further light on the cultural history of Australia’s Aboriginal people and their connection with their land.

“The results bring together Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people’s understandings of the biik wurrda cultural landscape and archaeological evidence for cultural fire, knapping, movement, trampling, and tool-use by their Ancestors at the ring,” scientists wrote.

“While memory of the purpose of the Sunbury Rings has faded, a deep understanding of the cultural values of the landscape in which they are embedded has been passed down through successive generations of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people,” they said.