Fish Traps

Built to take advantage of flowing currents, these enclosures capture the waters' bounty.

Several theories suggest that Australia's earliest settlement routes largely followed the island's coasts and waterways. These routes would have enabled seafaring people to gradually adapt their knowledge of the maritime world to other environmental contexts. Built with stone or plant materials, fish traps were devices that harnessed the force of currents or tides to drive prey into enclosures. Highly effective in estuaries and rivers, this type of fish trap has been used, according to some estimates, since roughly 8000 BCE, shortly after the start of the Holocene era. Some devices excavated by archaeologists would have been enhanced by the construction of fishponds, suggesting the emergence of early forms of aquaculture. Trapping, containment, storing, and breeding activities may have provided a basis for the development of a highly stratified sedentary or semi-sedentary society.