Abstract For over a century Torres Strait Islander Elders’ accounts about the adventures of reforming ancestors have been recorded. The pathways of these muruygul integrate a chain of Torres Strait islands, neighboring Papua New Guinea, and northern Cape York Peninsula (Australia). According to Islanders, these narratives (each segment of which is owned by different communities) encode important information about cross-community cohesion in the past and present; a mythological geography commemorated through stories, songs, ceremonies, and art. In this chapter, Cygnet Repu describes the process by which he routinely “navigat[es] between the reefs” to “read” these multistage stories, using various cultural data sets. This method of detailed assessment of oral histories, archaeology, and language is applied herein to a gidha (important story, legend, myth) sequence relating to the wandering cultural heroes, Naga and Waiat (Wayath, called Waiet in Meriam Mìr, Waiati in Mawata-Daru Kiwai). We demonstrate how greater than 700-year-old story-line pathways taken by these cultural heroes are marked by transportation of loanwords and songs, artistic endeavors and ceremonial exchange. Excavation results are presented for community-wide celebrations and rites of passage associated with Waiat in Western and Eastern Torres Strait. Finally, we reassess past human activities within this region and the important role living saga traditions may play within broader understanding of saga histories and storytelling.

ABSTRACT Torres Strait (TS), on Australia's north‐east border, has a long history of research on pœrapœral kulal : powerful stones. Pœrapœral kulal contain vital power from site‐of‐origin and therefore their movement across the Coral‐Arafura Sea corridor provides important information about past and present human relationships (Elu 2004). With few exceptions Western models draw on anthropological, linguistic and site origin research collated by a Cambridge University field team over 100 years ago, with little detailed reassessment of stone raw material and distribution or geological and archaeological surveys conducted within the intervening period. It is also unclear how TS Islanders engage with this literature, particularly the many communities poorly represented by 19th‐century studies. In this paper, we test several assumptions influencing recent literature from contemporary islander and non‐indigenous perspectives. This includes assessing whether: (a) western scholarship models oversimplify terminology and discussion; (b) early geological assessments of substantive movement of stones is correct; and (c) movement of exotic stones was a common feature across TS. Finally, using detailed cultural, archaeology, geology, and language data sets we reinterpret the regionally‐varying role and antiquity of pœrapœral kulal within this animate cosmo‐political land and seascape.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have long been interested in the study of past human interaction. In the Indo-Pacific, research has focused on the age and processes by which islands were settled and the role that intermediary communities played in these histories. Torres Strait, on Australia’s northern border, represents one such frontier zone. For millennia this 48,000 km2 area (containing at least 274 islands) separated predominately horticultural and pottery-using Melanesians and hunter-gatherer Australians, a contrast considered by some to be ‘starker and more perplexingly than anywhere else in the world’ (Walker 1972:405). Mirroring archaeological explanations and theoretical interests elsewhere, Coral Sea chronicles have transitioned between those prioritising large-scale migration to narratives of entanglement on the periphery of ancient globalisations. This paper develops the theme of entanglement, exploring distinctive regionally diverging histories of innovation and interaction occurring in Western, Central and Eastern Torres Strait. We suggest that traditional histories, involving the wandering trackways of Culture Heroes, provide useful insights into the deep history of human interactions, thereby helping us to understand patterns observed in the archaeological and linguistic record.

Archaeological excavations on the island of Badu have for the first time revealed evidence of people in Torres Strait before 2500 years BP. We interpret this evidence as representing three phases of island use and occupation. Phase 1 (8000–6000 years BP), when the high islands of Torres Strait were part of terminal Greater Australia, saw permanent occupation of the region. During Phase 2 (6000-c.3500/3000 years BP), the Western Islands of Torres Strait were occasionally visited from Cape York. And in Phase 3 (c.3500/3000 years BP to present) the islands became occupied mainly by speakers of languages with strong Papuan and Austronesian elements from the north and northeast. We argue for Austronesian influences at the tip of Australia during the late Holocene.