PhD candidate Duane Hamacher's  used ancient stories to make his newest discovery.

21 December 2009

Macquarie University PhD candidate Duane Hamacher was interested in “trying something a little different” when he came to Australia from the US to undertake PhD research.

That “something different” turned out to be a world first when he unearthed a previously unknown meteorite crater using an Aboriginal Dreaming story.

Hamacher has a background in astrophysics but has been researching Aboriginal astronomy within the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University. He has spent the last year investigating Aboriginal perceptions of comets, meteors and cosmic impacts in collaboration with Professor Ray Norris from the CSIRO.

 He began looking at all the places described in Aboriginal stories as having stars or stones falling from the sky and striking the ground.

“There were numerous examples and some of them very closely parallel the scientific understanding of a meteorite impact, sometimes citing a location. I also decided to look at known impact craters in Australia and see if they had associated Dreaming stories that attributed their origins to cosmic impacts - and some did,” he said.

Using Google Maps, Hamacher scoured the areas on his list for craters. His intuition paid off when he spotted a crater-like structure in the Northern Territory’s Palm Valley using an Arrernte Dreaming story of a star that fell to a place called Puka.

Hamacher made a trip to the area with Macquarie Geophysicists Dr Craig O’Neill and Andrew Buchel, and astrophysicist Tui Britton to collect geophysical and archaeological data from the site. Together they collected very strong evidence that what Hamacher found is indeed a newly-discovered crater.

“The geophysical data shows the structure is bowl-shaped under the surface. There is no other way to explain the structure's morphology than as a cosmic impact. It couldn’t have been erosion and there is no volcanic activity in the area,” Hamacher said.

The team also found archaeological evidence at the site in the form of flaked stone tools, showing the place was important to the local Arrernte people.

The results of the discovery will be submitted to the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science in February 2010 and the research that led to the discovery will be submitted to the journal Archaeoastronomy in January.

The next project for Hamacher's PhD, which he hopes to complete in August 2011, will be to examine astronomical representations in Sydney rock art and astronomical alignments in Aboriginal stone arrangements