A mining blast destroyed an Australian rock shelter used for 50,000 years, yet archaeologists recovered 50,000 artifacts there

In 2020, a mining blast in Western Australia destroyed a rock shelter that people had used for more than 50,000 years. Now archaeologists working at the ruined site have collected about 50,000 artifacts from it, far more than a typical dig recovers. Only one wall of the shelter still stands, yet the finds are shedding new light on life in the Australian interior.

What happened at Juukan Gorge

Juukan Gorge lies in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, on the lands of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people. The area sits inside Rio Tinto’s Brockman mine site, roughly 60 kilometers north-west of the town of Tom Price. In 2020, Rio Tinto blasted the site as part of its mining work and destroyed the rock shelter. The loss became a major point of public anger, because the shelter held one of the longest records of human life anywhere in Australia.

Five years on, the PKKP people have commissioned Scarp Archaeology, led by Dr Michael Slack, to excavate what remains. A domed tent now covers the site to protect it while the team digs through the rubble and the layers beneath it, according to an on-site report from ABC News published on 25 October 2026.

A site people never really left

Dr Slack calls Juukan Gorge “one of the most important sites in Australian archaeology.” He explained why: “Unlike most sites in Australia, you can trace back Aboriginal occupation of this site consistently for over 50,000 years.” Many Australian sites show people coming and going. This one shows steady use across tens of thousands of years.

The team has found the remains of about 200 fires, which gives a sense of how often people gathered here. One large cutting stone dates to between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. The article reports that the shelter was about 47,000 years old when the blast destroyed it. Dr Slack says the crew is now digging down to levels that rank “amongst the oldest sites in Australia.”

A handle made of resin and kangaroo dung

Some of the most striking finds are small and personal. The team recovered a stone cutting tool with a handle that dates to about 3,000 years ago. People made the handle from spinifex resin, a sticky natural glue from a spiny desert grass, mixed with kangaroo dung. “It’s kangaroo poo and spinifex resin as a handle. This is incredibly rare to find them like this,” Dr Slack said.

The dig also turned up a piece of baler shell, a large sea shell. The shell suggests that people moved goods along trade routes from the coast, about 350 kilometers (roughly 220 miles) away. That distance suggests the shelter sat inside a wide network of exchange, not in isolation.

Tasmanian devils in the desert

Animal bones add another surprise. Bone fragments show that Tasmanian devils once roamed arid inland Australia. They died out on the mainland about 3,200 years ago, according to the report. Most people link these animals only with the island of Tasmania today, so the bones help show how much the mainland’s wildlife has changed.

Why it matters, and what we still do not know

The dig does not undo the destruction. A rock shelter is more than a pile of objects, and the blast likely damaged the layers that archaeologists normally use to read a site. Even so, the volume of material suggests how rich the shelter was before 2020, and it gives the PKKP people a chance to recover knowledge about their own history.

Several caveats apply. No peer-reviewed study of this excavation has appeared yet, so the dates, the artifact count and the interpretations come from Dr Slack’s comments to a news reporter and may change as specialists analyze the material. We will learn more when the team publishes its results.

For now, Juukan Gorge shows how much a single place can hold, and how much a single blast can take away.

Sources

• No published study yet. Primary account: on-site interviews with lead archaeologist Dr Michael Slack, reported by Nicolas Perpitch, ABC News, 25 October 2026: How archaeologists are uncovering the ancient secrets of WA’s Juukan Gorge