I had imagined that we would find a deep grave, but felt rather disappointed when the outline of a pot rim, and then a second, emerged only twenty centimetres down. The pots were different fro others too. Rather than reflecting with a lustrous black burnish, they were rather sull earthenware. but then came the first of many surprises, for these pots turned out to be balanced on top of a growing pyramid of circular cylinders of clay, each of which, we felt, was destined 3,500 years before to be fashioned into a vessel. It as at one of these heaps that Rachanie came across a hint of red, which swelled into a pool of what looked like blood, but it was in fact, powered red ochre. A gentle probe with one of our dental picks, and there, revealed, was a patch of yellowish bone, part of a human skull.
Now what Sandra Bowdler has are remains of man in this cave off northwest Tasmania about 23,000 years old--a marvellous conjunction of events. It shows that as soon as this gate was opened people tok the opportunity to go there.
... The presence of this colouring matter inside the monolith was of supreme importance. The offerings found at the beginning and the end of the secret staircase had borne red paint; and the sides of the great stone showed traces of having been painted red all over. This colour was associated in the Mayan and Aztec cosmogony with the East, but also it is nearly always found in tombs, on the walls, or on objects accompanying the dead person or on his bones. The presence of red in tombs came, therefore, to indicate resurrection and a hope of immortality. The particles of cinnabar adhearing to the wire inserted into the centre of the enormous stone block was therefore unquestionable evidence of burial: and our supposed ceremonial altar must therefore be an extraordinary sepulchre.