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Bradshaw rock paintings
help Aboriginal people record knowledge to memory. Wikipedia,
CC BY-SA
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Ancient Celtic bards were famous for the sheer quantity of information
they could memorise. This included thousands of songs, stories,
chants and poems that could take hours to recite in full.
Today we are pretty spoiled. Practically the whole of human knowledge
is conveniently available at our fingertips. Why worry about memorising
something when we can simply Google it?
The answer seems pretty evident when we go into a panic after losing
our smartphones!
Long before the ancient Celts, Aboriginal Australians were recording
vast scores of knowledge to memory and passing it to successive
generations.
Aboriginal people demonstrate that their oral traditions are not
only highly detailed and complex, but they can survive accurately
for
thousands, even tens of thousands, of years.
Yet I struggle to remember what I did last Tuesday. So how did
they do it?
Researcher Lynne Kelly
was drawn to this question while investigating Aboriginal knowledge
about animals for her PhD.
It was evident to Kelly that Aboriginal people catalogued huge
scores of information about animals including species types,
physical features, behaviour, links to food and plants and
wondered how they do it.
A memorable thing
Aboriginal elders explained to her how they encode knowledge in
song, dance, story and place. This led to a theory that may revolutionise
archaeology.
It has long been known that the human brain has evolved to associate
memory with place, referred to as the method
of loci. This means that we associate memory with a location.
How often do memories come flooding back to us when we visit our
childhood haunt?
Loci (Latin for place), can refer to landscape features,
ceremonial sites, abstract designs anything with distinct
features where information can be linked to memory.
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Stonehenge evolved from
a simpler structure to the complex megalith we see today over
the course of thousands of years. Was it an evolving memory
space? Duane Hamacher, Author provided
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Kelly developed this into a framework that may explain the purpose
of famous sites such as Stonehenge, the Nasca lines and the Moai
of Easter Island.
The meanings of these sites have been a topic of controversy for
decades. What Kelly proposes in her new book The
Memory Code is that sites such as Stonehenge and the Nasca lines
are actually memory spaces.
Knowledge is power
In oral cultures, knowledge is power. It is imperative that the
most important knowledge be maintained and preserved by a few select
custodians who have proven their worth.
In Indigenous cultures, elders who have passed the highest levels
of initiation hold the deepest levels of knowledge.
This is reflected in ceremonial sites where knowledge is passed
down. Aboriginal initiation sites include a secret area where the
most sacred knowledge is discussed.
We also see this at Stonehenge, where the perimeter of standing
stones shields the centre of the ring, where the most important
aspects knowledge are passed on through ceremony.
These sites include features that are unique in shape and form.
At Uluru, the Anangu elders associate every crevice, bump, and notch
around the perimeter of the mountain with knowledge that is stored
to memory.
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Uluru close up reveals
a very textured environment. Shutterstock/Peter Zurek
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Star maps and memory
But loci is not only linked to places you can touch or visit.
Indigenous people also use the stars as memory spaces.
For example, groups of stars can represent features on the landscape.
Aboriginal Law Man Ghillar Michael Anderson explains how the Euahlayi
people were able to travel long distances for trade and ceremony.
The Euahlayi would memorise star
maps at night and learn the songs that talk about their relationship
to the land. Each star was associated with a landscape feature,
such as a waterhole.
Later in the year, they would sing the song as they travelled across
country by day. These songline routes became the foundation of some
of our highway networks that criss-cross the country.
Rather than navigating by the stars, the stars themselves serve
as a memory space.
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Landscape features and
songlines represented by stars in the Milky Way also correspond
to modern highways. Robert Fuller and Google Maps, Author
provided
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In The Memory Code, Kelly provides new insights into how oral societies
are able to store vast quantities of knowledge to memory without
it degrading over time.
It may explain how Aboriginal memories of land that existed before
it was flooded by rising sea levels during the last Ice Age survived
in oral tradition for more than 7,000 years.
To test it herself, Kelly used the technique to memorise all of
the worlds countries in order of population by linking them
with features around her neighbourhood, including buildings and
gardens making up her own stories for each one. And she can
now recite them flawlessly.
You might be surprised how easy it is to do yourself.
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