Beyond the Decolonial Myth: The Lesson of the Sunbury Earth Rings
A team of Australian archaeologists, led by Caroline Spry and documented by the journal Australian Archaeology, has recently conducted a systematic investigation into the mysterious earth rings located in the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country, near Sunbury, north-west of Melbourne.
The research clarified the origin, function, and structure of the so-called Sunbury Earth Rings, complex circles of earth and stone created over a period spanning approximately 590 to 1,400 years ago (Spry et al., Australian Archaeology, 2025). Stratigraphic analyses and geomorphological surveys confirmed that these sites remained in use until the late eighteenth century, shortly before the arrival of European settlers in the region.
Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates archaeology, geomorphology, and the collection of oral testimonies, the investigation documented not only the construction methods but also the social, cultural, and ceremonial context surrounding their creation. The rings have been interpreted as elements of a cultural landscape, closely linked to the functional relationship between Indigenous communities and the land.
Ancient landscape of Sunbury: forms, techniques, and meanings
The rings are located in the hilly region of Sunbury, in the state of Victoria, Australia, in an area that, prior to European colonisation, was permanently inhabited by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people.
For centuries, these circular structures attracted the attention of explorers and scholars, without reaching a shared explanation of their origin. Some interpreted them as natural anomalies, others as colonial constructions; both hypotheses have now been definitively ruled out based on stratigraphic evidence (Heritage Victoria, 2024).
Recent investigations have shown that the rings were built by selectively excavating the soil and arranging local stones in regular patterns, employing landscape modelling techniques that required a thorough knowledge of the soil and environment. Preparation of the soil included levelling the surfaces, removing spontaneous vegetation, and outlining the perimeter with stones—activities related to practices of Indigenous land management.
Some rings display signs of repair or subsequent modifications, indicating prolonged use and a gradual transformation of the original ritual and spatial criteria.
The geometric precision of many structures suggests a symbolic intentionality, with references to cosmological and ceremonial needs, similar to those observed in other traditional contexts studied by Eliade (Le chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase, 1951) and Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890).
Sunbury Earth Rings: ceremonial centres and ritual landscapes
The material evidence emerging from excavations, combined with oral sources collected from the Wurundjeri community, suggests that the Sunbury rings served as ceremonial spaces intended for rites of passage, community gatherings, and symbolic marking of the territory.
Alongside the rings, archaeologists found remnants of ritual hearths, lithic tools for processing plant and animal materials, and traces of ceremonial activities such as the production of ornamental featherwork and ritual scarification (Spry et al., 2025).
These elements place the Sunbury Earth Rings within a tradition of dynamic ritual landscapes, where the territory acts as an active element in constructing collective identity, according to a concept today known as connection to Country.
The Indigenous conception of “Country” and the value of the rings
The Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung culture conceives “Country” as a living entity that includes land, water, sky, plants, animals, and ancestral stories, according to an integrated and circular logic of reality.
In this context, the Sunbury Earth Rings must not be understood merely as material artefacts, but as visible manifestations of a network of relationships between humans, spirits, and the landscape.
The news surrounding the Sunbury discoveries was often reported using strong indigenist rhetoric, suggesting that the mystical-magical world of the natives was abruptly altered by the arrival of European settlers. However, comparative historical analysis indicates that the process of losing the original meaning of rituals had already begun well before European contact.
Studies conducted on traditional cultures without writing systems, such as those documented by Spencer and Gillen in Central Australia (The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899) and by Marcel Griaule among the Dogon people of West Africa (Dieu d’eau, 1948), demonstrate that oral transmission, in the absence of structured analytical supports, naturally tends to produce a progressive symbolic depletion of rites, transforming them into repetitive practices disconnected from their original understanding.
Similarly, observations by Lynette Russell (Unsettling Archaeology, 2012) reveal that many Indigenous Australian ceremonies already displayed signs of mechanical ritualism and confusion regarding ancestral meanings even in pre-contact times.
Beyond the Decolonial Myth, The Lesson of the Sunbury Earth Rings
A heritage to be deciphered
It is therefore inappropriate to attribute the loss of the original meaning of the Sunbury Earth Rings solely to the processes of historical transformation linked to European civilisation. The phenomenon must be framed within the broader dynamic of oral cultures, where the progressive mechanisation of gestures and the superstitious attitude towards sacred places develop physiologically over time.
It is precisely thanks to the rational, historical, and analytical approach developed by Western culture that today we can attempt to methodically reconstruct the authentic meaning of these beliefs, beyond the stratifications of unconscious repetition and cumulative distortions.
The rigorous study of the Sunbury Earth Rings thus enables not only a deeper understanding of an ancient culture but also a rejection of contemporary mythicised narratives, restoring to the ceremonial sites their authentic historical and anthropological value.
Beyond Trends: Rethinking the Authentic Meaning of Discovery
In commenting on the findings from the Sunbury excavations, some observers have suggested that the full understanding of the rings was the result of a “decolonial approach” to archaeology, as if only through this ideological lens it had become possible to appreciate Indigenous cultural heritage. This claim, besides being historically and methodologically forced, betrays a poor understanding of the true history of anthropology and Western critical thought.
From its very beginnings, anthropology was founded precisely on the direct observation of Indigenous cultures and the systematic collection of myths, rituals, techniques, and forms of social organisation.
The encounter with otherness was never merely an operation of domination or reduction but generated a profound internal transformation within Western thought. It was through critical engagement with peoples once considered “primitive” that the West began to reflect on its own limits, to relativise its categories, and to question the presumed universality of its cultural models.
As early as the sixteenth century, Montaigne, speaking about the cannibals of Brazil, suggested that the concept of “barbarism” depended more on the perspective of the observer than on the nature of the observed. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau, in his famous Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, used the figure of the “noble savage” not to idealise Indigenous societies, but to denounce the distortions of European civilisation. More recently, the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how the mythical thought of non-literate peoples is endowed with a rigorous logic, no less sophisticated than that of industrial societies.
The historical truth is that the West, far from systematically ignoring or erasing Indigenous cultures, has often drawn from contact with them lessons in relativism, self-criticism, and epistemological redefinition.
Without the encounter with otherness, we would not have cultural anthropology, critical sociology, nor the very ability to problematise concepts such as “progress”, “development”, and “civilisation”.
Applying labels like “decolonial” indiscriminately to every attempt to understand ancient cultures risks dramatically oversimplifying the complexity of this long historical process.
The Sunbury Earth Rings were not understood thanks to some recent ideological gesture, but thanks to a method rooted in the tradition of Western scientific inquiry: rigorous observation, collection of oral testimonies, stratigraphic analysis of artefacts, comparison with traditional cosmologies, and respect for Indigenous culture as both object and subject of knowledge.
Respect for Aboriginal traditions does not originate from a retrospective “decolonisation” but from the historical maturation of a thought system that has recognised the universal value of cultural diversity. Speaking of a “decolonial approach” without distinguishing between contexts and methods risks obscuring the real merit of the research: the ability to integrate, without succumbing to rhetoric, traditional knowledge with scientific inquiry, bringing to light not only material structures but also complex and vital symbolic worlds.
The discovery of the Sunbury Earth Rings, therefore, should be placed within a broader and deeper framework: that of a long history of reflection on otherness, in which Western thought has transformed the encounter with the other into a tool for self-knowledge. Reducing all this to a contemporary linguistic trend would betray both scientific research and the authentic value of Indigenous cultures, which do not need to be “saved” by ideological labels, but recognised for their intrinsic historical, cultural, and spiritual dignity.