Origin of Australia’s 1,400-year-old earth rings finally revealed

There are many strange monuments around the world left by our ancestors. In the UK, we have Stonehenge. Easter Island has maoi. And in Australia, there are a series of large rings that rise out of the hills. But now we can say we're one mystery down, as researchers finally know where these rings come from (Picture: Caroline Spry et al., Australian Archaeology (2025))

In a new study, published in Australian Archeology, researchers reveal that the mysterious ancient earth rings were made by the country’s Aboriginal Wurundjeri woi-wurrung people hundreds of years ago. For a long time, the purpose of these large rings have remained a mystery as strange rings have been spotted all over the world, including England and Cambodia (Picture: Australian Archaeology (2025))

But the ones sitting in Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country in the suburb of Sunbury are thought to be created by ancient people living in these regions by digging out and clumping together earth. They would form a large circle, or circles, that would span hundreds of metres in diameter. It’s thought that hundreds would have existed across the region but European colonisation destroyed many of them  (Picture:  David Mullins)

The researchers say that nearly 100 remain across the continent. And they hold an immense significance to different Aboriginal language groups which reflect on a history of occupation, colonisation, self-determination, adaptation and resilience (Picture: Australian Archaeology (2025))

For Indigenous people, country means considering elements that include ‘land, water, sky, animals, plants, artefacts and cultural features, travel routes, traditions, ceremonies, beliefs, stories, historical events, contemporary associations and ancestors’. The researchers say that to understand the rings, you will need to type in different strands of the culture’s knowledge about the landscape, and their ancestral activity traces preserved in the region (Picture: Caroline Spry)

One excavation of the rings revealed that it was constructed ‘sometime between 590 and 1,400 years ago’. In the area, researchers found that aboriginal people carefully cleared land and plants in the area, scraped back soil and rock to create the ring mound and the created stone arrangements by layering rocks. The researchers suggest the Indigenous people of the region made and used stone tools to move items around the ring’s interior – and likely used them on plants and animals to create feature adornments and scar human skin during ceremonies (Picture:  G. Elspeth Hayes)

'The results bring together Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people’s understandings of the biik wurrda cultural landscape and archaeological evidence for cultural fire, knapping, movement, trampling, and tool-use by their Ancestors at the ring,' the researchers wrote. 'While memory of the purpose of the Sunbury Rings has faded, a deep understanding of the cultural values of the landscape in which they are embedded has been passed down through successive generations of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people'