Cultures without writing are called ‘non-literate’, instead their identity should be associated with what they do in the absence of writing to record their knowledge.They employ a range of memory technologies linked under the term ‘primary orality’, including song, dance, story and physical memory devices. The sky or landscape itself, are the most universal of these and they provide highly effective memory storage across many societies

The Memory Skills Of Indigenous Elders

Rock art and decorated posts are famous aids to indigenous memory, but far less known are the portable memory devices. Incised stones and boards, tools, collections of objects in bags, bark paintings, birchbark scrolls, decorations on skins and knotted cords have all been used to aid the recall of memorised information.

Indigenous Portable Memory Aids

Australian Aboriginal memory palaces are associated with the land, structured by sung pathways called songlines. A songline is a sequence of locations that orientate or contain valuable resources. At each location, a song or ritual is performed that will always be associated with that particular location, physically and in memory. Thus, a songline provides a table of contents to the entire knowledge system.Some cultures mix the skyscape with the landscape as a memory device; associating knowledge such as seasonal variations, navigation, timekeeping and the ethics of their culture with stories about the heavenly locations. Typically, only fully initiated elders would know and understand the entire knowledge system of the community. This secrecy and sacredness of critical information protects it from corruption.

Aboriginal Memory Palaces

A memory palace, or a method of loci, is an imagined physical palace where one piece of information is placed in each site, allowing one to mentally stroll through their memory palace drawing out information in the required order without missing an element.There is ample circumstantial evidence that many indigenous cultures around the world have been using it for at least 40,000 years to store, in modern terms, absurdly large amounts of knowledge. But our dependence on writing has eroded this skill.

Memory Palace

In Arthur Conan Doyle's detective novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) we learn that Sherlock Holmes used the most effective memory system known: a memory palace. Although imagined memory palaces are still used by memory champions and the few who practice the memory arts, they are best known from Greco-Roman times when great orators, including Cicero, used them to ensure their rhetoric was smooth, detailed and flawless.

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