Groundbreaking archaeological research may have upended the longstanding belief that Aboriginal Australians did not make pottery.

A paper published in the Quaternary Science Reviews on Wednesday details the finding of 82 pottery pieces from a single dig site on a Great Barrier Reef island, dates them at between 3,000 and 2,000 years old and determines that the pots were most likely made by Aboriginal people using locally sourced clay and temper.

The pieces are the oldest securely dated pottery discovered in Australia and weave Indigenous Australians into an ocean-going network of people in Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait and Pacific Islands who formed a “community of cultures across the Coral Sea”, the paper finds. Fragments of pottery have also been found on the Torres Strait.

The archaeologists say the finds open “a new chapter in Australian, Melanesian and Pacific archaeology”.