Roxanne Tsang, Sebastien Katuk, Sally K. May, Paul S.C. Taçon, François-Xavier Ricaut, Matthew G. Leavesley
Hand stencils directly represent modern humans in landscape settings around the world. Yet their social and cultural contexts are often overlooked due to the lack of ethnography associated with the artwork. This paper explores the hand stencils from Kundumbue and Pundimbung rock art sites, situated in the traditional boundaries of the Auwim people in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Combining archaeological rock art analysis with ethnographic knowledge, we demonstrate that the hand stencils are a priority in each clan's place-making practices, around which they construct the community's social narratives. Rock shelters and their rock art also show a form of communal history that is evoked through their production in contemporary settings, in addition to having been a form of esoteric magic in the past. We conclude that hand stencils can have multiple meanings over time and across space as a widespread cultural marker. However, aspects of the identities of individuals, groups and communities who created the now static hand imagery, remain in place.
{"title":"Hand stencils and communal history: A case study from Auwim, East Sepik, Papua New Guinea","authors":"Roxanne Tsang, Sebastien Katuk, Sally K. May, Paul S.C. Taçon, François-Xavier Ricaut, Matthew G. Leavesley","doi":"10.1002/arco.5287","DOIUrl":"10.1002/arco.5287","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Hand stencils directly represent modern humans in landscape settings around the world. Yet their social and cultural contexts are often overlooked due to the lack of ethnography associated with the artwork. This paper explores the hand stencils from Kundumbue and Pundimbung rock art sites, situated in the traditional boundaries of the Auwim people in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Combining archaeological rock art analysis with ethnographic knowledge, we demonstrate that the hand stencils are a priority in each clan's place-making practices, around which they construct the community's social narratives. Rock shelters and their rock art also show a form of communal history that is evoked through their production in contemporary settings, in addition to having been a form of esoteric magic in the past. We conclude that hand stencils can have multiple meanings over time and across space as a widespread cultural marker. However, aspects of the identities of individuals, groups and communities who created the now static hand imagery, remain in place.</p>","PeriodicalId":46465,"journal":{"name":"Archaeology in Oceania","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/arco.5287","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48999986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Duncan Wright, Geoffrey Clark, E. Jaydeyn Thomas, Sam Juparulla Wickman, Timothy Darvill
Over millennia, and right across the globe, people have invested time and energy to create cultural landscapes that revolve around or incorporate powerful stones. Questions about the structured nature, distribution, source, or placement of stones (both within physical and meta-physical worlds), pose intriguing theoretical and methodological challenges. Emic and etic perspectives may provide additional insights into the complex (often animate) nature of the stone, the purpose of which varied radically between communities. In this special number of Archaeology in Oceania we explore some of the ways in which First Nations and non-Indigenous archaeologists address these potent features and objects, across widely varying chrono-cultural contexts in the Australia–Pacific region.
{"title":"Archaeology of powerful stones in the Australia-Pacific region: an Introduction","authors":"Duncan Wright, Geoffrey Clark, E. Jaydeyn Thomas, Sam Juparulla Wickman, Timothy Darvill","doi":"10.1002/arco.5289","DOIUrl":"10.1002/arco.5289","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Over millennia, and right across the globe, people have invested time and energy to create cultural landscapes that revolve around or incorporate powerful stones. Questions about the structured nature, distribution, source, or placement of stones (both within physical and meta-physical worlds), pose intriguing theoretical and methodological challenges. Emic and etic perspectives may provide additional insights into the complex (often animate) nature of the stone, the purpose of which varied radically between communities. In this special number of <i>Archaeology in Oceania</i> we explore some of the ways in which First Nations and non-Indigenous archaeologists address these potent features and objects, across widely varying chrono-cultural contexts in the Australia–Pacific region.</p>","PeriodicalId":46465,"journal":{"name":"Archaeology in Oceania","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/arco.5289","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42654876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cylcons are common in Australia, reported in early accounts (e.g., by Etheridge, McCarthy) as spiritually important for Aboriginal people, but where are the Indigenous perspectives on these important stones? Here we provide two stories about our engagement with these objects and then look at an archaeological excavation that allowed culture and science to come together helping us to interpret these stones.
{"title":"Stones, stories and ceremonies: A Gamilaraay, Arrernte, Luritja, Pitjantatjarra, Yankuntjatjarra perspective","authors":"Wayne Brennan, Sam Jupparula Wickman","doi":"10.1002/arco.5286","DOIUrl":"10.1002/arco.5286","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Cylcons are common in Australia, reported in early accounts (e.g., by Etheridge, McCarthy) as spiritually important for Aboriginal people, but where are the Indigenous perspectives on these important stones? Here we provide two stories about our engagement with these objects and then look at an archaeological excavation that allowed culture and science to come together helping us to interpret these stones.</p>","PeriodicalId":46465,"journal":{"name":"Archaeology in Oceania","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/arco.5286","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44835472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2021. ISBN: 9780374157357. pp. 704. US$35.00","authors":"Michael C. Westaway","doi":"10.1002/arco.5288","DOIUrl":"10.1002/arco.5288","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46465,"journal":{"name":"Archaeology in Oceania","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49270927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. Jaydeyn Thomas, Annie Ross, Shannon Bauwens, Conrad Bauwens
Prior to European settlement, the Gummingurru stone arrangement was a place of man-making and knowledge sharing for Aboriginal people from across vast areas of what is now southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, Australia. One of the most powerful sites of ritual and exchange en-route to the Bunya Mountains, Gummingurru was the place at which boys became adults, were assigned “yurees” (totems), and given Law to inform their roles in society for the rest of their lives. We argue that the stones themselves had agentive power in the creation of men. European invasion brought access to Gummingurru to a temporary end. The site lay dormant for many generations until it was returned to the Jarowair clan of the Wakka Wakka Nation in 2008. Since this time, the Gummingurru stone arrangement and its associated site architecture have been resurrected through the combination of applied archaeological and ethnohistorical research and Aboriginal knowledge. Today Gummingurru is at the centre of a major cultural revival on the Darling Downs. It is the locus of the development of Aboriginal control of reconciliation activities and the establishment of a power-base for the management of both the Gummingurru and Bunya Mountains landscapes, with the stones themselves acting to control the process.
{"title":"Resurrecting the power in the stones, developing a modern narrative of the agency and sentience of powerful stones, and recreating shared knowledge encounters at Gummingurru and its associated site architecture","authors":"E. Jaydeyn Thomas, Annie Ross, Shannon Bauwens, Conrad Bauwens","doi":"10.1002/arco.5282","DOIUrl":"10.1002/arco.5282","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Prior to European settlement, the Gummingurru stone arrangement was a place of man-making and knowledge sharing for Aboriginal people from across vast areas of what is now southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, Australia. One of the most powerful sites of ritual and exchange en-route to the Bunya Mountains, Gummingurru was the place at which boys became adults, were assigned “yurees” (totems), and given Law to inform their roles in society for the rest of their lives. We argue that the stones themselves had agentive power in the creation of men. European invasion brought access to Gummingurru to a temporary end. The site lay dormant for many generations until it was returned to the Jarowair clan of the Wakka Wakka Nation in 2008. Since this time, the Gummingurru stone arrangement and its associated site architecture have been resurrected through the combination of applied archaeological and ethnohistorical research and Aboriginal knowledge. Today Gummingurru is at the centre of a major cultural revival on the Darling Downs. It is the locus of the development of Aboriginal control of reconciliation activities and the establishment of a power-base for the management of both the Gummingurru and Bunya Mountains landscapes, with the stones themselves acting to control the process.</p>","PeriodicalId":46465,"journal":{"name":"Archaeology in Oceania","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/arco.5282","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45646020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}