Pub Date : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.2003976
U. Frederick
Australian archaeologists have been grappling with the complexities of ‘contact archaeology’ since the early 1990s, following pioneering work undertaken by Jim Allen, Judy Birmingham and Campbell Macknight, amongst others. Since that time various alternatives to the usage of the term ‘contact’ have been offered, including ‘cross-cultural encounter’, ‘interaction’, ‘engagement’, ‘negotiation’, ‘exchange’ and ‘entanglement’. Readers well-versed in the Australian literature will recognise this as a familiar problem rather than a revelation. Nonetheless, this paper highlights that ongoing issues persist with regard to how we name, frame and explain archaeologies of culture contact. This field of research gained momentum at a time when Australia and the USA were celebrating key events in the foundational narratives of their nations: the Bicentenary of the First Fleet and the Quincentenary of Columbus, respectively. As archaeologies of the ‘new world’ they are both shaped by the contingencies and consequences of the colonial project. Events and discussion surrounding these commemorations of invasion were controversial, thought-provoking and, importantly, laid the groundwork for renewed thinking about the ongoing impacts and influences of colonialism. Newly expanded formulations of ‘contact’ emerged from debates informed by focussed on-the-ground investigations. They were also shaped by developments in community archaeologies, gender in archaeology, and a growing recognition of Indigenous knowledges and sovereignty. These studies progressed our understanding of the nature, timing and breadth of cross-cultural relations and their material signature. Hence, archaeological studies of exploration, pastoralism, mining, forestry, whaling and migration have indeed indicated that ‘imperial debris’ (Stoler 2008) is scattered far and wide across the continent. But this 30þ year history of Australian archaeology also demonstrates that archaeologies of crosscultural interaction go beyond an IndigenousEuropean framework. We have complex multicultural archaeologies that record the presence of Afghan, Chinese, Japanese, South Sea Islander, and Indonesian individuals and communities, to name a few. These studies have broadened our understanding of what ‘contact’ archaeology may actually embrace, and have drawn attention to acts of resistance, agency, barter, gifting, resilience and other nuanced forms of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. I assume that these advances have been overlooked in this paper because, judging from the reference list, relatively little of the Australian literature has been canvassed. Likewise, many of the archaeologists who fostered the study of ‘contact’ archaeology and/or its theoretical agenda are women, a fact that is silenced in the references therein. These are disappointing elisions, particularly given the authors’ overall intent to redress and ‘recognise structural inequalities’. Here I name a few simply to reinstate some balance:
{"title":"Beyond colonialism? A comment on the formulation of ‘contact’ archaeology in Australia","authors":"U. Frederick","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.2003976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.2003976","url":null,"abstract":"Australian archaeologists have been grappling with the complexities of ‘contact archaeology’ since the early 1990s, following pioneering work undertaken by Jim Allen, Judy Birmingham and Campbell Macknight, amongst others. Since that time various alternatives to the usage of the term ‘contact’ have been offered, including ‘cross-cultural encounter’, ‘interaction’, ‘engagement’, ‘negotiation’, ‘exchange’ and ‘entanglement’. Readers well-versed in the Australian literature will recognise this as a familiar problem rather than a revelation. Nonetheless, this paper highlights that ongoing issues persist with regard to how we name, frame and explain archaeologies of culture contact. This field of research gained momentum at a time when Australia and the USA were celebrating key events in the foundational narratives of their nations: the Bicentenary of the First Fleet and the Quincentenary of Columbus, respectively. As archaeologies of the ‘new world’ they are both shaped by the contingencies and consequences of the colonial project. Events and discussion surrounding these commemorations of invasion were controversial, thought-provoking and, importantly, laid the groundwork for renewed thinking about the ongoing impacts and influences of colonialism. Newly expanded formulations of ‘contact’ emerged from debates informed by focussed on-the-ground investigations. They were also shaped by developments in community archaeologies, gender in archaeology, and a growing recognition of Indigenous knowledges and sovereignty. These studies progressed our understanding of the nature, timing and breadth of cross-cultural relations and their material signature. Hence, archaeological studies of exploration, pastoralism, mining, forestry, whaling and migration have indeed indicated that ‘imperial debris’ (Stoler 2008) is scattered far and wide across the continent. But this 30þ year history of Australian archaeology also demonstrates that archaeologies of crosscultural interaction go beyond an IndigenousEuropean framework. We have complex multicultural archaeologies that record the presence of Afghan, Chinese, Japanese, South Sea Islander, and Indonesian individuals and communities, to name a few. These studies have broadened our understanding of what ‘contact’ archaeology may actually embrace, and have drawn attention to acts of resistance, agency, barter, gifting, resilience and other nuanced forms of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. I assume that these advances have been overlooked in this paper because, judging from the reference list, relatively little of the Australian literature has been canvassed. Likewise, many of the archaeologists who fostered the study of ‘contact’ archaeology and/or its theoretical agenda are women, a fact that is silenced in the references therein. These are disappointing elisions, particularly given the authors’ overall intent to redress and ‘recognise structural inequalities’. Here I name a few simply to reinstate some balance:","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":"88 1","pages":"96 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44982223","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.2003973
Steve Brown
The use of ‘contact’ is problematic, in part, because it is often applied in ways that privilege nonIndigenous voices. In Cookian terms, the view is ‘from the ship and not the shore’. Hence objects, such as glass, ceramic, and metal tools produced by Indigenous peoples, tend to be interpreted from technical and historical archaeological perspectives, typically without commentary by those Aboriginal owners and custodians on whose land such items are ‘discovered’. That is, ‘contact’ is used, consciously or otherwise, in ways that perpetuate settler colonialism and appropriate cultural rights. I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate concerning the application of the term and concept of ‘contact’ in Australian archaeology. I commend the authors for their Forum piece and for its being informed by both theory and practice. I limit my comments to a few topics below and, overall, take the position that archaeologists should avoid using generic terms for encounter, engagement, and interaction between Aboriginal Australian groups and ‘others’ (whether British, Afghan, Macassan, Torres Strait Islander, etc.), but rather develop language that is specific to each circumstance or situation and place. Much as a construct of pan-Aboriginality in Australia subsumes individual groups into the nation’s whole (and thus undermines Indigenous cultural distinctiveness), so ‘contact’ as used by archaeologists masks more than it reveals. The critique of the use of ‘contact’ outlined by the authors has much in common with that levelled at ‘shared history’. As historian Heather Goodall (2002) noted, the concept of ‘sharing histories’ was a key goal of the Reconciliation process. The process, in historian Maria Nugent’s (2020) words, ‘clung to the idea of history as a discrete and stable set of facts that could be enriched and expanded by simply adding hitherto excluded experiences and perspectives without fundamentally changing the existing narrative’. Indigenous perspectives, it seems, could be inserted into a prevailing national story and create ‘a unified, consensual account’ of the nation-state (Goodall 2002:9). Thus ‘invasion’ could be ‘nicely’ accommodated! McNiven and Russell (2005) critique the categorisation of the contact period as a ‘shared space’ because it denies the reality of much of Australia’s post-AD 1788 history in which Aboriginal people were imposed upon, coerced, and dispossessed. It is apparent from just these two critiques that the concept of shared history is deeply problematic because of the gloss it gives to histories of contestation, resistance, and ‘contact’. Does recasting the idea of ‘contact’ as a ‘twotiered approach’ – ‘cultural entanglements’ and ‘colonialism’ – move the framing and re-writing of Australian archaeology into a more historically accurate, pan-Australian space? I am not persuaded. On the positive side, the authors adeptly apply these ‘tiers’ in their readings of the Pianamu cultural landscape. They make a stron
{"title":"Against ‘contact’","authors":"Steve Brown","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.2003973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.2003973","url":null,"abstract":"The use of ‘contact’ is problematic, in part, because it is often applied in ways that privilege nonIndigenous voices. In Cookian terms, the view is ‘from the ship and not the shore’. Hence objects, such as glass, ceramic, and metal tools produced by Indigenous peoples, tend to be interpreted from technical and historical archaeological perspectives, typically without commentary by those Aboriginal owners and custodians on whose land such items are ‘discovered’. That is, ‘contact’ is used, consciously or otherwise, in ways that perpetuate settler colonialism and appropriate cultural rights. I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate concerning the application of the term and concept of ‘contact’ in Australian archaeology. I commend the authors for their Forum piece and for its being informed by both theory and practice. I limit my comments to a few topics below and, overall, take the position that archaeologists should avoid using generic terms for encounter, engagement, and interaction between Aboriginal Australian groups and ‘others’ (whether British, Afghan, Macassan, Torres Strait Islander, etc.), but rather develop language that is specific to each circumstance or situation and place. Much as a construct of pan-Aboriginality in Australia subsumes individual groups into the nation’s whole (and thus undermines Indigenous cultural distinctiveness), so ‘contact’ as used by archaeologists masks more than it reveals. The critique of the use of ‘contact’ outlined by the authors has much in common with that levelled at ‘shared history’. As historian Heather Goodall (2002) noted, the concept of ‘sharing histories’ was a key goal of the Reconciliation process. The process, in historian Maria Nugent’s (2020) words, ‘clung to the idea of history as a discrete and stable set of facts that could be enriched and expanded by simply adding hitherto excluded experiences and perspectives without fundamentally changing the existing narrative’. Indigenous perspectives, it seems, could be inserted into a prevailing national story and create ‘a unified, consensual account’ of the nation-state (Goodall 2002:9). Thus ‘invasion’ could be ‘nicely’ accommodated! McNiven and Russell (2005) critique the categorisation of the contact period as a ‘shared space’ because it denies the reality of much of Australia’s post-AD 1788 history in which Aboriginal people were imposed upon, coerced, and dispossessed. It is apparent from just these two critiques that the concept of shared history is deeply problematic because of the gloss it gives to histories of contestation, resistance, and ‘contact’. Does recasting the idea of ‘contact’ as a ‘twotiered approach’ – ‘cultural entanglements’ and ‘colonialism’ – move the framing and re-writing of Australian archaeology into a more historically accurate, pan-Australian space? I am not persuaded. On the positive side, the authors adeptly apply these ‘tiers’ in their readings of the Pianamu cultural landscape. They make a stron","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":"88 1","pages":"92 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44166426","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.2003986
C. Spry
{"title":"When divisions can have value: Revisiting the term ‘contact’ in Australian First Peoples archaeology","authors":"C. Spry","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.2003986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.2003986","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":"88 1","pages":"106 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47550824","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.2003984
G. Nicholas
One of the most memorable articles I read as an archaeology undergraduate student was Lauriston Sharp’s (1952) ‘Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians’. In it, Sharp traced the flow of consequences – both beneficial and disruptive – that resulted from colonial encounters. To me, this illuminated human societies as multilayered, integrated systems sensitive to change; in this case, one could trace the perturbations that a seemingly innocuous substitution in technology caused, beginning in the late nineteenth century in Cape York. As it happens, this study of the consequences of contact on the Yir Yoront is not far from the Kuuku I’yu, the focus of Tutchener and Claudie’s article. How should we explore ‘contact’? What are the most appropriate terms to employ, concepts to consider, and at what scale? An approach based in cultural materialism (sensu Marvin Harris 1979) can reveal how new technologies from ‘outside’ enhance or disrupt traditional subsistence practices, gender roles, social relationships, and such, as evident with the Yir Yoront study. Or, following Silliman (2016) and Jordan (2014), unequal power dynamics might be seen as a more meaningful measure. Likewise, scale needs to be considered. Cross-cultural encounters can be viewed from a continent-wide perspective, tracking global market forces, ideological differences, etc, or focussing on a particular community/area as a microcosm of colonialism as it played out locally. These factors frame Tutchener and Claudie’s examination of ‘contact’, ‘cultural entanglement’, and ‘colonialism’ on the Kuuku I’yu cultural landscape. I focus here on two themes. The first is semantics (re: Jordan 2014; Silliman 2016) and how we think about these; the second, representations of social spaces (re: Lefebvre 1991) and cultural persistence.
作为一名考古学本科生，我读过的最难忘的一篇文章是劳里斯顿·夏普(1952)的《石器时代澳大利亚人的钢斧》。在书中，夏普追溯了殖民遭遇带来的一系列后果——既有有益的，也有破坏性的。对我来说，这说明人类社会是一个多层的、对变化敏感的综合系统;在这种情况下，人们可以追溯到19世纪末在约克角开始的一种看似无害的技术替代所造成的扰动。碰巧的是，这项对Yir Yoront接触后果的研究，与Tutchener和Claudie文章的重点Kuuku I 'yu相距不远。我们应该如何探索“接触”?使用什么是最合适的术语，考虑什么概念，以及在什么范围内使用?基于文化唯物主义(sensu Marvin Harris, 1979)的方法可以揭示来自“外部”的新技术如何增强或破坏传统的生存实践、性别角色、社会关系等，正如Yir Yoront的研究所证明的那样。或者，继Silliman(2016)和Jordan(2014)之后，不平等的权力动态可能被视为更有意义的衡量标准。同样，规模也需要考虑。跨文化接触可以从整个大陆的角度来看待，跟踪全球市场力量，意识形态差异等，或者关注特定社区/地区作为殖民主义在当地发挥作用的缩影。这些因素构成了Tutchener和Claudie对Kuuku I ' yu文化景观中“接触”、“文化纠缠”和“殖民主义”的考察。我在这里主要谈两个主题。首先是语义(re: Jordan 2014;Silliman 2016)以及我们如何看待这些;第二，社会空间的表征(参见:Lefebvre 1991)和文化持久性。
{"title":"Disentangling ‘contact’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘cultural entanglement’","authors":"G. Nicholas","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.2003984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.2003984","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most memorable articles I read as an archaeology undergraduate student was Lauriston Sharp’s (1952) ‘Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians’. In it, Sharp traced the flow of consequences – both beneficial and disruptive – that resulted from colonial encounters. To me, this illuminated human societies as multilayered, integrated systems sensitive to change; in this case, one could trace the perturbations that a seemingly innocuous substitution in technology caused, beginning in the late nineteenth century in Cape York. As it happens, this study of the consequences of contact on the Yir Yoront is not far from the Kuuku I’yu, the focus of Tutchener and Claudie’s article. How should we explore ‘contact’? What are the most appropriate terms to employ, concepts to consider, and at what scale? An approach based in cultural materialism (sensu Marvin Harris 1979) can reveal how new technologies from ‘outside’ enhance or disrupt traditional subsistence practices, gender roles, social relationships, and such, as evident with the Yir Yoront study. Or, following Silliman (2016) and Jordan (2014), unequal power dynamics might be seen as a more meaningful measure. Likewise, scale needs to be considered. Cross-cultural encounters can be viewed from a continent-wide perspective, tracking global market forces, ideological differences, etc, or focussing on a particular community/area as a microcosm of colonialism as it played out locally. These factors frame Tutchener and Claudie’s examination of ‘contact’, ‘cultural entanglement’, and ‘colonialism’ on the Kuuku I’yu cultural landscape. I focus here on two themes. The first is semantics (re: Jordan 2014; Silliman 2016) and how we think about these; the second, representations of social spaces (re: Lefebvre 1991) and cultural persistence.","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47944976","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.2003983
Russell Mullett, B. David, Joanna Fresløv
{"title":"Contact-tracing in archaeology: Encountering power difference, the archaeological record and the writing of the past","authors":"Russell Mullett, B. David, Joanna Fresløv","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.2003983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.2003983","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":"88 1","pages":"99 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42364346","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.2003975
Rodney Harrison
I am extremely sympathetic to the authors’ critique of the term ‘contact archaeology’ and their argument that it detracts from the real inequalities and cultural and spatial dynamics of Indigenous and non-Indigenous colonial lifeworlds. It was precisely this concern that led me and several others during the late 1990s and 2000s, working with Indigenous collaborators and in dialogue with newly emergent perspectives on postcolonial and Indigenous histories, to argue for a range of alternative frameworks for writing about and practising archaeology in Australia. This body of work addressed the significant discursive erasure of Indigenous Australians in colonial contexts through narratives that placed emphasis on deep prehistory on the one hand (e.g. Byrne 2011), and that seemed focussed primarily on the agency of settler Australians on the other. The book Shared Landscapes (Harrison 2004) was an attempt to provide more inclusive ways of using archaeology, archives, heritage and oral histories to tell stories of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian history and the places in which those histories had occurred, mindful of these significant entanglements and inequalities, and drawing on these new perspectives (see reflective discussion in Harrison 2014). My work, and the work of other authors on this topic in Australia at the time (e.g. see citations in Harrison 2014), much of which is not cited by the authors of the comment currently being discussed, was developed in dialogue with scholars in the United States and elsewhere (including Silliman 2005, 2016 and Jordan 2009, 2014 on whose work the authors of this paper mainly base their critique of the term ‘contact’). Silliman and Jordan also cited and drew on new concepts emerging from empirical work on historical Indigenous archaeology in Australasia. Although this exchange of ideas relating to the critique of the concept of ‘contact’ was happening much earlier – Torrence and Clarke (2000) themselves argued for the use of the term ‘entanglement’ in preference to ‘contact’ in their book The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania – it is exemplified in the volume Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology (Ferris et al. 2014) which I coedited with Neil Ferris and Michael Wilcox, in which the significant cross-fertilisation of ideas from ‘colonialism’ to ‘shared histories’ to ‘cross-cultural engagement’/’entanglement’ is directly reflected in Jordan’s (2014) chapter which the authors cite, alongside several others from authors from the United States and Australia. The critique of ‘contact archaeology’ which the authors make was always a significant part of these earlier discussions, and itself derived in part from work in Australia. My disagreement with this paper, then, is a historiographical one. The implication that these concepts have not already been discussed in the Australian archaeological literature, and the arguments they bring to bear on the term
{"title":"Pasts otherwise: Some comments on the historiography of concepts of ‘colonialism’ and ‘entanglement’ and the critique of the concept of ‘contact’ in Australasian archaeology","authors":"Rodney Harrison","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.2003975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.2003975","url":null,"abstract":"I am extremely sympathetic to the authors’ critique of the term ‘contact archaeology’ and their argument that it detracts from the real inequalities and cultural and spatial dynamics of Indigenous and non-Indigenous colonial lifeworlds. It was precisely this concern that led me and several others during the late 1990s and 2000s, working with Indigenous collaborators and in dialogue with newly emergent perspectives on postcolonial and Indigenous histories, to argue for a range of alternative frameworks for writing about and practising archaeology in Australia. This body of work addressed the significant discursive erasure of Indigenous Australians in colonial contexts through narratives that placed emphasis on deep prehistory on the one hand (e.g. Byrne 2011), and that seemed focussed primarily on the agency of settler Australians on the other. The book Shared Landscapes (Harrison 2004) was an attempt to provide more inclusive ways of using archaeology, archives, heritage and oral histories to tell stories of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian history and the places in which those histories had occurred, mindful of these significant entanglements and inequalities, and drawing on these new perspectives (see reflective discussion in Harrison 2014). My work, and the work of other authors on this topic in Australia at the time (e.g. see citations in Harrison 2014), much of which is not cited by the authors of the comment currently being discussed, was developed in dialogue with scholars in the United States and elsewhere (including Silliman 2005, 2016 and Jordan 2009, 2014 on whose work the authors of this paper mainly base their critique of the term ‘contact’). Silliman and Jordan also cited and drew on new concepts emerging from empirical work on historical Indigenous archaeology in Australasia. Although this exchange of ideas relating to the critique of the concept of ‘contact’ was happening much earlier – Torrence and Clarke (2000) themselves argued for the use of the term ‘entanglement’ in preference to ‘contact’ in their book The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania – it is exemplified in the volume Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology (Ferris et al. 2014) which I coedited with Neil Ferris and Michael Wilcox, in which the significant cross-fertilisation of ideas from ‘colonialism’ to ‘shared histories’ to ‘cross-cultural engagement’/’entanglement’ is directly reflected in Jordan’s (2014) chapter which the authors cite, alongside several others from authors from the United States and Australia. The critique of ‘contact archaeology’ which the authors make was always a significant part of these earlier discussions, and itself derived in part from work in Australia. My disagreement with this paper, then, is a historiographical one. The implication that these concepts have not already been discussed in the Australian archaeological literature, and the arguments they bring to bear on the term","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":"88 1","pages":"94 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59334788","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}
Pub Date : 2021-11-15DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.1996218
Michelle C. Langley, Owen Carriage, the Walbunga Custodian Elders
Abstract Almost 60 years ago, the small cave of Durras North was excavated to learn more about the Walbunga Yuin People who have lived along this part of the New South Wales coast for thousands of years. From a 2 m × 2 m pit, an extensive shell midden recording some 500 years of site use was uncovered. Amongst the many kilograms of marine shell were a small number of stone and shell artefacts and almost 500 tools made primarily on short-tailed shearwater bone. Such large collections of osseous technology are rare in the Australian archaeological record and consequently this assemblage provides a unique opportunity to better understand the use of bone on this continent. We revisited this remarkable bone tool assemblage and discovered that the fishing-spear tips indicate several distinctive approaches in their manufacture and style – including some ingeniously utilising the natural structure of the bird bone to create tangs. In addition, we also identified tools used in working organic fibres or leathers, as well as a rare interpersonal weapon. In total, the Durras North osseous assemblage not only provides unprecedented detail on the construction of the multipronged fishing spears which were so common a sight in southeast Australia on European arrival, but also insights into more ephemeral cultural manufacturing and use practices.
{"title":"Insights from a small sea cave: Reanalysis of the bone technology from Durras North, Yuin Country, Coastal New South Wales, Australia","authors":"Michelle C. Langley, Owen Carriage, the Walbunga Custodian Elders","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.1996218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.1996218","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Almost 60 years ago, the small cave of Durras North was excavated to learn more about the Walbunga Yuin People who have lived along this part of the New South Wales coast for thousands of years. From a 2 m × 2 m pit, an extensive shell midden recording some 500 years of site use was uncovered. Amongst the many kilograms of marine shell were a small number of stone and shell artefacts and almost 500 tools made primarily on short-tailed shearwater bone. Such large collections of osseous technology are rare in the Australian archaeological record and consequently this assemblage provides a unique opportunity to better understand the use of bone on this continent. We revisited this remarkable bone tool assemblage and discovered that the fishing-spear tips indicate several distinctive approaches in their manufacture and style – including some ingeniously utilising the natural structure of the bird bone to create tangs. In addition, we also identified tools used in working organic fibres or leathers, as well as a rare interpersonal weapon. In total, the Durras North osseous assemblage not only provides unprecedented detail on the construction of the multipronged fishing spears which were so common a sight in southeast Australia on European arrival, but also insights into more ephemeral cultural manufacturing and use practices.","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":"88 1","pages":"18 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41501343","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}
Pub Date : 2021-11-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.1991385
B. Barker
In the popular Western imagination the nineteenth century unilineal social evolutionary theories of Tylor, Morgan and Spencer are often still commonly held in which ‘hunter-gatherer’ is essentially a metaphor for primitive in which – to quote Hobbes – life was ‘... nasty brutish and short’. The idea that hunters and gatherers lived a perilous existence – eking out a living, teetering on the brink of existence, desperately seeking the next meal – is a powerful trope in the Western imagination with the idea that it is only when we became farmers that we truly ‘progressed.’ That ‘cultivation’ was seen as one of the colonial benchmarks for ‘civilised’ is recorded from the very earliest contact between Aboriginal people and Europeans. Joseph Banks recorded in his journal: ‘Since we have been on the coast we have not observed those large fires which we so frequently saw in the Islands and New Zealand made by the Natives in order to clear the ground for cultivation: we thence concluded not much in favour of our future friends’ (Joseph Banks 28 April 1770, cited in Mundle 2013:188). Even today, many world ‘pre’-history textbooks continue to be organised in a unilineal – ‘simple’ to ‘complex’– hierarchy from hominid evolution, hunter-gatherer societies, early farmers culminating in civilisations. In academia, famous ethnographic studies such as those carried out by anthropologists Richard Lee and Lorna Marshall with Kung San foragers of southern Africa became the template for ‘classic’ hunter-gatherer lifeways in which hunter-gatherers were portrayed as egalitarian and highly mobile, with low density populations – contrasting a ‘simple’ indigenous foraging system with our own complex food producing/technological society. It is not surprising, then, that this idea of a ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer lifeway so deeply permeates the thinking of non-Indigenous and in some cases First Nation Australians and how they might view traditional Aboriginal society in what is essentially a colonial trope. Pascoe does not explicitly state that he thinks hunting and gathering is ‘primitive’; indeed he states that it is ‘[A]rchaeologists and prehistorians who have constructed the archaeological record to scientifically vindicate the colonialist notions of savagery and staged progressivism to leave little doubt that Indigenous peoples, particularly ‘hunter-gatherers,’ represented primordial man.’ He thus invokes a long defunct, nineteenth century version of Australian archaeology and it seems that implicit in his attempts to make pre-European Aboriginal Australians ‘farmers’ is the idea, that hunters and gatherers were indeed ‘primitive’ effectively buying into a colonial narrative. Whether this was his intention or not, it seems – based on the popularity of his book and subsequent media coverage – that this view has been embraced by a certain section of society, as if middle Australia has finally, to its great relief, found someone who has ‘shown’ that Aboriginal people wer
{"title":"A continent of hunter-gatherers?","authors":"B. Barker","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.1991385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.1991385","url":null,"abstract":"In the popular Western imagination the nineteenth century unilineal social evolutionary theories of Tylor, Morgan and Spencer are often still commonly held in which ‘hunter-gatherer’ is essentially a metaphor for primitive in which – to quote Hobbes – life was ‘... nasty brutish and short’. The idea that hunters and gatherers lived a perilous existence – eking out a living, teetering on the brink of existence, desperately seeking the next meal – is a powerful trope in the Western imagination with the idea that it is only when we became farmers that we truly ‘progressed.’ That ‘cultivation’ was seen as one of the colonial benchmarks for ‘civilised’ is recorded from the very earliest contact between Aboriginal people and Europeans. Joseph Banks recorded in his journal: ‘Since we have been on the coast we have not observed those large fires which we so frequently saw in the Islands and New Zealand made by the Natives in order to clear the ground for cultivation: we thence concluded not much in favour of our future friends’ (Joseph Banks 28 April 1770, cited in Mundle 2013:188). Even today, many world ‘pre’-history textbooks continue to be organised in a unilineal – ‘simple’ to ‘complex’– hierarchy from hominid evolution, hunter-gatherer societies, early farmers culminating in civilisations. In academia, famous ethnographic studies such as those carried out by anthropologists Richard Lee and Lorna Marshall with Kung San foragers of southern Africa became the template for ‘classic’ hunter-gatherer lifeways in which hunter-gatherers were portrayed as egalitarian and highly mobile, with low density populations – contrasting a ‘simple’ indigenous foraging system with our own complex food producing/technological society. It is not surprising, then, that this idea of a ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer lifeway so deeply permeates the thinking of non-Indigenous and in some cases First Nation Australians and how they might view traditional Aboriginal society in what is essentially a colonial trope. Pascoe does not explicitly state that he thinks hunting and gathering is ‘primitive’; indeed he states that it is ‘[A]rchaeologists and prehistorians who have constructed the archaeological record to scientifically vindicate the colonialist notions of savagery and staged progressivism to leave little doubt that Indigenous peoples, particularly ‘hunter-gatherers,’ represented primordial man.’ He thus invokes a long defunct, nineteenth century version of Australian archaeology and it seems that implicit in his attempts to make pre-European Aboriginal Australians ‘farmers’ is the idea, that hunters and gatherers were indeed ‘primitive’ effectively buying into a colonial narrative. Whether this was his intention or not, it seems – based on the popularity of his book and subsequent media coverage – that this view has been embraced by a certain section of society, as if middle Australia has finally, to its great relief, found someone who has ‘shown’ that Aboriginal people wer","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48697799","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}
Pub Date : 2021-11-07DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.1991426
H. Lourandos
The success of Dark Emu has reawakened old debates in Australian archaeology. The hunter/ farmer debate and the embeddedness of interpretation in postcolonial narratives have been key issues in Australian archaeology since the 1970s and 1980s. I am sympathetic, therefore, to the main arguments of the Forum piece regarding a more critical, socially conscious approach, but these also need to be contextualised historically. Most issues can be found in the earlier debates.
{"title":"Tragedy or transformation: Australian archaeology at the crossroads (again)","authors":"H. Lourandos","doi":"10.1080/03122417.2021.1991426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2021.1991426","url":null,"abstract":"The success of Dark Emu has reawakened old debates in Australian archaeology. The hunter/ farmer debate and the embeddedness of interpretation in postcolonial narratives have been key issues in Australian archaeology since the 1970s and 1980s. I am sympathetic, therefore, to the main arguments of the Forum piece regarding a more critical, socially conscious approach, but these also need to be contextualised historically. Most issues can be found in the earlier debates.","PeriodicalId":8648,"journal":{"name":"Australian Archaeology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502840","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：