Australia, Historical

Formal British settlement of Australia did not begin until 1788, with the establishment of the convict colony at Sydney, but there is a much longer history of European exploration, which began with the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Along the north coast of Australia there was also an extensive trading system with fishermen from Southeast Asia that dates to at least the eighteenth century (McKnight 1976). European settlement began in earnest in the nineteenth century, and the archaeological record of colonization has been shaped by the influences of global economies and industrial technologies, which were by then well established. Since the 1970s terrestrial and maritime archaeologists have begun to investigate this material record, and vital and dynamic fields of research have emerged. The archaeology of the postcontact period is typically called “historical archaeology,” although “contact archaeology” and “Aboriginal historical archaeology” are also used to describe the archaeology of the Aboriginal people during the same period.

The origins of historical archaeology in Australia date to the 1960s and the first excavations of European settler sites. At the Australian National University in Canberra, Jim Allen (Allen 1969) undertook Ph.D. research on Port Essington, in the Northern Territory, while Campbell McKnight (1976) studied the Macassan trepang industry (sea slug harvesting) that flourished in the same region, also for a Ph.D. At the University of Sydney, Judy Birmingham (1976) carried out excavations at James King’s pottery at Irrawang, New South Wales, and at the Tasmanian Aboriginal settlement of Wybalenna on Flinders Island. At the University of New England, Graham Connah began the study of the pastoral establishment of Winterbourne (Connah, Rowland, et al. 1978). In Melbourne, Bill Culican from the University of Melbourne excavated the Fossil Beach cement works on the Mornington peninsula (Culican and Taylor 1972). During the same decade, sport divers in Western Australia discovered the wreck sites of Dutch East India Company ships, among them the Batavia and the Vergulde Draeck (Green 1973, 1989), and maritime archaeology in Australia began.

Ian Jack (1985, 153–156) attributes the emergence of historical archaeology at this time to two developments. One was an increasing interest in what he terms local history within university history departments and the attendant interest in its surviving physical remains. The second development came from within departments teaching classical and Near Eastern archaeology where a need was identified for a less costly means of training students in excavation methods than the traditional practice of taking them to sites overseas. Thus, one of the important forces shaping historical archaeology in Australia was, from the outset, its institutional home in departments of prehistory, classical, and Near Eastern archaeology.

As those departments were themselves closely modeled on British university systems, anthropology was not as great an influence in Australian historical archaeology as it was in the United States. In addition to those with a training in archaeology, other early practitioners came from a variety of backgrounds, including history, geography, architectural history, and engineering. All of these scholarly traditions influenced the field, and the wide-ranging and multidisciplinary nature of historical archaeology in Australia was thus established from the beginning. In 1971, the Australian (now Australasian) Society for Historical Archaeology (ASHA) was formed, and it was followed in 1982 by the Australian Institute of Maritime Archaeology (AIMA).

The field grew rapidly during the 1970s, led by scholars at the University of Sydney and the University of New England and as a result of the emergence of cultural heritage management. By 1983 and the publication of the first issue of ASHA’s journal Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology (later Australasian Historical Archaeology), Jane Wesson (Wesson 1983, 1984) was able to compile a bibliography of more than 450 entries. Many of these studies were necessarily descriptive, as researchers attempted to define the nature of material record of Australia’s settler society.

Other scholars, however, were already seeking to understand local sites within wider historical and archaeological contexts. Allen (1973)