a focus for students of Classical antiquity before that time. In 1948 the Department of Archaeology was established, and the professor Dale Trendall (Australia’s most eminent classical scholar) was joined by J.R.B. Stewart (who would become a professor) to expand offerings in the archaeology of Cyprus and the Middle East. Since then the teaching of classical and Middle Eastern archaeology has flourished, especially at the University of Sydney but also at the Universities of Melbourne, La Trobe, Macquarie, Monash, New England, Queensland, and Tasmania and at the Australian National University (ANU). Field research has been undertaken in Greece at Zagora on the island of Andros, at Torone in the Chalkidiki, and at Koukos near Sykia. Australian teams have also worked at Pompeii and I Fani in Italy, at Teleilat Ghassul and Pella in Jordan, and in Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, and Syria. Universities and the great state galleries and museums have not been the only sources of funding and inspiration for research into the archaeology of the Middle East. Indeed, one private foundation, the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Melbourne (founded in 1946 with a focus on using archaeology to prove the literal truth of the Bible) has made significant financial contributions to research and the education of the general public. The vigor of this field of archaeology is reflected in the recent founding of the journal Mediterranean Archaeology as a vehicle for the publication of research undertaken in Australia and elsewhere. Perhaps most significant was the foundation of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens. Begun in 1981 by Alexander Cambitoglou, then professor of Classical archaeology at Sydney University, the institute has developed into a significant force for the promotion of classical scholarship and has branches in all the states of Australia.

The Archaeology of Australia

Although the archaeology of Australia has only recently been taught in Australian universities, an interest in the archaeology of the region began with the European conquest of the continent in 1788. Detailed studies of Aboriginal life and customs were undertaken for a wide variety of purposes, but questions of origin and antiquity were always prominent. Where had the Aborigines come from? How long had they been in Australia? Were the inhabitants of Tasmania and the Aborigines of the mainland really the same people? What lessons could Europeans learn from the Aborigines?

It was soon recognized that the conquest of Australia would have disastrous consequences for the traditional landowners, as dispossession was frequently followed by death due to social dislocation, disease, and frontier violence. These factors underscored the conventional wisdom about “strong” races overcoming the “weak” and led to the widespread acceptance of the inevitability that traditional Aboriginal society would die out. This popular understanding gave further impetus to those hoping to record examples of the most savage (and hence most primitive) of all the human races, before all evidence of the “childhood of humanity” disappeared from view. Thus, from the first, an understanding of the antiquity of Aboriginal Australia and the need to document traditional societies under great stress became part of the same process. Archaeology, ethnography, and anthropology have had an enduring relationship in Australia ever since.

The sense that Australian Aborigines were a “people without history” stemmed from the fact that for the greater part of the nineteenth century European observers could not imagine a people more primitive than contemporary Aborigines. This meant either that Aboriginal society had remained fixed and unchanged since the initial colonization of Australia or that it had experienced periods of growth and stasis and degeneration over the centuries. In either case the contemporary inhabitants (particularly the Tasmanians) were believed to be the best examples of what Europeans had looked and behaved like long ago. Thus an important early stimulus to archaeological inquires was the sense that Europeans were documenting their own history in their studies of Australia. Yet there were always inconsistencies in this approach, especially when it was recognized that the real social and cultural differences between Aboriginal societies at contact were magnified by differences in