numbers of archaeologists, the expanding range of working environments (from universities and museums to private consultancies, government agencies, and Aboriginal organizations), the vast increase in government and private funds being applied to archaeological investigations, and the increasing importance attached by Australians to the archaeology of their country. Beginning with the appointment of john mulvaney to the History Department at Melbourne University in 1953 and greatly strengthened by appointments made to the Anthropology and Prehistory Departments at Sydney and ANU shortly afterward, the archaeology of Aboriginal Australia has become a very significant element in Australian culture. Since 1970, thousands of sites have been recorded and excavated, and our understanding of the human history of the continent has been transformed. Sites such as Lake Mungo have been placed on the World Heritage register, and the presence of significant cultural remains in Kakadu National Park and southwest Tasmania contributed to their World Heritage listings as well. Australians now understand that the Aboriginal history of their country exceeds 40,000 years and is marked by great cultural change and variety. Australian archaeology is taught in every mainland state and territory today, and it plugs into an increasingly complex infrastructure of government agencies created to administer heritage legislation and promote an understanding of Aboriginal Australia (such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, founded in 1961). During this period Aboriginal people have reasserted their rights and interests in the investigation and management of their heritage. As a result Australian archaeologists of the modern era are more aware that they are investigating not the relics of a dead or dying society but the history of a living one. The implications of this fundamental change of focus have been very significant indeed.

Oceania, Asia, and the Archaeology of Contact

During this same period Australian archaeologists also paid increasing attention to the islands adjacent to the tropical coastlines. Although a great deal of the focus has been on Papua New Guinea and Melanesia, Australians have worked (and continue to work) in Timor, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. Research initiatives, such as the Lapita Homeland Project organized by Jim Allen, first professor of archaeology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, were based on a perception that understanding the history of oceanic exploration and settlement required the assembly of an international team of researchers. Much the same thinking has supported a more consistent push by Australian-based researchers into China and south Asia.

Although there has long been a strong focus on establishing the antiquity of human occupation in Australia, the 1990s also witnessed a rapid expansion in contact archaeology, a branch of the general discipline that deals with the archaeology of Aboriginal Australia during the phase of initial contact by Europeans, Macassans, and, in some cases, Chinese. It is widely recognized that contact archaeology’s subject matter can be more general than this—for example, it might cover longer periods of interaction between Aboriginal people and others at places such as mission stations as well as pastoral and industrial enterprises. Again the question of what constitutes contact is quite vexed because it is now understood that items of European material culture were entering Aboriginal societies well in advance of actual European exploration or settlement. This type of “wave effect” certainly applies to disease, for Aboriginal populations (particularly in the southeast of the continent) were already seriously jeopardized by the introduction of exotic viral and bacterial infections.

Interest in contact archaeology is increasing among archaeologists, but it has long been a significant inquiry for Aboriginal people. Although some see it as the archaeology of the “end” of traditional Aboriginal society and the beginning of European Australia, others are beginning to realize that contact studies might allow us to examine the archaeology of present-day Aboriginal Australia—particularly of Aboriginal communities that have been established since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is frequently difficult to identify Aboriginal people in