the absence of identifiably Aboriginal material culture (such as stone tools), but archaeologists are developing approaches that integrate oral histories, archaeological investigation, and documentary evidence (such as maps, company records, private diaries, and the records of government departments) to overcome this “invisibility” factor.

The benefits of this new approach have been seen in our enhanced understanding of how Aboriginality has changed and developed in institutional environments such as the Lake Condah Mission (Victoria) and Wybalenna (Flinders Island). Contact sites associated with less-structured contexts, such as Macassan trepanging (sea slug harvesting) sites (northern Territory) or stock camps such as Burghley (Tasmania), are also being investigated.

Past, Present, and Future?

Understandings of the nature and significance of the human history of Australia have long had great influence beyond the shores of the island continent. In the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth century), reports of the customs, technologies, and societies of indigenous Australians played a vital role in the development of anthropology and archaeology. Indigenous Australia was considered to be one of the great laboratories of “primitive” human beings. With the great expansion of archaeological research beginning in the 1960s, Australians came to understand the scale and richness of the history of Australia before the European invasion in the late eighteenth century. These developments also attracted the attention of archaeologists (particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom) who were keen to conduct ethno-archaeological studies among contemporary indigenous Australians. The primary purpose of these studies was to pursue inquiries about prehistoric society, technology, and human ecology on the world scale. These studies attracted considerable interest among local archaeologists, but by far the bulk of their attention was (and still is) firmly focused on establishing the antiquity of human beings on the continent and documenting the changing relationships between people and environment. The benefits deriving from this foundational work are undeniable, but they have led to a sense of theoretical stagnation within a discipline concentrated on absolute dating technologies as well as a decline in the impact of archaeology on Australian society. Thus, although the archaeology of Australia continues to pose great methodological and theoretical challenges to the field, the struggle to broaden the focus of research beyond a concentration on antiquity and human ecology is perhaps the greatest challenge of all.

Tim Murray

See also

Australia, Historical; Golson, Jack; McCarthy, Fred; Papua New Guinea and Melanesia; Polynesia

References

For Mediterranean archaeology, see R. Sinclair, ed., Past Present and Future: Ancient World Studies in Australia (1990); R.S. Merrilees, Living with Egypt’s Past in Australia (Melbourne: Museum of Victoria, 1990). For Australian archaeology, see Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); D.J. Mulvaney, “The Australian Aborigines, 1606–1929: Opinion and Fieldwork, Parts I and II” (1957), Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 8: 131–151 and 297–314, and “A Sense of Making History: Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1961–1986” (1986), Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2: 48–56; T. Murray and J.P. White, “Cambridge in the Bush? Archaeology in Australia and New Guinea” (1981), World Archaeology 13, 2: 255–263; J. Golson, “Old Guards and New Waves: Reflections on Antipodean Archaeology, 1954–1975” (1986), Archaeology in Oceania 21: 2–12; and I. McBryde, “Australia’s Once and Future Archaeology” (1986), Archaeology in Oceania 21: 13–28. For general discussions of relationships between archaeologists and Aboriginal people and of issues of heritage management, see T. Murray, “The Discourse of Australian Prehistoric Archaeology” (1992), in B. Attwood, ed., Power, Knowledge, and Aborigines, 1–19; I. McBryde, ed., Who Owns the Past? (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); H. Creamer, “Aboriginal Perceptions of the Past: The Implications for Cultural Resource Management in Australia” (1989), in P. Gathercole and D. Lowenthal, eds., The Politics of the Past (London: Unwin Hyman), 130–140; I.