Browsing by Subject "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Archaeology"

Gumbaingirr Aboriginal people at Corindi Beach, a small town in coastal northern New South Wales (NSW), have lived a self-sufficient lifestyle for over a hundred years, outside the systems of government reserves and missions which existed elsewhere in Australia in the twentieth century. Adapting to a land tenure which included formal 'permissive occupancy leases' in the early twentieth century, the Corindi Beach living places are now on Aboriginal land, having been granted legally under a successful land claim in 1985 (Murphy et al. 2000). The Corindi Beach people have therefore resisted domination from white control, and kept traditional history, culture and language alive, alongside new ways of living. Tony Perkins (a Garby Elder) says 'A long time ago we'd keep it all in out heads and we'd pass on something that way ... Now we [are] better off researching everything, recording everything, getting it all down' (Beck et al. 2002:40). This chapter documents how the Corindi Beach people have continued in their efforts to resist domination, and Tony explains how in 1987 the Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation was set up to carry out this work, and how it became a partner in the Yarrawarra Place Stories Project.

It has previously been assumed that New England high-country environments were not conducive to intense Aboriginal occupation and associated ceremonial activities. How productive were upland wetlands (lagoons) for Aboriginal occupation of high country in eastern Australia through time? Especially during their intermittent phases, upland lagoons provide a diverse and changing mix of deep water, marsh and the green pick of recently exposed lake bed, a rich aggregation of both plant and animal resources not available in other environments. Upland wetlands can be a surprisingly productive Aboriginal resource in an otherwise harsh country, and would at times allow for high population aggregations, such as for ceremonies. We surveyed the ecological literature on New England lagoon characteristics, on vegetation and on birds and other fauna used as resources by Aboriginal people. This was then compared with palaeo-environmental data to prepare an account of potential resources for the New England region over time. We found that overall productivity of lagoons can be high, with large numbers of plant and animal species present in the wetland environment, especially in the early and very late Holocene. Productivity is highest not at the lake-full stage, but when the moist littoral zones are at their most extensive. The reasons for the apparent sparseness of occupation of the high country before the mid-Holocene are unresolved but open to informed speculation about the changing resource inventory of the wetlands, and the mid-Holocene appearance of new technologies that may have enabled more efficient use of resources. In the later Holocene, Aboriginal occupation in upland areas became visible in the record, and included an exceptionally high number of ceremonial sites juxtaposed with the areas of greatest lagoon concentration. This suggests either that these wetlands had become more productive and diverse over time or that people had learnt how to make better use of the available wetland resources, to the point of supporting the larger numbers often associated with ceremonial activity. More research into the location and chronology of wetland archaeological sites is required to resolve the question of whether the apparent early lack of sites is a question of visibility or a real hiatus.

This paper describes the results and implications of recent excavations on the Hamersley Iron Brockman 4 tenement, near Tom Price, Western Australia. Results concentrate on two rock shelters with Aboriginal occupation starting at least 32,000 years ago and extending throughout the Last Glacial period. Preliminary observations are proposed concerning the nature of Aboriginal foraging patterns as displayed in the flaked stone and faunal records for the Brockman region.

As part of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process, the Hunter Valley has been subject to decades of archaeological investigations involving many Aboriginal stakeholder groups. This paper critically discusses the EIA process, specifically the Aboriginal cultural heritage assessment (ACHA) process and the Aboriginal consultation requirements (ACHRs) for New South Wales (NSW) drawing on our collective experience of cultural heritage management (CHM) in the Hunter Valley. We examine the definition of 'values' and the identification of heritage within the history of relevant legislation in NSW to critique the ACHA process in the Hunter Valley. We introduce the relevance of the concept 'solastalgia', relating concerns for heritage to effects of 'environmental distress' from the cumulative impacts of mining and its relevance to the ACHA process. CHM legislation and practice is currently under review by the NSW State government, we hope to stimulate constructive dialogue on these issues based on our collective experience.

The first Australians are believed to have arrived by boat some 50-60,000 years ago with the northern coastline of the continent a likely beach-head. The prospect of intact or even partial remains of ancient watercraft turning up in the archaeological record is remote. The expansion and contraction or the coastline over the last 60,000 years means that early landing sites would have been inundated as sea levels rose and fell, and the organic materials, perhaps wood or other plant material, from which such early watercraft would have been constructed have long since rotted away. Rock art assemblages from Australia's north then, represent the most likely record of venturesome mariners, who may have reached the coast over the millennia since initial occupation, or of watercraft constructed by Aboriginal inhabitants settled in coastal regions.

This book was developed out of a need for a clear and concise field manual that could be used to make basic identifications of animal bones from archaeological sites in Australia. While there are many excellent manuals that cover the identification of European and North American fauna, and a few that address Australian fauna, there are none that combine common introduced animals with both Australian native species and humans. This manual will be an asset to students of archaeology and faunal analysis, as well as law enforcement, forensic investigators, and the general public. It is an introductory field guide written primarily for Australian archaeologists working on both Indigenous and historic sites. It does not assume any prior knowledge of the mammalian skeleton and includes 16 species commonly encountered in most environments and archaeological contexts. Since it is impractical for a field manual to provide an exhaustive list of all the potential species that may appear, the aim is to provide basic knowledge needed to identify bones and species that are relevant to most Australian contexts. This manual is intended as a starting point for the non-specialist. Identification of bone can be difficult, even for the most experienced faunal analyst, and especially when faced with smaller elements with less-obvious diagnostic features. For this reason, smaller bones, such as many of the small hand and foot bones, ribs and vertebrae, have been excluded from this manual. For those bones and for species not included, as well as additional information, we have added a suggested reading list. Given that bone from archaeological contexts is often fragmentary, making identification much more difficult, definitive identification is always best accomplished by a trained specialist and based on a good comparative collection back in the lab.

This book celebrates the work of archaeologist Isabel McBryde. Her long-term contributions to the understanding of Indigenous culture and heritage in Australia are explored in this collection of valuable new cross-disciplinary studies by leaders in the fields of archaeology, history, heritage management, linguistics and anthropology.

This discussion of archeology of cognition is concerned primarily with the evolutionary emergence of the cognition particular to modern humans but there is an implication for the evolution of cognition among modern humans. Archaeological evidence can provide important insights into the evolutionary emergence of human cognition, but theoretical considerations are fundamental in understanding what sorts of cognition there might have been between the ape-like common ancestor and modern humans. Archeology is the only source of evidence for the behavior associated with such theoretical stages. Cognitive archeology, therefore, involves an iterative interaction between theory from outside archeology and more or less direct evidence from the past. This review considers the range of possible evidence from archeology and genetics and summarizes some of the results of analysis of nonhuman primates particularly to assess characteristics of the last common ancestor (LCA) of apes and humans. The history of changes in size and shape of the brain since separation from other apes introduces the need to assess the appropriate cognitive theories to interpret such evidence. The review concentrates on two such approaches: Baddeley's working memory model as interpreted by Coolidge and Wynn, and Barnard’s interacting cognitive subsystems as it has been elaborated to define the cognitive conditions for hominins between the LCA and modern people. Most of the rest of the review considers how the evidence from stone tools might be consistent with such theoretical models of cognition. This evidence is consistent with views that modern human behavior only emerged in the last 100,000 years (or so) but it gives an explanation for that in terms of cognition.

Archaeological experimental studies have been conducted on taphonomic and artefact disturbances worldwide. Studies conducted have addressed various disturbance factors such as wind, water, animal activity, and human impact independently of one another. Generally, these studies were on a small scale with regard to the geographic range and environmental contexts covered. Additionally, no mitigation or site extent analyses have been conducted that would facilitate the management of moving and missing artefacts. The experiment was spread out over five locations in the New England Tablelands in NSW. These locations were at Barley Fields, Uralla, Kirby Farm and the University of New England Deer Park Armidale, Big Llangothlin, Llangothlin and Laura Creek west of Guyra. All locations experienced varying degrees of disturbance due to livestock, kangaroos, deer, rabbits, different slope gradient, soil, vegetation and human activity. Movement, breakage, and disappearance were common artefact disturbances in the New England Tablelands within a short six month period. Artefacts that were nor moved or moved up to seven metres experienced some breakage in less than a month, some artefacts had disappeared and some of these reappeared because of animal or human activity and environmental changes. One focus of the study was to investigate the effects of slopes on artefact movements over time. The degree of slope gradient was found not to be as significant to artefact movement as previously thought; rather, movement was due mostly to other post-depositional processes, which are discussed in this thesis. Archaeologists need to consider the potential post-depositional disturbances when determining the extremities of a stone artefact scatter. From a cultural resource management perspective it is more likely that sites recorded without these considerations may be more difficult to locate when the site is revisited for construction.

"Austral English" means all the new words and all the new uses of old words that have been added to the English language by reason of the fact that those who speak English have taken up their residence in Australia and New Zealand. E.E. Morris, Austral English, (1898), p. xi. For practical purposes, Australia may be said to have been settled by England from 1788, and New Zealand from 1835.

'Archaeologists make up stories about the past, but not just any stories.' Archaeological stories are written principally from the interpretation of material remains. Increasingly we also use evidence from a variety of other sources, such as genetics and linguistics. In Australia, as in other countries colonised from Europe, the stories are about the past of Indigenous peoples and so are generally believed to have an important relationship with the ethnographic description of traditional behaviour. But the relationship is not straightforward. Ethnographic accounts show that there are oral and other histories that account for the way those people are. For this reason, archaeological histories are not always easily adopted by Aboriginal Australians, particularly as they are, in almost all cases, written by non-Aboriginal people. I suggest that an alternative approach is to look at the record of ethnographies and historical material culture around Australia as indicating what is to be explained through the analysis of archaeological materials, just as geneticists and linguists begin from the analysis of the variation in modern samples. An archaeological approach to the diversity of peoples in Australia requires an understanding of the symbolic construction of identity in the past. But symbols, because of their very nature, are difficult to interpret, so special care is needed to work out how the diversity was constructed, and attention needs to be paid to different scales of analysis. Archaeology has proceeded rather as other sciences proceed, by putting up hypotheses, testing them, and moving on to the next hypothesis once the test is satisfactorily conducted. The conclusions must be understood as historical though the methods of arriving at them are like the process of science. In this regard, just as an unchanging Dreaming is said to be successively revealed as new claims are established, so archaeological history, too, is successively revealed.

The emergence of stone-tipped projectile weaponry was an important event in hominin evolution. A common archaeological approach to identifying projectile weapons is to extrapolate from optimal values of ballistically-relevant attributes as determined from ethnographic North American weapons and modern experiments. Among the most significant of these attributes is "tip cross-sectional area" (TCSA) because it determines a point's efficiency in penetrating an animal. The warranting argument for projecting these data onto prehistoric artefact's is that past "research and development" necessarily led to stone projectiles with optimal TCSA values for a given delivery system. However, our test of this warranting argument, involving analysis of 132 hafted ethnographic Australian stone projectile points and 102 hafted knives, demonstrates that Aborigines did not optimize TCSA values, thus offering a challenge to TCSA-based narratives about the first appearance of projectile weaponry. This illustrates the difficulty of inferring ancient stone workers' design intentions from narrowly-defined optimal values. Instead, tool designs should be considered in the context of the reduction sequences that produced them and the dynamics of transmission of those reduction sequences across generations.

The major focus of this work has been the patterning of Australian Aboriginal beads and their functions. This work started as an investigation into the relationship between Aboriginal material culture and drainage basins and led to the role of beads in determining past human behaviours. The symbolic content of beads has been recognised and their appearance in early archaeological sites has long been accepted as identifiers of modern human behaviour. The patterning of style in beads and other material culture from hunter-gatherer societies has been investigated by authors for interpreting the archaeological record. At the time of European colonisation from the late 1700s, Aborigines were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with hundreds of language groups and diverse ways of living. Australia has shell beads that have been dated to over 30,000 years old and there is ethnographic material held in museums from the late 1800s to the early 1900s that shows what Aboriginal people were manufacturing during those early years. Added to that is literature that gives accounts for the use of material culture. A combination of those lines of evidence could have implications for understanding the archaeological record. For this project, I have synthesised the beaded ornaments held in Australian museums and set up a classification system that has allowed me to determine spatial patterning of beads and to investigate current theories for explaining patterning. I determined that there was clear patterning in discrete categories, no two categories had the same distribution and there were categories that were highly standardised for local use and exchange. This study has shown that the relationship between archaeological and ethnographic evidence for beads is more complex than those given by current explanations.

Associated Rock Art Traditions are surface modifications usually found in association with rock art. They are the product of repeated mechanical actions and usually lack the figurative elements of stylistic rock art traditions. While pecked cupules, fingerfluting, abraded areas, and abaded grooves are well documented both in the archaeological and ethnographic record, flaked edges have received limited recognition as an Associated Rock Art Tradition. This thesis will examine bedrock flaking as another example of an Associated Rock Art Tradition. Research was conducted in the northwest Kimberley where linear panels of bedrock flaking are abundant in association with rock art. Seventy eight sites were recorded across six (6) research areas, containing 1719 bedrock flaking panels from which 10,178 flake scars were recorded. Sites were classified as Quarry sites - abundant flaking debris; Ritual sites - limited flaking debris and rock art; and Other - limited flaking debris and no rock art. The analysis of variables from panels and flake scar measurements showed that Quarry sites were significantly different to Ritual and Other sites, containing a high quantity of larger flake scars. Ritual and Other sites were much harder to differentiate, containing flakes of similar dimensions but of varying stone quality and scar quantity. Other sites contained limited bedrock flaking panels and were interpreted as prospecting sites, where stone was assayed. Ritual sites had high numbers of bedrock flaking panels, but with much smaller flake scars than found at Quarry sites and very limited flaking debris. It is proposed here that bedrock flaking at Ritual sites represent an Associated Rock Art Tradition rather than an economic activity. The mechanical similarities between pounding and bedrock flaking may have led to these being viewed as closely related ritualised behaviours along with rubbing, hammering and incising which have been recorded ethnographically and archaeologically as Associated Rock Art Traditions.

The 'Movius Line' is the putative technological demarcation line mapping the easternmost geographical distribution of Acheulean bifacial tools. It is traditionally argued by proponents of the Movius Line that 'true' Acheulean bi faces, especially hand axes, are only found in abundance in Africa and western Eurasia, whereas in eastern Asia, in front of the 'line', these implements are rare or absent altogether. Here we argue, however, that the Movius Line relies on classifying undated surface bi faces as Acheulean on typological grounds alone, a long-standing and widely accepted practice in Africa and western Eurasia, but one that is not seen as legitimate in eastern Asian contexts. A review of the literature shows that bifaces are relatively common as surface finds in Southeast Asia and on this basis we argue that the Movius Line is in need of reassessment.

The combination of bifacial percussion and pressure flaking to make stone tools was repeatedly invented in prehistory. Bifacial percussion and pressure technology is well documented in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, but a separate and poorly understood center of innovation occurred in the Kimberley Region of Northwest Australia. Stone points first appeared there ca 4.5 kya and bifacial Kimberley Points emerged by ca 1.4 kya. Aboriginal flintknappers made Kimberley Points using traditional methods until the recent past. This study analyzes stone artifacts from 335 sites in the remote Northwest Kimberley and documents a sophisticated bifacial technology that involved seven "tactical sets" - four of them exclusive to manufacturing these points - applied in five strategic phases. It is proposed that bifacial thinning ultimately arose in response to social forces operating across Kimberley Aboriginal societies in response to demographic pressures from neighboring Aboriginal groups. The repeated invention of bifacial flaking in prehistory may be related to the messaging made possible by the manufacturing approach itself - both in virtuoso technical performance and the flexible way bifacial performances could be distributed across the natural and social landscape.

The age of much Aboriginal rock art in northwest Australia is unknown. Concentrating on headdress depictions and some specific motifs in these paintings, an experiment has been undertaken to establish the feasibility of using perceived similarities and differences in their styles to compare the relative ages of art in two major locations. The order of established chronological sequences for the paintings in the core study area, Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory has been used to establish comparative order matches with the Kimberley rock art sequences. The sequences seen in the Aboriginal rock art defined in previous research by well established authors in this topic do not appear to have been matched with the art in the two major locations, specifically using headdress depictions. In my thesis Grahame Walsh's sequence for the Kimberley has been compared with that of George Chaloupka's order for Arnhem Land (Chaloupka, 1993:47; Walsh, 2000). I felt that comparing the changes in headdress depiction over time would allow a method of wider investigation to be undertaken. It was therefore worthwhile to try a new way of comparison over a wider range of art styles than previously attempted. Using depictions of headdresses, as well as portrayals of the specific custom of circumcision, I analysed published reproductions of paintings and personal photographs from Arnhem Land (n=777) and the Kimberley (n=1066), using a database to record each headdress type and region, and then compare numbers of each type, according to the study area. Headdress types were defined by obvious shape. Observing the frequency of the most common Arnhem Land and Kimberley headdresses, I saw that in Arnhem Land, Vertical and Inclined Cones, Swept-Back hair styles and Round heads dominated with frequencies between 15% and 11%. In the Kimberley, Vertical, Inclined and Hanging cones on headdresses lead the counts (between 16% and 10%), along with Bun head shapes (10%) and Round Heads (17%). The resemblance between these particular headdress designs was notable in the Early, Intermediate and Late sequences for both Arnhem Land (AL) and the Kimberley (K). As well, a likeness in circumcision representation was noticed in both the core (AL) and the comparative study area (K), particularly relating to the more recent paintings. This suggested possible parallels in Early and Late sequences. Smaller counts of many different headdress types were also seen during the recording. Observations of paintings with approximately 5-7 headdress types seen only in either Arnhem Land or the Kimberley showed that diversity and local preferences also existed. I found that a visual and quantitative relationship was seen to exist between popular and wide-spread depictions of similar headdress motifs and circumcision motifs which may indicate communication of ideas between the people of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley regions and suggest a comparable time of painting.

This paper presents the results and interpretations of a pilot study of pigment characterisations conducted between 2002 and 2006 on the rock art assemblage of the south Woronora Plateau located immediately west of Wollongong, New South Wales. Eighteen samples from ten sites are described. Analyses of the geochemistry, mineralogy and micro-morphology of samples was undertaken using a combination of scanning electron microscopy including energy dispersive x-ray analysis, x-ray diffraction, particle induced x-ray emission and particle induced gamma-ray emission techniques. With one exception the analyses show that composite clay-based paints were used to produce both iconic and non-iconic rock art on the Woronora Plateau and adjacent Mittagong Tablelands. We discuss differences in the processing of paints used for iconographic and stencil art, and consider the possible chronological and behavioural implications of paint chemistry and morphology. The results of the study, while indicative, provide an exciting example of the type of archaeometric work which can be undertaken successfully in the taphonomically complex Hawkesbury Sandstone rockshelters of the Sydney Basin.

Around 88 large vertebrate taxa disappeared from Sahul sometime during the Pleistocene, with the majority of losses (54 taxa) clearly taking place within the last 400,000 years. The largest was the 2.8-ton browsing 'Diprotodon optatum', whereas the 100- to 130-kg marsupial lion, 'Thylacoleo carnifex', the world's most specialized mammalian carnivore, and 'Varanus priscus', the largest lizard known, were formidable predators. Explanations for these extinctions have centered on climatic change or human activities. Here, we review the evidence and arguments for both. Human involvement in the disappearance of some species remains possible but unproven. Mounting evidence points to the loss of most species before the peopling of Sahul (circa 50-45 ka) and a significant role for climate change in the disappearance of the continent's megafauna.

A vague notion of 'wanderlust' seems to be the driving force in many narratives about hominin migration (e.g. Dennell and Roebroeks 2005), but, true to the zeitgeist, O'Connell and Allen have shown us that wanderlust is all about food. The strength of behavioural ecology is the explicit nature of the underlying assumptions and the clear connection between forager theory, predictive statements and archaeological evidence. Summarising several optimal foraging models, O'Connell and Allen conclude that optimising hominins are pulled from patch to patch by the serial depletion of highest ranked resources. The logic of their scenario is straightforward: the archaeological record shows that humans colonised Wallacea and Sahul, and the theoretical model stipulates that forager movement is linked to exploitation of highest ranked prey, therefore colonisation was driven by the pursuit of highest ranked prey. One might question whether certain assumptions of optimal foraging models - for example, that foragers have perfect resource knowledge and the perfect ability to exploit it - would apply to the first wave of colonists to cross the Wallace Line, but the successful colonisation itself might be de facto evidence that the costs of imperfect knowledge were not prohibitively high. O'Connell and Allen posit that, after colonisation, movement between patches in pursuit of highest ranked prey became the norm as foragers made nearly-continuous readjustment to unstable climatic conditions.

The first colonization of the Greater Australian continent, known as Sahul, indicated that humans had modern cognitive ability. Such modern human abilities probably emerged earlier in Africa. I will argue that the only way we can identify what constitutes modern human behavior is to look at the record in Australia - the first place colonized only by modern humans. I place this argument within recent theorizing about cognitive evolution.

One of the largest concentrations of rock paintings in Australia is found in the rugged Kimberley region in the northwest of the continent. A temporal sequence of visually distinctive figurative styles is presumed to span periods of cultural change and major climatic events. As the nature and course of these changes are poorly understood, this paper investigates the relationships between continuity and change in the stylistic attributes of the selected anthropomorphic figures in the rock art assemblage. Some previous Kimberley rock art researchers have argued for an abrupt discontinuity in the art assemblage between the Wararrajai Gwion (the most recent of the Gwion styles) and Painted Hand Periods (formally Clothes Peg Figure and Clawed Hand Periods respectively), while others have argued for more gradual change. Based on the study of 204 rock art sites from 15 site complexes, which included a total of 7,579 motifs and 3,685 identifiable anthropomorphic figures, we identify the core characteristics of anthropomorphic figures in each of the established stylistic periods and show that there is no evidence to support notions of an abrupt discontinuity of art through time. Rather, attribute preferences changed gradually, existing as clades of variation rather than discrete units, with identifiable threads of continuity and periods when certain attributes (core characteristics) are preferentially adopted. A quantitative analysis supports our interpretation.

One of the largest concentrations of rock paintings in Australia is found in the rugged and remote Kimberley region in the northwest of the continent. A sequence of visually-distinctive figurative styles is likely to span periods of complex cultural change and major climatic events. However, the timing, nature and course of these changes are poorly understood. In order to redress these deficiencies, I investigated the relationships between continuity and change in the form and context of production of anthropomorphic figures in the rock art assemblage. Specifically, I identified the core characteristics of anthropomorphic figures in each of the established stylistic periods. I analysed the evidence cited by previous researchers to support notions of an abrupt discontinuity in the art assemblage between the Wararrajai Gwion and Painted Hand Periods. New chronological data was correlated with environmental evidence to establish the timing of cultural change and potential association of events with the Last Glacial Maximum. Factors that contributed to, or drove change were identified in order to develop an understanding of the social and economic lifeways in the northwest Kimberley through time.

The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partnership with Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, which was aimed at understanding Aboriginal place knowledges, we develop the concept of conversation for analysing the research process between archaeology and oral history. We define co-opting conversations as the most usual conversations engaged in between disciplines, research paradigms and between scientific and Indigenous knowledges. We then identify several more productive kinds of conversation that occurred between oral history and archaeology in our research: intersecting, parallel, complementary and contradictory. We found contradictory conversations, usually regarded as failures by other researchers, yielded the most productive analytic understandings. As a result of these different types of conversations we were able to produce a richer understanding of "placeness" ('sensu' Mayne and Lawrence 1998). The richest understandings of place at Yarrawarra develop only through such interdisciplinary conversations.

Invasive predators can impose strong selection pressure on species that evolved in their absence and drive species to extinction. Interactions between coexisting predators may be particularly strong, as larger predators frequently kill smaller predators and suppress their abundances. Until 3500 years ago the marsupial thylacine was Australia's largest predator. It became extinct from the mainland soon after the arrival of a morphologically convergent placental predator, the dingo, but persisted in the absence of dingoes on the island of Tasmania until the 20th century. As Tasmanian thylacines were larger than dingoes, it has been argued that dingoes were unlikely to have caused the extinction of mainland thylacines because larger predators are rarely killed by smaller predators. By comparing Holocene specimens from the same regions of mainland Australia, we show that dingoes were similarly sized to male thylacines but considerably larger than female thylacines. Female thylacines would have been vulnerable to killing by dingoes. Such killing could have depressed the reproductive output of thylacine populations. Our results support the hypothesis that direct killing by larger dingoes drove thylacines to extinction on mainland Australia. However, attributing the extinction of the thylacine to just one cause is problematic because the arrival of dingoes coincided with another the potential extinction driver, the intensification of the human economy.

The raw material, method of manufacture and modification of a ground-edged hatchet-head found at Vaucluse in Sydney provides evidence for the movement of stone tools from west of the Great Dividing Range to the coast. Such evidence adds new knowledge about social relationships between different groups in southeastern Australia and patterns of exchange that existed in the past.

Examples of striped marsupial depictions have been reported from both the coastal and inland Pilbara. Many are regarded as images of the thylacine, an animal that disappeared from mainland Australia some 3000–4000 years ago. Also observable in the rock art is the 'fat-tailed macropod', a distinctive rendition of a marsupial with an extremely thick tail. Recent investigations in the Tom Price area and on the Burrup Peninsula confirm that both motifs pertain to the more ancient rock art corpus. Restricted artistic variation within the depiction of these two species confirms the trend to naturalistic style within animal subjects and suggests a extensive, culturally cohesive, artistic tradition across the Pilbara during the Pleistocene and early Holocene. At two specific locations, aspects of the rock art may be explained in terms of contemporary oral traditions and cultural practices, affording one way of placing temporal parameters on these early graphic traditions. I argue that the rock art is not just representational; that it communicates mythological narratives and behavioural traits, which have a deep antiquity to the Dreaming of more than just a few thousand years.

In Australia the seriousness of domestic violence is reflected in part by the on-going attention it receives from academics, public and community sector commentators, legal authorities and the police. Likewise, it can be suggested that the increase in public awareness about the seriousness and prevalence of domestic violence can be attributed to the manner in which authorities have handled the very reporting of the problem. In this article the authors seek to illustrate and contrast some of the ways in which domestic violence has been managed over time and place. To develop this contrast, they compare recent (primarily Australian) western material with historical examples taken from early modern England. The focus of the discussion is on how intervention into domestic violence has shifted from a decidedly community-based to an authority-based system of monitoring social relations. They argue, in seeing many aspects of this trend reversed, that there are good reasons for a more localised and community-based treatment of domestic violence.

In arid Australia the importance of grass and acacia seeds as grain led to a substantial demand by Aboriginal groups for replacement grinding slabs. This demand was met in some areas by large grindstone quarries that supplied millstones for local needs, as well as long-distance exchange networks (McBryde 1987, 1997:594; Mulvaney 1976; our terminology follows the grindstone typology set out in Smith 1985, 1986). These grindstone quarries are typically located where there are suitable sandstone outcrops on the edge of large tracts of sand plain, dune field or stony 'gibber' desert - areas where sandstone slabs are otherwise scarce. The best known examples are the quarries at Helen Springs ('Kurutiti') in the Northern Territory (Mulvaney and Gunn 1995) and others in South Australia, including Anna Creek ('Palthirri-pirdi'), west of Lake Eyre South ('Hercus 2005'); Tooths Nob ('Wadla wadlyu'), north of Reaphook Hill in the Flinders Ranges (McBryde 1997); Charlie Swamp ('Biljamana/Pidleeomina'), south of Finniss Springs Station (McBryde 1982); and the quarry complexes north and south of Cooper Creek at Innamincka (including Wild Dog Hill and McLeod's Hill) (Hiscock and Mitchell 1993; McBryde 1987, 1997). Despite their importance for desert prehistory, there are few published plans of this type of site, and little quantitative data on the scale of grindstone production (although see McBryde 1997 and Mulvaney and Gunn 1995 for exceptions). Here, we describe Narcoonowie, a small, discrete, grindstone quarry in the Strzelecki Desert in north-eastern South Australia (Figure 1). PJ Hughes briefly recorded the quarry in 1980, during an impact assessment survey of archaeological sites in the Cooper Basin (Hughes 1980, 1983). We recently relocated it on aerial photographs.

The dingo has received considerable attention in the Australian archaeological literature as an agent of bone fragmentation and accumulation. Dingoes have also been studied with respect to their commensal relationship with Aboriginal people. Study has not been directed, however, to the meta-role of dingoes as prey regulators that suppress kangaroo abundance, and the subsequent impact on human subsistence that direct competition between dingoes and humans over the same animal resources could have produced. This study presents data gathered in two adjacent cultural landscapes defined by human land use, one with dingoes and one without dingoes - to illustrate the archaeological effect that dingoes may have had on human economic systems by suppressing kangaroo abundance. Live kangaroos and kangaroo skeletal remains were on average 14-fold and 32-fold more abundant in the absence of dingoes, and contemporary commercial kangaroo harvesting and sheep grazing were restricted to areas where dingoes were absent. Given the marked effects that dingoes have on contemporary kangaroo abundance and the human economy, we argue that dingoes likely shaped the human economy in the past through human-dingo competition for the same limited resources. Evidence for competition between humans and dingoes could be investigated in the archaeological record by comparing the relative frequency of prey of different body sizes, as well as the degree of fragmentation of kangaroo skeletal elements, before and after the arrival of dingoes.

A new find of an engraved 'archaic face' in the Toomba Range, on the northeastern edge of the Simpson Desert, provides additional evidence for the production of these distinctive motifs on the eastern side of the arid zone (Figure 1). This supplements an earlier report of an engraved archaic face at Carbine Creek, 100km to the northeast of the Toomba Range (Morwood 1978, 1985). Together, these two engravings with characteristic bas-relief facial features extend the known distribution of archaic faces and suggest that sometime in the past people shared aspects of a common visual vocabulary across the entire breadth of the arid zone, north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

An essay by Dr June Ross, Adjunct Professor, School of Humanities, University of New England and an Australian archaeologist specialising in rock art.

Early historical accounts of inter-group social networks operating between Aboriginal groups in South East Queensland and northern New South Wales, document large gatherings at which elaborate ceremonies and exchange took place. Interpretations of archaeological evidence at sites, which researchers have associated with these ceremonial gatherings, have fuelled arguments that they provided the impetus for increased social complexity during the late Holocene, as evidenced by shifts in land use patterns as well as subsistence and cultural practices. Within these highly complex economic and social alliances, described by early European settlers up until the early 20th century, ground-edged stone hatchets were reported to be one of the most prized items of exchange. This study used non-destructive, portable XRay fluorescence to elementally characterise a sample of basalt ground-edged hatchets from Southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales, as well as a potential range of basalt sources, to assess the complexity of exchange represented. In addition to museum collections, this provenancing study used a community archaeology approach to access additional ground-edged hatchets, curated by rural landholders in South East Queensland. The aim of this research project was to assess two independent but related issues. The first was a critical review of interpretations of the archaeological evidence in South East Queensland from the late Holocene that characterise hunter-gatherers societies in that region as being socially complex. In this review, I found the concept of social complexity, when used in the context of pre-contact Aboriginal communities, to be highly problematic. Not only has the definition of social complexity been vague but interpretations of the evidence to support those arguments ambiguous. Perhaps the most significant omission has been adequate interrogation of the archaeological record to understand the triggers for such an apparent significant social change in pre-contact Australia. The second was a methodological evaluation of the potential of non-destructive geochemical characterisation (portable X-ray fluorescence - pXRF) for investigating the possible geological range represented by this corpus. This pXRF study was unable to match hatchets with geographically specific source locations, due primarily to widespread basalt formations throughout the region and, as a consequence, redundancy in characterisation of sources. So while it was not possible to examine the level of social complexity of inter-group activity, the results do lend weight to arguments of extensive exchange. The community archaeology aspect of this project involved people from non-Indigenous backgrounds but who had collected Aboriginal artefacts from their rural properties. What emerged was a window onto a previously untapped source of information; access to artefacts which had not recorded and first-hand accounts of where they had been found.

Differing patterns of distribution from source of local and exotic artefacts have been used to set up and modify theories and models of hunter-gatherer social/political networks. Stone hatchets are useful for testing these theories because they do not decay in time. In this research pXRF technology was used to compare 242 hatchets found in south-east South Australia with known local basalt sources, and with distant sources from Central Victoria and Mount Isa. Chemical analysis determined that the great majority of hatchets came from unknown sources of similar, distinctive, stone which, unlike the local basalts, were very low in most elements from Rb to Nb in the periodic table. This majority was similar, but not a match, to stone from Mt William in central Victoria. From their distribution and frequency, this majority of hatchets was probably used as tools, but because they were found across three language areas, I conclude that they were also desirable exchange items. There was no apparent separation of useful and exchange hatchets, a difference from hunter-gatherer models which may have been a result of limited local stone sources. My research also determined that three hatchets found in SESA originated in Mount Isa, extending the distance that Mount Isa hatchets are known to have moved from Lake Eyre/Flinders Ranges to south-east South Australia. One of these was distinctively shaped, matching a type of hatchet known to have originated in Mount Isa. Another three hatchets were determined to have originated near Mt Macedon in central Victoria. These six exotic hatchets were distributed evenly across the three language areas, showing no area with a concentration of power of acquisition. I concluded that the distribution of SESA hatchets from source indicates a strong network between the three language groups, Ngarrindjeri, Bindjali and Buandig prior to European settlement, a network which was highly interactive, evenly spread across Buandig land and the southern areas of their neighbours, and with no evidence of dominance by one group in any language area.

This paper questions our understanding of the movement of bones by animal scavengers in the archaeological record. Since assumptions regarding the effects of animal scavenging shape final interpretations of skeletal element frequencies in archaeological faunal assemblages, they are important for our understanding and reconstruction of ancient human behaviour. The results of a 4-year actualistic kangaroo scavenging study from Australia are used to question our understanding of the movement of the bone by contrasting visual data captured by motion-activated digital game cameras with traditional taphonomic studies using skeletal element frequencies. Game cameras are commonly used by ecologists to capture the behaviour of living species but have not yet been used in experimental archaeology where visually documenting animal scavenging behaviour can be used to understand the movement of carcasses and individual bones. Results suggest that traditional zooarchaeological analyses may not be accurate indicators of hunted versus scavenged prey in archaeological faunal assemblages. Moreover, they most certainly fail to document the entire suite of animals scavenging a carcass. These implications are discussed with particular reference to the ability to definitively ascertain the role of humans in the megafaunal extinction debate in Australia.

The target paper takes the debate about the narrative of Australian archaeohistory a significant step forward, and sets up some new research problems to be tackled. O'Connell's research with the Alyawara (Iliaura) (O'Connell and Hawkes 1981) demonstrated that, despite their access to purchased flour, modern fisher-gatherer-hunters will collect seeds and grind them, provided there is an anthropologist who can use a vehicle to drive them to the grasses. While this sounds dismissive, it is actually very important for two reasons: (1) the gatherers needed to know where and when the grasses were suitable for harvest; (2) the anthropologist's vehicle reduced the cost of travel and search effectively to zero, altering the values in the patch choice model. A distinguished ethnographer of fisher-gatherer-hunters protested angrily about this work: 'My people do not forage optimally.' I wondered, silently, whether they were somehow more virtuous because they had not reached optimality or perhaps they were somehow better than optimal. This questioning also has implications: (3) are there behaviours which do reduce the 'optimality' of foraging; and, (4) on what time scales do the considerations of behavioural ecology have to operate?

Existing insights into the history of southeast Asian contacts with northern Australia prior to British colonization in 1788 are limited to Macassan visitors and the trepang industry beginning in the early 18th century and perhaps 16th century. Neither historical nor archaeological evidence indicate extension of such contacts to Torres Strait of northeast Australia. To shed further light on this issue, a collection of 16 Asian ceramic sherds surface collected and excavated recently from the islands of Pulu and Mabuyag in Torres Strait were compared to a large database of Southeast and East Asian stoneware jars that are well characterised, elementally, typologically and chronologically. This comparison matched a number of sherds with two jar types with likely production origins in Thailand and southern China. While the surface collected sherds from Pulu sourced to Thailand date probably to the 19th century, the small glazed sherd from Mabuyag island is typical of a southern Chinese decorated jar type dating to c. 1500-1600 C.E. This Chinese sherd is the earliest known Asian artefact in Australia and parallels recent archaeological evidence on the antiquity of contacts between Macassan trepangers and Aboriginal Australians. It is unknown if the Chinese sherd came ashore to Mabuyag through direct contact with Asian traders or from a nearby shipwreck through salvage.

In this lecture Iain Davidson talks about his introduction to archaeological analysis in the Stratigraphic Museum at Knossos, Crete and his later work based in the Museum of the Servicio de Prehistória de Valencia, Spain. The bones from Knossos allow comparison between the myths about animals at Knossos, the Linear B texts about animals and the reality of animals in everyday life. The bones from Parpalló allowed Iain to investigate the emergence of hunting by Ice Age people of Spain; but, in combination with the study of the art from the same cave, he also studied the emergence of socially defined power, and symbolic construction of identity earlier than the introduction of agriculture to Western Europe.

The archaeology of Glen Thirsty, a desert well in the Amadeus Basin, Central Australia, illustrates the changing relationship between the ranges and desert lowlands during the last 1500 years. Historical records and Aboriginal accounts of the site document the regional importance of Glen Thirsty as one of the few wells in this part of the desert. Archaeological excavations and rock art research show that despite its proximity to Puritjarra with its long, late Pleistocene record of occupation, Glen Thirsty only became an important focus of occupation after 1500 BP. Several lines of evidence independently suggest the establishment and consolidation of a new cultural and economic landscape in the Glen Thirsty area around this time. Growing population pressure and shifts in patterns of land-use and economy in the Central Australian ranges may have provided the impetus for more intensive use of the Glen Thirsty area, although the timing of this was constrained by climatic factors. As a rain-fed well in the lower part of the Amadeus Basin, Glen Thirsty is sensitive to shifts in palaeoclimate and its history reflects changes in regional rainfall patterns during the late Holocene.

The thylacine ('Thylacinus cynocephalus') was one of Australia's largest predators, but became extinct in mainland Australia soon after the arrival of a new predator, the dingo ('Canis lupus dingo') around 3500 BP. Evidence implicating the dingo in the thylacine's extinction has been equivocal, largely because thylacines are thought to be considerably larger than dingoes. Thus, other concurrent factors, such as shifts in human technology and population increase as well as climate change, have been cited to explain their extinction. Here we present new morphological evidence that female mainland Holocene thylacines were actually smaller than dingoes. We discuss these findings against archaeological and contemporary ecological evidence concerning dingoes' environmental impacts, and provide evidence that, as novel predators, dingoes induced a trophic cascade that had dramatic impacts on the fauna and economy of Holocene Australia. We suggest that dingoes, owing to their larger brains and body size, were likely a primary agent for the extinction of the thylacine from mainland Australia.