Alistair Paterson

Early Pastoral Landscapes and Culture Contact in Central Australia

The arrival of British pastoralists throughout central Australia from the 1850s marked the introduction of wool production, predominantly for industrialized Britain. Pastoral industries were both capitalist and colonizing enterprises. Archaeological research and historical documents from pastoral station managers reveal how indigenous people were involved in the workings of Strangways Springs Station in northern South Australia (1860–1900). Research reveals differential Aboriginal involvement in the pastoral industry, indicated by two phases in the development of the pastoral station. Changes in pastoral work practice over time influenced cultural interaction.

Australian historical Archaeology: Retrospects and Prospects

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a review of historical archaeology in Australia. We feel that the continuing debate on the nature and course of the subject could benefit from such a review. Our goal is to provide by demonstration a de facto profile of the discipline and suggest some potential future directions. We do not give a description of the development of Australian historical archaeology but attempt to demonstrate what the discipline has been at least in terms of publications and theses.

An archaeology of historical reality? A case study of the recent past

Abstract An Aboriginal elder, an archaeologist and a geographer report on an interdisciplinary project about colonial-era settlement in the Murchison and Davenport ranges in the Northern Territory. Oral history, physical evidence and historical records reveal a distinct central Australian cultural landscape and show that archaeology can do more than merely exhume material to support historical ‘realities’. This project provides new or improved understandings of (1) colonial technology in pastoral ventures, (2) continuity and change in Aboriginal life following European arrival, (3) social behaviour in colonial settings, and (4) alternatives to Eurocentric Australian histories.

Considering Colonialism and Capitalism in Australian Historical Archaeology: Two Case Studies of Culture Contact from the Pastoral Domain

As a result of British colonization in 1788, Australia was transformed from a continent of hunter-gatherers to a capitalist settler nation with social, economic, physical, environmental, and material cultural aspects of this radical transition. Colonization and colonialism by settlers (mainly British) are important topics for investigation in archaeological studies of colonial Australia while capitalism has been a less significant research priority. One key colonial enterprise was the pastoral industry, which involved sheep and cattle raising in many parts of Australia. Pastoral stations were sometimes the primary setting for the shift from Aboriginal to farming country. Two regional studies – one from the southwestern Lake Eyre Basin in Central Australia and the other from the coastal Pilbara in Western Australia – demonstrate how archaeology can interpret and measure these significant changes in landscape and society. The evidence operates on different scales, from a broad scale detecting how people used landscape to the scale of site, artifact, and individual agency. Particular attention in this research was directed in these regional studies toward the evidence for cross-cultural contacts and changes in Aboriginal society that resulted from European colonization; a further question explored how Europeans adjusted to their “frontier” regions (remembering that their frontiers were Aboriginal homelands) through studies of the spatial and temporal organization of archaeological sites and artifacts. The main temporal focus for this discussion is the first stage of pastoralism and culture contact (ca. 1860–1900). In both regions, the network of early pastoral sites was transformed by Australian Federation in 1900: many early settlements lay abandoned and others were part of economically more successful enterprises. This research suggests how, in these regions at least, archaeological sites provide evidence of early pastoralism and aspects of Aboriginal history, and that the colonial pastoral program required access to indigenous labor and knowledge.

Commemorating the colonial Pilbara: beyond memorials into difficult history

The colonial Northwest of Western Australia was a harsh frontier, where demands for Aboriginal land, labour and knowledge led to dispossession, loss of rights, massacre and generations encumbered with the colonial legacy. In the Pilbara, there are some rare attempts to engage with this difficult colonial history, mainly in the form of heritage site interpretation and heritage trails. Overall, the difficult colonial history of the Northwest is poorly represented. Colonialism and its legacy are not effectively commemorated, nor are distinct local cultural and civic attributes highlighted as ‘lessons from the past’. In this paper, we explore the memorialization and commemoration of the Northwests traumatic colonial history and consider a history of how heritage has been represented across the landscape. We suggest that the affective heritage of the Northwest especially cross-cultural or multi-cultural sites and histories can provide a basis for commemorating difficult colonial history or violent events that are underrepresented in dominant heritage regimes.

Te Miro o'one: the archaeology of contact on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Abstract Historical accounts of European exploration and intervention in Polynesia during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries speak of the complex interpretative fields through which both Polynesians and Europeans came to understand each other. Here we employ the record of material practices on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to investigate the indigenous response to European contact from the islands ‘discovery’ by the Dutch in 1722 to the populations conversion to Christianity in 1868. Rather than seeing events on the island during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a simple trajectory of decline, we highlight how myriad new practices and social orders emerged through a creative agency that drew inventively upon the material and cosmological possibilities afforded by contact.

Current Research in Australia and New Zealand: An Overview

This issue of Historical Archaeology grew out of a session organized by Alasdair Brooks for the 2005 Annual Meeting for The Society for Historical Archaeology. Delivered in York, England, the papers highlighted research with diverse theoretical perspectives and of broad geographic scope. Participants explored a variety of cultural landscapes and the myriad forms of material culture through which Australian Aboriginals, British colonists, convicts, working class women and children, Chinese miners, Asian divers, and others enacted economic strategies; established, maintained, or contested hierarchical social identities; and created mun dane, sacred, and commemorative places. With the exception of Edward Gonzalez Tennants contribution on mining in New Zealand, this volume focuses primarily on Australia. After the Dutch seaman Abel Tasman in 1642, early landfalls in the region were followed by British annexation in 1840, before which most trading, missionary, and whaling vessels embarked from Sydney. While perhaps less relevant in todays socio-political relationships between the two settler nation states, New Zealand was essentially, for a period in the early 1800s, an Australian colony. Indeed, the histories of these two nations shared similar structural roots?exploration and contact, colonization, the development of extractive industries, British annexation, and nationhood? yet these processes resulted in two very different places. Perhaps future comparative work will explore this relationship more completely. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, a handful of British settlements dotted the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. These colonial outposts served as centers of exchange for the hinterland, where resources were extracted and communities sustained. Among the most geographically isolated settlements of the British Empire, they were nevertheless linked by oceanic trade routes with global reach to British and other European ports in Asia (including Hong Kong and the Indian subcontinent), to the southern tip of Africa, and to Europe. Exchange was not completely controlled by the British. American whalers, for example, frequented the Southern Ocean from the early 1800s, and Chinese migrants populated the late-19th-century goldfields along with many other ethnic groups. The papers in this volume combine evidence from documents, landscapes, extant buildings, archaeological sites, and artifacts to explore colonialism and contact; the creation of identity; the impact of gender, ethnicity, and status on the material record; and the role of consumerism?all important themes in todays historical archaeology. Together, they demonstrate that Australasia provides fertile ground for exploring the increasingly global nature of the modern world. The publication of these studies represents another milestone for Australasian historical archaeology, comprising the second volume of Historical Archaeology dedicated to research from this region, the first having been published in 2003. We recommend those papers and the insightful introduction to that volume (Lawrence and Karskens 2003) to readers; however, rather than revisit their discussion here, we will reflect on Australasian historical archaeology as revealed through the papers in this second collection.

Under the same sky: two British settlements in early colonial Australia

most monasteries continued to prosper throughout the Viking Age, the initial impact of the Vikings must have been devastating. Equally interesting, though, is the fact that agriculture and metalworking resumed at Portmahomack immediately. According to Carver from the ninth to the eleventh century the site was ‘an industrially active farmstead ’ (p. 142). There were fewer burials in the excavated area and vellum production ceased. Carver suggests that the church was ruinous throughout this period (pp. 142 & 147), but the evidence for this seems equivocal and we should consider the possibility that the site continued to function as an ecclesiastical centre, even if it was no longer a monastery.