John Mulvaney

Human cognition: The Australian evidence

Cognitive archaeology benefits from the specific record of Australian evidence, which offers important glimpses of early human thinking in its burials and art. Colin Renfrew’s insightful Prehistory: the making of the human mind (2007) undervalues the evidence relating to social intelligence (cognitive archaeology) available from Pleistocene Australia, whilst Steven Mithen’s The prehistory of the human mind (1996) refers only to recent Aboriginal society. This note directs attention for non-Australian readers to intriguing Australian evidence for modern human behaviour extending across at least 40 millennia. This has been reported in recent broad-ranging and well-documented surveys (Franklin & Habgood 2007; Balme et al. 2009), while Iain Davidson (2010) has contributed a discerning appraisal.

Digging in the Archaeology Archives

Personal correspondence written during the 1950s - by now a virtual archaological Dreaming - provides a context for excavations on the Murray River, at Fromms Landing rockshelter 2, during January-February 1956, and the 1960 Queensland expedition during which pilot digs at Kenniff Cave and The Tombs collected Late Pleistocene radiocarbon 14 samples.

From 'The Dawn' to sunset: Gordon Childe in Melbourne, 1957

Only Gordon Childes death sufficed to alert Australians to his international reputation. His private return after an absence of 35 years was unlikely to be newsworthy, given Australias intellectual climate and regional isolation in 1957. 1 was totally unaware of Childs return in April, or of his visits to universities in Sydney and Canberra, despite the fact that it was in that year that I initiated Australias only course in the prehistory of this region. This was Pacific Prehistory, a final honours year course at Melbourne Universitys History Department.