Shelley Greer

Heritage and empowerment: community‐based Indigenous cultural heritage in northern Australia

This paper reports on the transformation from an archaeological research project to one that focused on Indigenous cultural heritage. The ultimate outcome was the development of a community‐based approach for northern Cape York (Australia) that emerged from a partnership between researcher and the indigenous community. The paper particularly focuses on notions of landscape, sites and artefacts and the ways in which archaeological and indigenous perspectives of these are both different and similar. It challenges the idea that artefacts are only central for archaeologists, presenting a case study illustrating that they can also be important within Indigenous frameworks. These insights emerged from a deeper understanding of Indigenous local heritage that was only possible within a community‐based approach.

The Janus View: Reflections, Relationships and a Community-Based Approach to Indigenous Archaeology and Heritage in Northern Australia

Abstract This paper describes archaeological work, begun in the 1980s, that resulted in the development of a community-based approach. The approach is underpinned by the relationships that developed between the researcher and the Cape York Indigenous community of Injinoo. It explores the researcher’s motivations in the development of the approach and the way that it emerged, over a period of years, from an on-going exchange of ideas and understanding. The paper presents the central desire to ‘dovetail’, wherever possible, the interests of both the researcher and the community and the principles. These include the importance of working with the appropriate community members and the necessity of operating within the languages and domains that are most potent for the community. These principles are aimed at empowering all research participants and in so doing, enriching our understanding of the past. This personal story is placed within the context of social movements that dominated the second half of the twentieth century and the way that these influenced theoretical developments within archaeology.