The past few years has seen a proliferation in the breadth and scope of academic literature surrounding theory and method in heritage studies. In this post, I want to consider some of the similarities in recent approaches to the idea of heritage in relation to Aboriginal notions of country. It’s possibly an overly ambitious idea for what is my first contribution to the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival, but challenges are what make life interesting. In some ways this is also a continuation on from an earlier post about natural versus cultural heritage. Consider it all part of an idea in progress.

What is cultural heritage?

There is a lot of specialist literature around on both issues so what follows is certainly not exhaustive nor particularly authoritative. However, we need to start somewhere.

The idea of cultural heritage hinges on the idea of value: Schofield (2008:18) has recently defined it as something that is “valued by society, by specific groups within a society, and by individuals”, and goes on to refer to ‘value’ as something that serves as the basis for an emotional relationship or commitment to a ‘thing’. Here, I’m interested in heritage places, or places that are valued largely on a personal, emotional basis: they trigger an emotional response, for an individual, a social or ethnic group, or a whole community. Contemporary understandings of heritage do not require that such places have an archaeological component: for example, places of historical interest (“Prof. Bloggs the explorer, died here”), with no tangible evidence of past activity, are justifiably part of our cultural heritage.

And what about country?

Again, something worth pinning down a little because there are all sorts of wild ideas thrown around in the media about just what country is to Aboriginal Australians. It is not, for example, the whole of Australia (in the western sense at least), and nor is it the same as western ideas of property, something owned, something that is used. It’s much, much  more complicated than that. It’s fundamentally cultural, which is why it’s complex.

Bird-Rose (1996) has published a decent book on what country is and what it means to many Aboriginal Australians. The key point, I think, is that country is often viewed as being sentient: it has a history, a present, and a future; it is something that people engage with, and which engages with them. Bird-Rose (1996:7) explains it better:

People talk about country the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy

There is a holistic dimension to country: it’s various elements (soil, plants, animals, waters, winds, etc) are considered to be interlinked or perhaps interwoven. The philosophy of ‘caring for country’ (also a widely misused term) reflects a desire to keep country healthy by keeping these elements in balance; indeed, the ideal is balance in that one particular element should not disadvantage or be given priority over others. This is why large scale development, such as mining, can sometimes be very confronting; it’s an act of violent un-balancing.

Violent 'un-balancing'

There are many countries across Australia and each managed by groups of people who inherit rights to that country, as well as responsibilities for management, usually through older kin. Most individuals tend to have strong relationships with one or two particular countries, and the basis for these relationships, these inherited rights, relate back to the actions of ancestral spirits though in contemporary Aboriginal societies political, historical or other factors are also cited as the basis for these rights (Sutton 2003: 21). It’s a complex philosophy, one that I’m frankly only beginning to understand, but it’s important and I think that heritage practitioners in Australia need to pay more attention to.

Heritage; a poor cousin?

I’m not an Indigenous Australian however if you flick around the pages of my humble blog you might notice that my understanding of the history of Indigenous Australia is rooted in ongoing, long-term research in north eastern Australia, most notably with people whose countries are in the Weipa region. There are a few examples from my fieldwork in this area that make me think that the entire idea of ‘heritage’ management is in some ways redundant in relation to Aboriginal philosophy of country, and caring for country, at least in Australia. Well, perhaps not redundant but certainly a poor cousin.

I think it goes without saying that for Aboriginal people, in a very simplistic sense, country is a heritage place. Country is valued in its entirety, and as Bird-Rose notes, the whole is so much more than the elements that comprise it. I’ve written before my thoughts on  natural and cultural heritage within an Aboriginal context (but  see also Pannel 2006) and others too have noted the constellations of connections that many Aboriginal people reflect on when considering management of places. If anything, contemporary Aboriginal peoples’ philosophical views about country are perhaps more nuanced and even more sophisticated than academic perspectives. There is a certain harmony between ideas such as a two way inter-relationships with place, or  balance equating to health, and the idea that value is about emotive inter-relationships with place.

Heritage is about the values that people associate with a place or thing. Work by Holtorf, Harrison, Byrne, Schofield and I’m sure many others demonstrate the increasingly broad approaches to heritage studies that, in many ways, are pushing theoretical debates about what heritage is. A  place doesn’t need to be ‘old’, it doesn’t need to be valued widely, and it doesn’t need to have a material (archaeological) component to be significant. Furthermore, the ways people engage with a place also change as can the nature of the place itself shift in relation to these engagements (witness the example of Aboriginal repainting of rock art). Such ideas are also common in my own experiences working on projects involving management of heritage places. Understandings of places change, as do the ways people engage with them and so does country itself. For Aboriginal people, country is alive, and as such, it does knowingly change or act. For example, during one field trip recording shell mounds (mounded middens) a few years ago, one elder said to me (and I’m paraphrasing from fieldnotes):

These mounds are growing up. When I visited this place as a girl, they were only little but look at them now, they’re bigger than the trees!

She then went on to explain why, when these places are damaged, her family becomes ill. When she gets sick, she drinks water or eats bush food from her country to make her well again. Such is the nature of her relationship with her country.

So what’s my point? That one of the most interesting areas of research in the field of Indigenous heritage management in Australia relates to exploring ways that Aboriginal people understand country and the implications of these understandings for moving forward our ideas about both what heritage is, and further, how we manage heritage. I think academic ideas about heritage are perhaps only catching up with Aboriginal philosophies of country, and  the discipline as a whole stands to benefit from reflexively engaging with these kinds of philosophies. That, to my mind, is a step towards de-colonising heritage studies.

References:

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Over the past few years I’ve been based in Cairns, far north Queensland, working as a heritage advisor for Aboriginal community groups and developers. However the past several months have seen a bundle of changes in my life which revolve around a new position in the Department of Archaeology, Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.

The new position involves lecturing in archaeology and cultural heritage management topics. I’ll be coordinating Indigenous Heritage Management, Cultural Heritage Management and an Indigenous archaeology field school over the next year (and no doubt a few others). Although I’ve only been in the role for a few weeks, I can see a lot of potential for linking some of my long-standing research interests with teaching activities and student research projects. We already have a graduate student to work on one of my community based heritage projects at Weipa, which I’ll encourage her to write about soon.

I doubt that I will formally meld my blogging interests with my teaching duties, largely because we use a Uni wide implementation of Blackboard. However, I do think that being in a fundamentally different head space will benefit my blogging. This is particularly the case because in order to teach well you need to read widely and engage with various debates and ideas in much more substantive ways than you can when you are a solo contract archaeologist. I also note with interest that the Department has a blog which boasts some of the work being carried out by students in the graduate programs in archaeology and cultural heritage. I hope to inject some social media into this equation in time, so that the work of students here gets more widely promoted.

I have also recently been reading a little on communicating archaeology and the importance of engaging with the public. It’s not something that I’ve explicitly set out to do here in the past – indeed this site has had one long identity crisis – however on reflection I think that it needs to become more oriented towards non-specialist audiences interested in things that interest me. It’s no fun writing if you don’t engage your readers. And Australian archaeology and Indigenous history is somewhat poorly represented and understood by non-professionals. As Lilley (2005: 100) has recently suggested, unless professionals become more active in this area, the discipline risks becoming “stuck in a groove, communicating only with an ever-decreasing circle of like-minded professional colleagues while continuing to bemoan public ignorance and lack of support”. Apt words indeed in the age of massively social media.

References:

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Today I’m happy to report I have been successful with two funding applications to carry out fieldwork projects in north Queensland over the next  year or so. The funds – $150,000 in total – have been provided by the Indigenous Heritage Program (IHP) and were announced by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Arts last week. The first project is completely new one for me, and will be carried out with the Muluridji People whose land is near Mareeba, near Cairns in north Queensland. The second is a continuation of earlier work with Anhatangaith people at the site of the former Weipa mission, which I have written about here before.

The  Muluridji Heritage Project will involve working around Mareeba on the upper catchments of the Barron and Mitchell Rivers. The project is a essentially a baseline study of Indigenous cultural heritage places in this poorly investigated area which lies in an area with wet tropical rainforests to the east, and dry open savannah woodland to the west. While my interest is pre-contact archaeological sites, the project takes quite a broad approach to cultural heritage and we’re aiming to identify and record pre-contact archaeological sites, areas of traditional importance and historical places. We expect to start fieldwork by around September this year, with the project to be completed by mid 2011.

Ceramic Dolls Head (scale = 1 cm

The second project involves detailed work at the site of the original Weipa Mission (1892-1932).  The area, known as ’20 Mile’ or ‘Waypenden‘  is part of the lands of the  Anhatangaith people, who are seeking to have the site protected from vandalism, pilfering of artefacts and so on. This project is a continuation of ongoing community history and heritage project that is broadly investigating the experiences of Aboriginal people at Weipa during the ‘mission era’ (1898-1966). I’ve written previously here about how the project initially began, as well as about work at the more recent (post-1932 site) here and here. Upon reflection, I should really be writing more about this project because it is really very interesting, however finding time is sometimes challenging and there are also important ethical issues about disclosing historical or cultural information about the history of the community. We’ll be spending about 6 weeks on the site filling in gaps on what is already quite a detailed GIS database  and acquiring some detailed data on artefact scatters across the mission site for further desktop analysis.

Both projects will generate some good research outcomes as well as good outcomes for the management of Indigenous heritage places. One key element of both projects is the use of Google Earth to present heritage data to community members, and to establish an easy to use database that Indigenous management groups can use. I’m working on another post at the moment in which I will outline in detail just how I plan to do that and may even do a conference paper on this later this year.

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There are quite a few open source applications around that are at the point of being sufficiently well developed to be of practical use for a professional on a day to day basis. Those that immediately come to mind include Open Office, Inkscape, the GIMP, the strangely named ‘gvSIG‘ (GIS) and of course the bibliographic application Zotero that I discuss in this post. That’s not to say any of these apps are not useful, reliable or popular but rather, that very minor issues sometimes mean that their day to day use is not entirely problem free in some scenarios. It’s not a universal scenario, but is certainly something I have noticed.

Interesting things in my library #7 (Flickr User AussieRupe - Rupert Scammell)

Zotero impressed the heck out of me when I first began using it regularly. Early versions were a little buggy, occasionally crashed,  had limited support for in-text citations and also caused random database craziness. Indeed, until the beta of V2.0, I could only use Zotero as a tool for quickly adding new items that I had found on the web to my master bibliography, held in Endnote. But that rather unique functionality was enough to make it a permanent resident on my mac. It was good, and certainly very promising, but just not good enough to use (or trust) with my entire bibliographic database. So I used it and abused it, leaving it running in the bottom of my browser window where it would store small batches of new discoveries for a few days at most before they were exported to Endnote.

Fast forward a year or two and as most people would be aware the Zotero developers now have a very stable and extremely useful 2.03 release behind them: the app – a gem of an idea – has evolved into a beast. There are so many  advantages to using Zotero for managing my research sources that I really don’t know what I would do without it now, and many of these benefits are fairly well covered on the Zotero website. However, Zotero is not yet my one stop reference manager for a few small reasons and, with the view that constructive criticism can be helpful, I thought I should outline those here.

Support for in text citations (or rather a lack of support) has long been an issue. There are now citation plugins for both Mac/Win Microsoft Word and Open Office (as well as OO on Linux), however I still find them a little frustrating to use. They lack contextual menus and while the commands work fine most of the time,  very occasionally the plugins fail completely and require a reinstall. These are certainly not major issues, more inconveniences. But as I suggest below, mere inconveniences become much more than that in a professional workflow with very hard deadlines, real clients and where one doesn’t tend to have time to mess about fixing things.

Editing citation/bibliographic styles with Zotero is not for the faint hearted. Indeed, it’s quite difficult and requires a degree of computer literacy that I and many others don’t have. While there is an active community who have developed a good range of styles that you can download it’s not possible for mere humans to edit these styles. Why would you want to edit an output style? Put simply, to ensure that your reference list meets the requirements of publications whose styles are not currently supported. Endnote handles this same problem well: one simply copies the nearest similar style, makes some minor changes using their style manager and you are done. Zotero has a long way to go in this regard.

Searching is important to me, indeed, it’s critical however Zotero has somewhat lacklustre search abilities. I have a very large database, not only of sources but also accompanying notes and PDFs, different kinds of sources for different projects and so on. While doing a quick search for a term or author is easy, advanced search options are basically absent. I suspect that the ‘smart folders’ tool is there to provide some of the advanced search capabilities I need, but I haven’t yet been able to add more than one search criteria to a saved search which limits its effectiveness for me. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing? Better search gives users more control.

The Firefox browser is not where I like to work. While Zotero has decent integration with my desktop environment – including dragging reference lists into other apps or drag/dropping of PDFs into the Zotero database itself – I still find it a source of ongoing frustration to work inside a browser. Fortunately, they are working on a standalone desktop client. Bring it on: Zotero is the only reason I continue to use Firefox at all.

Zotero is very important to me; it is a potentially very powerful research tool that any serious researcher should be using in some way.  Proxy support, syncing/sharing to the web, wide support for importing new sources and many other attributes make it a research-centric tool not matched elsewhere. Frankly, the inability to edit styles in Zotero is the only issue that prevents me from fully (and permanently) incorporating this wonderful application into my professional workflow. In a document with 10 or 20 citations, this limitation is really only a mere inconvenience however if you regularly work on projects with 10s or 100s of citations – as I do – then it’s a deal breaker. I’m not going to edit large reference lists manually.

So, overall I think that the app is almost there; indeed, I really really want it to get there soon. It has become the central store for all reference materials across all of my projects, which means I trust it with the results of years of my hard work to accumulate a useful reference database. It’s stable and dependable and despite day to day use for quite some months now I have not had a single crash or error since I installed the 2.0 beta. The issues I highlight here then are very minor complaints indeed and are far outweighed by the advantages of using this app. If you are yet to try Zotero for yourself, I can not recommend it enough. To the Zotero developers: thankyou – this humble researcher is eternally grateful!

Edit 3 June 2010: Reader Sebastian, in a comment below, has pointed out this discussion on the Zotero forums about editing styles and a project underway  linked to Mendeley called ‘csledit‘ that will, hopefully, resolve the style editing limitation. Good news indeed. Thanks!

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Well, if you happened across this site during the past few days you will have received a ‘website not found’ error of some sort. My apologies for this: the reason is that I encountered some problems during a transfer from the site’s former home at wordpress.com to a self-hosted installation of wordpress with Laughing Squid. The problems seem to have been easily fixed, thanks largely to the wonderful tech help at Laughing Squid.

So what’s changed? At this stage, only the theme which is called ‘Amazing Grace’ by Vladimir Prelovac and which I think is quite stunning both in terms of design as well as backend functionality. There will be problems with my earlier posts, namely formatting errors and I suspect a lot of dead links and I will be working to fix these over the next week or so. Hopefully from here forward there will be no significant issues and I can get on with the task of writing and improving this site.

In terms of future plans: well not a lot will change in the short term. I’m eventually aiming to include more content on my business/consulting services and to redirect visitors here from my (poorly maintained) business website  (http://culturalheritage.com.au). I think it’s  more sensible to have one website, it certainly is a lot easier to keep content updated and tidy. Importantly, the content and motivation for this blog will remain the same, as described in About, and the blog will remain as the frontpage.

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In 2007 Jane Lydon, Jeremy Ash and I co-convened a conference session at the ‘New Ground’ Australian Archaeology joint conference at the University of Sydney on the archaeology of Indigenous missions and reserves in Australia and the Pacific. A range of papers were presented exploring the contributions of archaeological approaches to the history of missions and reserves,  with case studies including work from the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, Torres Strait, the Gulf of Carpentaria and a series of papers on work throughout south eastern Australia. After the great feedback we received at the conference, we explored publication opportunities and I am (belatedly) glad to report that this collection of papers has recently been published in the March 2010 edition of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

One of the key motivations for publishing the papers was to showcase the diverse histories of Indigenous missions in the region, and the equally diverse approaches employed in the investigation of those histories. Lydon and Ash wrote a great introduction to the volume which aptly locates the papers in relation to international debates on missions and the archaeology of cross-cultural interactions, as well as the history of research into Indigenous missions and reserves in Australia and the Pacific.

Darlene McNaughton, Justin Shiner and I wrote a paper that set out to explore the economic contributions of Indigenous people who lived in and near a former Presbyterian mission at Weipa, and the significance of those contributions to both the mission and the health and wellbeing of the mission community. We were most interested in looking at wild food (that is, foods that were gathered and hunted from the bush by Aboriginal people), and we focused upon the case study of culturally modified trees (scarred trees) as well as relevant historical and oral history data. The abstract is below:

Mission-based Indigenous Production at the Weipa Presbyterian Mission, Western Cape York Peninsula (1932-1966)
Michael Morrison, Darlene McNaughton and Justin Shiner

Previous research on remote nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Indigenous missions in northern and central Australia point to their often tenuous existence and the complex nature of engagements between Christian Missionaries and Indigenous people. This paper explores the contribution and significance of Indigenous production of wild foods in the context of one such settlement located at Weipa on Cape York Peninsula, north eastern Australia. It is premised on the assertion that investigation of the
economies of these often remote settlements has the potential to reveal much about the character of cross-cultural engagements within the context of early mission settlements. Many remote missions had a far from secure economic basis and were sometimes unable to produce the consistent food supplies that were central to their proselytizing efforts. In this paper it is suggested that Indigenous-produced wild foods were of significant importance to the mission on a day-to-day basis in terms of their dietary contribution (particularly in terms of protein sources) and were also important to Indigenous people from a social and cultural perspective. We develop this argument through the case study of culturally modified trees that resulted from the collection of wild honey.

Highlights in the volume for me included the paper by Lydon and Burns on the Ebenezer Mission in Victoria (see also Lydon’s recently published book), Angela Middleton’s comparative paper on Missionization in New Zealand and Australia, and finally, the paper by Birmingham and Wilson comparing the well known Wybalenna Settlement (Tasmania) with  the Killalpaninna Mission (central Australia). We hope to have the volume reviewed in the coming months and I’ll post that once it comes out.

EDIT (26 Mar 2010): Alun Salt has written a great blog post about our paper, which you can read here.

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Over the past half year or so I have been working on a project documenting the cultural heritage of the Alngith People (pronounced Al-ngit where ‘ng’ is the same as in ‘ping’) , an Aboriginal group whose lands include the Weipa area and surrounds on western Cape York Peninsula, north eastern Australia. It is a fascinating and enjoyable project that has thrown up a number of unique challenges and opportunities in regards to cultural heritage management. The project is funded by the Indigenous Heritage Program via the Malaruch Aboriginal Corporation, representative body for the Alngith group.

In 1932 a Presbyterian Mission was established on Alngith Lands after an earlier settlement inland had failed. It was small, supported a small population (< 200 people) and more to the point, represented the beginnings of the modern Aboriginal community of Napranum. During the 1950s mineral exploration identified extensive bauxite deposits in the region and by the late 1960s a substantial strip mining operation had been established and the mission was closed. Thus, Alngith land is in many ways central to the history of Weipa and Napranum and has a diverse cultural heritage that reflects this. It is is also one of most seriously impacted and developed areas around Weipa, if not on Cape York Peninsula and thousands of hectares of open woodland have been removed to make way for mining as well as industrial, administrative and residential facilities. My own estimate is that well over 60 – 70% of their land has been seriously (and probably irreparably) impacted upon by this development. Despite this, there are some simply magical areas that remain in wonderful condition: wetlands, riverine forests, remnant Eucalypt woodlands,  mangrove lined estuaries and residual dry notophyll vine forests.

The Alngith Cultural Heritage Project began several years ago when I was invited to assist the Alngith Traditional Owner group with developing a project to document their cultural heritage. They specifically requested that the project look at heritage in a very broad sense, including archaeology, oral histories, Traditional places, significant resource areas and natural heritage places. In a sense, they essentially wanted me to help begin to map their Country and heritage: a very broad scope indeed, and one that initially had me scrambling in terms of developing a system for this type of cultural landscapes approach to Indigenous heritage.

There is of course an extensive literature on documenting both tangible and ‘intangible’ cultural places and  landscapes (for example, Byrne, Brayshaw and Ireland 2003; Byrne and Nugent 2004; Clarke 2000; Greer 1995; Greer, Harrison and Tamwoy 2002; Mahood 2006; Pannell 2006) which I am only just beginning to come to grips with. Based on my rather preliminary reviews thus far, much of the literature seems to focus on historic or archaeological heritage places with much less consideration of the ways Traditional Owners value natural heritage places, though Pannell (2006) and Mahood (2006) provide notable exceptions from the respective perspectives of an anthropologist and artist. One of the underlying themes across this work is the need for people engaged in research into Aboriginal cultural heritage values to broaden their views and consider cultural values around natural heritage as part of cultural heritage management work, particularly when their work is driven by community groups themselves. This is what the Alngith people were seeking in any case. So recording Alngith natural heritage assets – places that are laden in cultural values – is a critical part of the project that we have developed. Indeed, the approach we take in many ways attempts to document the sort of information required by UNESCO’s definition of a ‘cultural landscape’ which I think is important given the recent beginnings of the world heritage nomination process for Cape York Peninsula.

Within this context of a broadened definition of cultural heritage, natural resource management (NRM) concerns – which are often well off the radar in cultural heritage research – take on a different light. NRM issues include threats to natural heritage places, such as weed outbreaks, erosion, visitor management, littering, mine rehabilitation concerns, theft of natural resources (eg plants), poor fire management and so on. If one adopts a view of  heritage similar to that held by the Alngith people whereby natural heritage assets should be considered part of the cultural heritage assessment process, then it equally stands that NRM issues need to be systematically documented, where possible.

In some respects the process of identifying, recording and managing Alngith natural heritage assets (and associated threats) is very straightforward. Many Alngith natural heritage values are localised and occur at specific places in the landscape (i.e. they can be ‘mapped’ in space). Often they are large areas and are best mapped with a desktop GIS rather than in the field, however the approach we take is to visit important places with elders where we obtain preliminary geographic data along with detailed oral histories, photos, notes and so on about the place and its importance. Follow up work involving more detailed field or desktop mapping with younger, more mobile Traditional Owners takes place later. All of this data is entered into a database and GIS which, ultimately, will sit in Google Earth or Google Fusion Tables as a resource for the Alngith ranger program (more on that in a future post). Threats or management concerns about those places, such as illegal rubbish dumping, weed outbreaks, vehicle tracks and so on, can usually be recorded in similar ways.

Alngith land has been home to the broader local Indigenous community since the 1930s and so in addition to Alngith knowledge and histories, their country is intimately associated with the shared histories of a large portion of the broader local Aboriginal community. It was quite important that the project set out to document these histories, requiring us to shift from mapping places with ‘things’ (ie tangible heritage) to mapping places with historical, cultural or traditional associations. This includes remembered places like former camping sites, ceremonial or story places, locations of former buildings or features, paths or tracks, named places, or where specific remembered events occurred. Byrne and Nugent (2004) use the term ‘geobiographies’ to describe similar work, which is a term I like a lot.

Oral histories are quite critical to documenting this kind of information and the project began by undertaking both semi-structured and unstructured interviews (both in the office and at particular places) to both record oral histories and to identify associated remembered places. This is supplemented by mapping work where we visit prominent places to record stories and recollections about those places, as well as to draw on people’s first hand knowledge to try and reconstruct  what was formerly there, or how a place might have changed.

In addition to all of this, the project draws upon traditional archaeological techniques. We use archaeology to record known places, to document the archaeological component of places identified through oral history work, and finally, to survey in order to identify previously unrecorded features. We have had a lot of great results from this work as well, with several hundred features in the database and more sure to come. We have not had need to carry out any excavations as yet, though that may come.

The project still has a few months left to run as it enters the reporting phase, however the results thus far have been very positive. We have recorded oral history interviews with a wide range of community elders, many of which are associated with particular places and in addition we have documented hundreds of tangible and associative heritage places (natural, historical, archaeological). The work is quite fun for all involved, because instead of taking an overtly blinkered approach (ie. only looking for archaeological sites) we are effectively mapping Alngith cultural landscapes in what I think is reasonably useful way. At this stage, I am calling this a ‘cultural  mapping’ framework (after Mahood 2006) until I discover something better, or until someone points out an inherent flaw in this terminology.

I think this cultural mapping approach has a great deal of applicability to cultural heritage research projects that are driven by Indigenous community groups. While the idea of mapping cultural values around natural heritage places is by no means new, I have experienced some criticism  about this type of approach. So, I should clarify my point: cultural heritage specialists are, in many contexts, in an ideal position to begin to record the cultural values associated with natural heritage places, and the NRM issues that threaten those places, and should endeavour to obtain information that is relevant to the management of cultural values associated with these places. However, just as a cultural heritage specialist might undertake preliminary recording then draw upon additional expertise for types of heritage requiring specialist attention (e.g. a heritage architect or lithic specialist), so too should we draw on environmental scientists, biologists and other scientific specialists to record other dimensions of natural heritage places and assess their overall scientific importance. Anthropologists have an important role to play and, if not undertaking the initial recording work, then they may be required to undertake more detailed follow up work to record and manage important places, and to understand the way people value those places.

I would be very interested to find out if other people are using similar approaches or have any ideas, suggestions or critical comments about this approach. If so, leave a comment here or send me a tweet @mickmorrison. I shall endeavour to follow up on this with a post about the data management issues we are dealing with in the next week or two.

References

Greer, S., Rodney Harrison, and S.R. McIntyre-Tamwoy. 2002. Community-based archaeology in Australia. World Archaeology 34, no. 2: 265-287.

Pannell, S. 2006. Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? Lessons from the world heritage list. Cairns: Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management.

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At long, long last I am happy to report that my doctoral dissertation is through the examination process and came out largely unscathed. Although I need to make some minor corrections and graduate before it is ‘official’, it really all hinges on examiners comments which I received a few weeks ago. They were good, so I thought it might be timely to post my abstract.

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The shell mounds of Albatross Bay: an archaeological investigation of late Holocene gatherer-hunter production strategies near Weipa, north eastern Australia.

This thesis presents the results of an archaeological investigation of shell matrix sites, and in particular, shell mounds sites that occur around the shores of Albatross Bay, near Weipa on the north western Cape York Peninsula, northern Australia. It is the contention of this thesis that earlier approaches to the investigation of shell mound sites in northern Australia have tended to place too much emphasis on developing long-term explanatory models that gloss over explanations for the specific roles of these unique sites in past economic systems. While long-term explanations represent important contributions, it is argued here that short-term decadal scale modelling of the production systems associated with shell mound formation and use are required in order to fully understand the significance of the mid- to late Holocene emergence of these types of sites. It is argued that a focus on production – defined in a substantive economic sense – is a suitable avenue through which archaeologists can expand our understanding of the role of these features in past Indigenous societies, and their broader importance on longer-term time scales

The thesis thus develops a detailed model of the production strategies associated with the formation of shell mound sites that occur around Albatross Bay, while also considering the broader significance of this model, particularly within the context of Cape York Peninsula. It presents the results of field surveys and excavations carried out around Albatross Bay by the author, as well as a detailed review and analysis of work carried out by others. It is argued that shell mounds are the result of relatively specialised production activities focussing on a very specific resource base: mudflat shellfish species. Shell mounds offered a range of unique benefits for people engaged in these specialised activities, including as camp sites and as specialised activity areas. These events were inherently flexible in size and in terms of timing, reflecting the dynamic nature of the resource base itself; yet the flexible nature of this production strategy also enabled more regular small scale social gatherings, along with a range of social and economic benefits to participants, than would have been otherwise possible. It is proposed that these types of strategies may represent an important characteristic of the production systems employed by gatherer-hunter peoples in late Holocene Cape York.

Overall, this thesis makes a significant contribution to both our understanding of late Holocene lifeways at Albatross Bay as well as to our understanding of the significance of the emergence of shell mound sites in Cape York. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of a focus on short-term modelling of Indigenous lifeways alongside approaches oriented toward longer-term explanations of economic, social and environmental change.

I’m in the process of making the final corrections and within a few months expect it to be available online and open access via the Open Digital Thesis Program. I’ll post again when that happens.

Morrison, M.J. 2010 The shell mounds of Albatross Bay: an archaeological investigation of late Holocene production strategies near Weipa, north eastern Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, Adelaide: Department of Archaeology, Flinders University.

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September to December is typically the ‘conference season’ in Australia and is when most major archaeology conferences are scheduled. The largest of these is the Australian Archaeology Association’s annual conference which this year is being held in Adelaide, South Australia in early December. The keynote speaker is Professor Geoff Bailey (University of York) and the conference seems to have a good selection of sessions on offer. The conference theme is ‘Old Guard, New Guard’ and this from the conference website:

The last decade has seen major changes in the environment of Australian archaeology. The mining boom has created new job markets, with new requirements for education and training in archaeology. In several states, new heritage legislation has been introduced, and more heritage Acts are currently under review. Australian archaeology and archaeologists have gained a wider global audience in the wake of controversies such as those over the Flores hominids and rock art management on the Burrup peninsula, and global issues such as climate change have permeated academic and public discourses about the past.  At the same time, academic baby boomers have been approaching retirement, leading to predictions of a shortfall of experienced people in the tertiary education sector, as well as a general change in the complexion of professional archaeology. In the 2009 AAA Conference “Old Guard, New Guard”, we ask participants to consider what will be the major directions for archaeology as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. How will new generations of archaeologists build on – or deconstruct – the research and practice of the past 50 years?

Proposed sessions include:

• Archaeology to excite and inspire (Duncan Wright and Alice Gorman);
• Research outcomes in Australian Archaeology (Sandra Bowdler);
• Engineering archaeological solutions: how technological advancements have been implmented in cultural heritage management (Faye Prideaux);
• Seeing beneath the soil: the possibilities of archaeological geophysics in Australia (Ian Moffat);
• Archaeology and anthropology (Fiona Sutherland and Neale Draper);
• The real dirt game: archaeology and mining in the Pilbara (Boon Law and Dawn Cropper);
• The archaeology of Australasian coasts and islands (Duncan Wright and Michael Morrison);
• “Old problems new shit” or “Old paradigms, new applications: the application of cultural heritage legislation in modern cultural heritage situations (Annie Ross);
• Google earth, open source and other emerging spatial technologies: innovation and application in archaeology (Illya Santos and Stafford Smith);
• Engaged archaeology, consultancies and management planning: research directions (Steve Hemming, Chris Wilson and Kelly Wiltshire);
• Palaeoecology and its role in archaeology: current research and future directions (Jillian Garvey and Judith Field);
• Valued stones: understanding the manufacture, use and distribution of transported stone artefacts (Clair Harris and Chris Clarkson).

There are a couple of sessions I am particularly looking forward to. The first will be Sandra Bowdler’s session on research outcomes in Australian archaeology, which hopefully will include some good thematic papers on key research issues being addressed by people working in Australia. I was also interested to see the proposed session exploring the application of ‘Google earth, open source and other emerging spatial technologies’ to archaeology in Australia. It is not something I can remember seeing before at a AAA conference and so I hope it garners enough support to run.

In recent years I have co-convened several sessions on topics not strictly within my primary area of research and so this year decided that  it would be good to do something on coastal archaeology. After a few chats with Duncan Wright (Monash University) we decided to propose a session entitled ‘The archaeology of Australasia’s coastlines and islands’. It looks as if we have eight confirmed papers and I shall post details once the organising committee finalise the program. In the meantime, our abstract is:

The archaeology of Australasia’s coastlines and islands has been an important focus for archaeologists carrying out research in the region, particularly since the pursuit was recognised as a distinct sub-field of research in the early 1980s (Bowdler 1982; Hall and McNiven 1999). Since then, there has been a relative efflorescence of research into the circumstances and character of human settlement and use of coastal and island regions. This session hopes to showcase the diverse range of research being undertaken in such contexts throughout Australasia. Speakers may wish to address the following broad themes within coastal or island settings:

• The role of islands and coastlines, liminal zones and the sea for both communities and archaeologists;
• Colonisation and settlement;
• Economies and subsistence;
• Rock art research;
• Methodological and technical issues;
• The question of mid- to late Holocene economic, social and technological change;
• Approaches to managing cultural heritage in coastal settings;
• Human-environment interactions;
• The archaeology of cross-cultural contact and interaction in coastal settings.

AAA is always good fun and a great chance to catch up with colleagues and old friends. I’ll post more about the final program once it is finalised, which should hopefully be in the next week or so.

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My apologies for the lengthy hiatus between posts on this site;  as followers of my twitter feed would be aware I have recently submitted my Doctoral thesis for examination, and the final stages of completing that needed to take precedence over blogging. However, with that behind me now I have time to start writing here again: there have been quite a few research papers published recently that I will endeavour to post as soon as possible, as well as a few half written posts that have been waiting to be completed.

Update: 15 October 2009

In the past week or so I have made some changes to the aims and purpose of this site and you can read all about those in the About section. I have also moved to a new domain (mickmorrison.com) and also have imported selected posts from my old blogger site. Before I can start posting again I need to edit these, this should be completed in the coming days.

I will also be adding separate permanent pages for each of my current research projects as well as details on publications, seminars, reports and so on.

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