Prehistory of Australia

Johan Kamminga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781864489507
• eBook ISBN: 9781000319446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Australia's human prehistory through more than 40, 000 years is the challenging theme of this masterly survey. John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga bring together the discoveries and often controversial interpretations of six decades of archaeological research to reveal that across this island continent, in the face of contrasting environments and changing climates, human responses produced many cultures, languages and life styles. The Old World is usually credited with the origins of art and spirituality. Recent discoveries, however, prove that symbolic rock art and complex burial rites also existed in Australia at challengingly early times. The authors evaluate the dating evidence upon which Australia's human story before 1788 is reconstructed. They review diverse topics, such as the controversy about the time people first arrived on the continent's northern coast, the extinction of marsupial megafauna and the diversity of Aboriginal rock art. Prehistory of Australia explains why Aboriginal Australia is recognised today for its significance in global prehistory and why so many of its archaeological places have merited World Heritage listing.

1
The past uncovered and its ownership

Australia became an island continent when it separated from the southern super-continent of Gondwanaland, some 80 million years before the emergence of humanity. The first Australians must have arrived by sea. They almost certainly came from Sundaland, the Pleistocene (Ice Age) subcontinent of Southeast Asia, via the islands in between the two great landmasses. The only terrestrial placental mammals to precede humans were bats and rodents, the latter presumably clinging to floating vegetation or logs. The epic journey to Australia stands as the earliest evidence of sea voyaging by modern humans.

The discovery of Australia’s remote human past has proved one of the most exciting and challenging episodes in unveiling global prehistory. Challenging, because discoveries have followed so rapidly, yet the time-scale revealed for continental colonisation is so immense. During the 1950s it was suspected that people occupied Australia earlier than 10,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age—but it was only in 1962 that radiocarbon dates from a Queensland excavation exceeded 10,000 years, the conventional terminal date then accepted for the commencement of the Holocene (post-glacial) period.

The pace of the discovery, excavation and dating of sites accelerated. The earliest known occupation exceeded 20,000 years ago by 1965; in 1969 it approximated 30,000 years, and in 1973 it had stretched to 40,000 years. Such antiquity then exceeded the colonisation of the American continents (as shown by dated occupation) by at least twenty millennia.

Imagine the exhilarating impact upon the comprehension of Australia’s human past! Until then, four centuries sufficed for the European contact period, recorded in fragmentary written records until Sydney’s settlement in 1788. Given even 40,000 years of human existence, time since 1788 only amounts to 0.5 per cent of that period. Today the proportion may have dwindled further, because new dating techniques hint at 60,000 years or more since people first stepped ashore; but they remain hints yet to be authenticated.

Our chief concern is to sketch the evidence for Australia’s story before Europeans, so our sources are essentially archaeological and draw upon many scientific disciplines. Nowhere in the world do written records exceed some 5000 years (one-eighth of our period), and the first fleeting written observations relating to Australia’s inhabitants were made in AD 1606. For Aboriginal people, their story is contained in oral traditions handed on by their elders, they believe, since Dreaming times. Each clan has its traditions, and within recent years numbers of them have been written down and published. We emphasise that those traditions are not necessarily in contradiction with our story, yet they relate to a different intellectual tradition, where time and concepts of evidence are so different that, as explained in the preface, we make no attempt to reconcile these two approaches to the past.

The divergence between these two intellectual approaches may not be as great as some Aboriginal people believe, however. This conclusion emerges from the implications of many Dreaming creation activities. The network of Dreaming tracks which criss-cross this continent records the travels of ancestral beings, yet no single significant ceremonial place existed in isolation. On northern shores, even the direction from which powerful Dreaming beings travelled is revealing, because some came from across the sea to Arnhem Land, or arrived in Cape York from the north. In other words, these ancestral beings travelled from beyond the shores and followed the Dreaming pathways to distant creation places. That is, in essence, what archaeologists claim—the Aboriginal past was not static, there are links overseas, and traditions changed across time and place. Archaeologists provide a chronology and a record of Aboriginal settlement which has been cited in contemporary land rights claims.

Our synthesis is constructed from the findings of archaeology and many other academic or scientific fields: prehistoric archaeology, which is about the era prior to British colonisation; and historical archaeology, a fast-growing field concerned with the colonial era and its relics and places, including Aboriginal settlements. Australian archaeologists collaborate with specialists in many other fields, such as ecology, earth sciences, human biology, anthropology and linguistics. They employ a wide variety of scientific methods to analyse the results of surveys and excavations. With the growth of prehistoric archaeology, more highly specialised interdisciplinary fields have developed, such as ethnoarchaeology, the study of contemporary activities and behaviour to help interpret archaeological finds, and taphonomy, which investigates how archaeological sites and relics are formed and preserved.

ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALOGY

A major asset for reconstructing Australia’s human past is the relative wealth of the historical and ethnographic records, including written and oral accounts of traditional society and items of material culture held by museums. Although many of these records provide only a sketch of Aboriginal society and culture in particular regions, some rank among the world’s more illuminating accounts of the ways in which hunter-gatherer societies organised their lives. British settlers’ reminiscences, explorers’ journals, and even personal letters are vital primary sources of information, but such records are difficult to interpret and they are not always accurate. The deserts and Arnhem Land experienced colonial control later, so the impact on traditional culture was more gradual; traditional social and economic ways continue. Indeed, some groups of people in the Western Desert lived entirely traditional lives until the 1960s. Not surprisingly, archaeologists tend to rely on the more detailed ethnography from these regions, which may bias interpretations of economic and social features towards those of the arid region, while societies in the temperate southeastern region are underestimated. Despite the catastrophic impact of British colonisation, contemporary Aboriginal oral histories and the rich holdings of museums and art galleries are invaluable records.

Archaeologists often use historical records as a starting-point in interpreting their findings. Recent prehistoric artefacts and archaeological patterns identified by the historical method called the ‘Direct Historical Approach’ often provide convincing comparisons or explanations. For example, the fishing spear used by Aborigines of the Sydney region at the time of British settlement had three or four small bone prongs, and two of these spears have been preserved in museum collections. Comparable bone points have been recovered from shell and other occupation debris (called middens) dating to within the last 2000 years and are widely recognised as prehistoric examples of spear prongs. The same applies to a stone adze (chisel) flake widely used in the arid zone until the present century, which has a similar antiquity. Since the Direct Historical Approach deals with observations made about the direct descendants of the people whose archaeological remains are being interpreted, its application is limited in time and space.

Although many interpretations based on analogy with historical observations are plausible and constructive, we cannot assume stable continuity in lifestyle between recent prehistoric times and the ‘ethnographic present’. Such an assumption can constrain or mislead. The problem is not that the historical picture is irrelevant—clearly it is fundamental—but that the principles for evaluating historical sources are sometimes not adequately applied. In some regions British colonial influences changed aspects of Aboriginal culture and lifestyles even before explorers or settlers arrived. For instance, over most of southeastern Australia all historical observations were made on the survivors of Aboriginal populations that had already been decimated by smallpox. The archaeological record itself reveals change, and the documentary record of Aboriginal Australia recorded during the last 200 years cannot simply be projected back uncritically into remote prehistory. Environmental and other circumstances in the past also differed from those in early colonial times, while social customs and behaviour may also have been different. Consequently, to argue that evidence from AD 1800 applies equally in 1800 BC requires caution. However, the choices available to hunting, gathering and collecting societies display certain similarities, so it is not unreasonable to cautiously take the ‘ethnographic present’ as a guide to interpreting the past.

HERITAGE PRESERVATION

A growing national maturity led to movements during the 1960s to preserve Australia’s heritage across a wide spectrum. In 1965 the Australian Conservation Foundation was established, while in the same year the Australian Council of National Trusts adopted a collaborative approach to preserving the built heritage. This was also the year in which the first state legislation (South Australia) was passed to protect Aboriginal places. Although state laws were seldom fully implemented and most instrumentalities were poorly staffed, by 1975 each state had passed legislation to protect Aboriginal sites.

The landmark event was the 1973–75 Hope Inquiry into the National Estate, which resulted in the creation of the Australian Heritage Commission in 1976. It has compiled a Register of the National Estate with the objective of coordinating and inculcating better conservation practices. Many hundreds of places on the Register are Aboriginal. It is significant that three of the registered properties have been classified as possessing World Heritage status, partly for their global archaeological importance. These are Kakadu, Southwest Tasmania and the Willandra Lakes region. Archaeological research has played a prominent role in these developments. Uluru is another World Heritage place with deep Aboriginal significance.

The move to protect archaeological sites by law came at a time when environmental activists were making similar gains. Trained archaeologists were recruited into government service to administer the new heritage laws. While museums and universities have experienced growth, it is the applied field of cultural heritage management, and what is loosely termed ‘consulting archaeology’, that provides the first employment for many graduates choosing to continue professionally. Consulting archaeology had its beginnings in the large-area field projects of the early 1970s, such as the survey by F. L. Virili of rock engravings at Dampier on the Pilbara coast, and the Alligator Rivers Survey in which both authors were involved. From the 1980s a variety of state and federal legislation requires environmental impact statements for all proposed large development projects and also many small ones. Such assessments usually include field surveys for Aboriginal sites. Many consultant archaeologists now belong to the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists (ACCA) and others are involved on a professional basis as members of Australia ICOMOS, the local affiliate of the International Council of Monuments and Sites, a body given responsibility by the World Heritage Convention (1972) for giving arm’s length advice to the World Heritage Committee on the inscription of Australian sites. Australia ICOMOS has developed a widely respected code of cultural conservation practice, The Burra Charter. The Australian Archaeological Association (AAA) was founded in 1975 and its journal Australian Archaeology now informs some hundreds of members. Both the ACCA and AAA have codes of ethics to which members subscribe.

There is a continuing debate among archaeologists about the academic research value of fieldwork conducted for environmental impact assessments and cultural conservation studies, and the relatively few publications to result from well financed projects. Nonetheless, some magnificent field opportunities are generated by consulting projects. Whereas the duration of research excavations in Australia has diminished over the years, the amount of field survey work has risen dramatically. Nowadays, many more archaeologists are working as consultants on environmental and heritage issues than are employed in universities and museums. Consultant archaeologists often undertake intensive field surveys of small areas subject to planned development. While much of this work is routine, sometimes there is an unexpected discovery. With each consultancy report, the amount of information about a region’s prehistory accumulates and it is this growth that should provide much of the information for future researchers. However, consultancy reports frequently remain unpublished and access is limited. This trend underlines the importance of Site Registers held by state authorities as sources of basic data.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Aboriginal involvement and control over archaeological fieldwork began in the early 1970s with demands that excavation be approved by traditional landowners. This was a time of drastic reappraisal of government policy towards Aborigines, with the dawn of an assertive Aboriginal nationalism, and with the struggle for legislative recognition of Aboriginal land rights that continues to the present day. Aboriginal people moved into fields of higher education and public administration. Previously, many sites were excavated in ignorance of Aboriginal wishes, and museums displayed artefacts never intended by their owners for public gaze. When Mulvaney began fieldwork, no state permits were needed, and there was no obligation to deposit finds in a public repository. In certain regions, including Arnhem Land, permission to enter an area was first obtained from a local mission; only then was a permit provided by the government administration. Local Aboriginal communities were never consulted.

Archaeologists played a leading role in campaigning for legislation to protect Aboriginal places and material relics. Also, archaeology has given material and scientific support for Aboriginal claims of deep antiquity, and to a people claiming a share in the land it seems relevant that British occupation of the continent since Captain Cook is less than one per cent of the total period of known human settlement. Aboriginal people assert that both their land and the interpretation of their culture and history have been appropriated by white Australians. They see Australian prehistory as their past, their heritage, and therefore theirs to do with as they wish, and to share with others only on their own terms.

Members of the northern Queensland Djungan community visiting the Ngarrabullgan excavation in 1993 during a Ranger training programme coordinated by the Kuku Djungan Aboriginal Corporation: From left, Ross Craig, Malcolm Grainer, John B. Grainer Jnr and archaeologist Roger Cribb. (Bruno David)

The wheel has turned, and Aboriginal Australians today exert greater control over their archaeological heritage than Native Americans hold over theirs. Federal and all state heritage organisations currently have a policy of consultation with Aboriginal communities about indigenous heritage issues. While there are still instances of mutual resentment and distrust as Aboriginal people gain effective control over their history and heritage, there is also increasing collaboration with archaeologists and movement towards greater mutual understanding. An unfortunate outcome to a significant archaeological project in southwestern Tasmania, when the law was used to recover prematurely archaeological materials under investigation, represents an incalculable cultural catastrophe, leaving both archaeologists and Aboriginal people the losers.

It was during the early 1970s that Aboriginal people first participated in archaeological fieldwork, in a region now the heartland of Kakadu National Park. The need to provide archaeological training for indigenous people was first argued by Harry Allen, now teaching at Auckland University, who incorporated training in the excavation of a large rockshelter in Kakadu. Such involvement in survey and excavation is now the norm. A code of ethics acknowledging Aboriginal ownership of their prehistoric heritage was adopted by the Australian Archaeological Association and each year Aboriginal delegates attend its conferences. Not only are indigenous communities involved in archaeological fieldwork and vigilant in protecting prehistoric ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and illustrations
• Maps
• Preface
• 1 The past uncovered and its ownership
• 2 The diversity of surviving traces
• 3 Dating the past
• 4 Changing landscapes
• 5 People, language and society
• 6 Subsistence and reciprocity
• 7 Seafarers to Sahul
• 8 Sahul: A Pleistocene continent
• 9 The initial colonisation
• 10 The original Australians
• 11 Pleistocene settlement
• 12 Conquest of the deserts
• 13 Pleistocene artefacts
• 14 Holocene stone tool innovations
• 15 Theories and models: Explaining change
• 16 People of the coast
• 17 Regional challenges and responses
• 18 Island settlement
• 19 Tasmania
• 20 Art on rock
• 21 Rock art of temperate Australia
• 22 Rock art of tropical Australia
• 23 Asian and European newcomers
• Glossary
• Endnotes
• References
• Index