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- Arizona State University, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Department MemberUniversity of Colorado at Colorado Springs, LAS Extended Studies (Cognitive Archaeology program), Department MemberFlinders University of South Australia, Department of Archaeology, Department Memberadd
- Cultural heritage and industry, Communication, History, Archaeology, Zooarchaeology, Evolutionary Archaeology, and 28 moreHeritage Studies, Spanish archaeology, Lithic Technology, Prehistoric religion and r ritual a, Archaeological Method & Theory, Environmental Archaeology, Religion and ritual in prehistory, Paleolithic Europe, Cognitive archaeology, Heritage Management, Upper Palaeolithic boundary, Earlier Stone Age (Archaeology), Iberian Prehistory (Archaeology), Hunters, Fishers and Gatherers' Archaeology, Landscapes in prehistory, Rock Art (Archaeology), Social Archaeology, Taphonomy, Archaeology of Religion, Prehistoric Archaeology, Environmental Sustainability, Human Evolution, Middle Palaeolithic, History of Archaeology, Upper Palaeolithic, Ice Age Cave Art, Heritage Tourism, and Rock art researchedit
- Professor Iain Davidson (BA, PhD Cambridge, UK). I am Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Humanities a... moreProfessor Iain Davidson (BA, PhD Cambridge, UK). I am Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Humanities at the University of New England and have held honorary positions at Flinders University, Arizona State University, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I worked at the University of New England for 34 years, where I helped start the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. I was awarded a Personal Chair in 1997 which I held until retirement in 2008.
I held the Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 2008-9. I was awarded the Rhys Jones Medal of the Australian Archaeological Association 2010.
I have worked on the Spanish Upper Palaeolithic, archaeology and ethnography of Northwest Queensland, Australian rock art, archaeology and heritage, and language origins.
I have contributed to discussions of interpreting animal bones as evidence of prehistoric economy, use of ethnography in archaeological interpretation, evidence of non-human primates for understanding language origins, the interface between psychology and archaeology, problems of understanding the "meaning" of prehistoric art, and the relations between stone tools and cognition, and the evolution of cognition.
I have held major grants from the Australian Research Council and its predecessors, and from AIATSIS and AINSE, to investigate Aboriginal archaeology, rock art, resource use and museum collections.
I have worked on projects with Anaiwan, Darug, Gamilaraay, Kalkadoon, Undekerebina, Wankamadla, Wonarua, Mitakoodi and Yulluna people. I completed major research projects arising from archaeological consultancy in western Sydney and in the Hunter Valley. My consultancy work has been funded by for BHP Billiton, Cyprus Gold, Department of Environment and Conservation (NPWS), Flinders University, Placer Dome, Rouse Hill Stage 1 Development, Transgrid, Western Mining, Woodside Energy Limited, Xstrata.
My publications include 4 books, 6 edited books, 48 chapters in books and more than 65 articles in refereed journals.
I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and have been a Fellow of the Collegium Budapest, Hungary. While President of the Australian Archaeological Association, I ensured the adoption of the first Code of Ethics for the Association. From 2000 to 2005 I was the foundation Director of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England.
I enjoy taking photographs
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Last upload 25 June 2016
Some of my other publications are available as pdfs if you contact meedit
Review of book from Templeton funded symposium on Catal
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gated. Another would be a study of the changing environment that must have occurred with the drying of the Fayum basin and correlation with the representations of water birds in the different periods. The scholarship and excellent... more
gated. Another would be a study of the changing environment that must have occurred with the drying of the Fayum basin and correlation with the representations of water birds in the different periods. The scholarship and excellent production of the two books, The birds of ancient Egypt and Die Tierwelt des alten Agypten, should help to provide a platform for these and many other investigations into palaeoecology and biogeography, as well as increasing our understanding of the profound relationships which exist between humans and animals. JULIET CLUTTON-BROCK Department of Zoology British Museum (Notural History), London
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Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate... more
Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate those beginnings and discusses recent attempts to provide a more satisfactory understanding of changes in stone tool technologies, including work by Philip Barnard and William McGrew, subsequent work by Tom Wynn, and my own work with various collaborators. It suggests that some of the previous understandings of cognitive evolution were shaped by the fact that approaches to stone tools were largely determined in the nineteenth century. I propose some new ways of looking at stone tools and the sort of story that allows for more productive models of the evolution of human cognition.
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South of My Days' - Judith Wright..Note on Aboriginal Language Names..Prelude: Uplands Always Attract - J.S. Ryan..1. What is New England? - Alan Atkinson..PART 1: PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT..2. The Rocks Beneath - Bob Haworth..3. Sunshine,... more
South of My Days' - Judith Wright..Note on Aboriginal Language Names..Prelude: Uplands Always Attract - J.S. Ryan..1. What is New England? - Alan Atkinson..PART 1: PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT..2. The Rocks Beneath - Bob Haworth..3. Sunshine, Snow, Wind and Rain - Jack Hobbs and Alan Atkinson..4. Wildlife - Peter Jarman and Karl Vernes..5. The Vegetated Landscape - Peter Clarke..6. Land and Livelihood - Nick Reid and Lewis Kahn ..PART 2: FIRST PEOPLES..7. Seeing Red: Musings on Rock Art - June Ross..8. Aboriginal Archaeology - Wendy Beck..9. The Frontier - David Andrew Roberts..10. Aboriginal People and Pastoralism - Rodney Harrison..11. Aborigines and Citizens - Matthew Jordan..PART 3: NEWCOMERS..12. Passing Through - Martin Auster..13. Colonial Settlement - Alan Atkinson and John Atchison..14. Homesteads - Jillian Oppenheimer..15. Schools - Bruce Mitchell and Jean Newall
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Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are... more
Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?
Research Interests: Storytelling and Rock Art
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The major focus of this work has been the patterning of Australian Aboriginal beads and their functions. This work started as an investigation into the relationship between Aboriginal material culture and drainage basins and led to the... more
The major focus of this work has been the patterning of Australian Aboriginal beads and their functions. This work started as an investigation into the relationship between Aboriginal material culture and drainage basins and led to the role of beads in determining past human
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El Niño cave, located on the south-eastern border of the Spanish Meseta, hosts a discontinuous sequence including Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic levels, along with Upper Palaeolithic and Levantine style paintings. It is a key site for... more
El Niño cave, located on the south-eastern border of the Spanish Meseta, hosts a discontinuous sequence including Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic levels, along with Upper Palaeolithic and Levantine style paintings. It is a key site for understanding human occupations of inland Iberia during the Palaeolithic and early prehistory. This paper summarises the main results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at defining the prehistoric human occupations at the site.
Research Interests: Geography, Archaeology, Rock Art (Archaeology), Palaeolithic Archaeology, Mesolithic Archaeology, and 11 moreNeolithic Archaeology, Iberian Prehistory (Archaeology), Prehistory, Middle Palaeolithic, Cave, Rock Art, Middle Paleolithic, Upper Palaeolithic, Cave Painting, Middle Stone Age, and Rock Shelter
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This chapter addresses questions about the emergence of art, sign, and representation, showing what these categories mean as applied to the archaeological record and how evidence of them may relate to the evolution of human cognitive... more
This chapter addresses questions about the emergence of art, sign, and representation, showing what these categories mean as applied to the archaeological record and how evidence of them may relate to the evolution of human cognitive capacities. It goes beyond the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic to consider marked or decorated objects from significantly older sites associated with Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa and Indonesia, Neanderthals in Europe, and Homo erectus in Trinil, Java. The materials evidence a range of graphic production across significant space and time. They indicate the emergence of graphic expression and its role in human evolution is much more complex than traditional Eurocentric model, as well as more recent models, allow. The review points to problems with the current epistemology of symbolic evolution and emphasizes how the use of “art” and other traditional artifact classes bias interpretations of prehistoric behaviors and models of when and why symbolling em...
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This paper examines the impact the massacre at Myall Creek had on subsequent frontier interactions in other parts of Australia. It is argued that its aftermath in the region then known as Northern NSW, where a Native Police force was... more
This paper examines the impact the massacre at Myall Creek had on subsequent frontier interactions in other parts of Australia. It is argued that its aftermath in the region then known as Northern NSW, where a Native Police force was formed a decade later was extensive and that Aboriginal responses to the event provide new insights, including how people from different Aboriginal groups at the time may have heard about Myall Creek and other violent clashes with white settlers, and how their families remember frontier conflict today.
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The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia’s most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained... more
The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia’s most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained economic success of Queensland for over half a century, and their widespread, devastating effects on Aboriginal societies across the colony, have left a complex legacy. For non-Indigenous Queenslanders, a process of obscuring the Native Mounted Police began perhaps as soon as a detachment was removed from an area, reflected today in the minimisation of the Native Mounted Police in official histories and their omission from non-Indigenous heritage lists. In contrast, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Database preserves several elements of frontier conflict and Native Mounted Police presence, giving rise to parallel state-level narratives, neither of which map directly onto local and regional memory. This highlights potential issues for formal processes of t...
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The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia's most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained... more
The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia's most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained economic success of Queensland for over half a century, and their widespread, devastating effects on Aboriginal societies across the colony, have left a complex legacy. For non-Indigenous Queenslanders, a process of obscuring the Native Mounted Police began perhaps as soon as a detachment was removed from an area, reflected today in the minimisation of the Native Mounted Police in official histories and their omission from non-Indigenous heritage lists. In contrast, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Database preserves several elements of frontier conflict and Native Mounted Police presence, giving rise to parallel state-level narratives, neither of which map directly onto local and regional memory. This highlights potential
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Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that... more
Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that subject, and the seer. Through the stories of the producer and the seers, this system implicated members of society in ways that were not limited to the images produced. By tying those stories to particular places, rock art influenced society more broadly through foraging choices and ritual. Because the persisting marks of rock art necessarily required storytelling, the stories penetrated the mental lives of people in the society. Interwoven with these considerations is the observation that for archaeologists, the producer, the stories and the original seers are gone and all that is left is the material of the rock art and the archaeologist. Writing archaeohistory from these materials requires interpretation in light of the archaeological evidence dis...
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The Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology has continued its extensive and intensive involvement in research, some of which concerns material from Queensland.
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Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that... more
Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that subject, and the seer. Through the stories of the producer and the seers, this system implicated members of society in ways that were not limited to the images produced. By tying those stories to particular places, rock art influenced society more broadly through foraging choices and ritual. Because the persisting marks of rock art necessarily required storytelling, the stories penetrated the mental lives of people in the society. Interwoven with these considerations is the observation that for archaeologists, the producer, the stories and the original seers are gone and all that is left is the material of the rock art and the archaeologist. Writing archaeohistory from these materials requires interpretation in light of the archaeological evidence distributed across both space and time. One way of interpreting archaeohistory suggests that rock art played a significant role in cognitive evolution through its engagement in ritual. Archaeohistory, rock art and the narratives that underlie oral history Cambridge Archaeological Journal
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Iain Davidson book review of Hallam, S. J. (1975). Fire and hearth: a study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in south-western Australia. Canberra, ACT: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
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One of the motivations for this collection of papers was articulated by one of us in an earlier publication that was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22): It seems likely that there is an argument to be... more
One of the motivations for this collection of papers was articulated by one of us in an earlier publication that was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22): It seems likely that there is an argument to be developed here about the emergence of the ‘Western’ styles of scene representation (which is by no means confi ned to Western rock art traditions). Just as the emergence of naturalism through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world during the European Renaissance, so changes in the ways images of animals were represented with other animals probably testify to changes in the ways people saw the world. The initial intent was to explore the question of scenes in the Paleolithic broadly, but then the question was expanded to include rock and cave art from later periods. It has been traditional to state that there are few representations of scenes in the Upper Paleolithic Cave art of Western Europe. Davidson (Ch. 1) reviews some of the ways the absence of scenes in Paleolithic art has been represented in textbooks over the last sixty years or more. In general, it has persistently proved to be true that scenes do not appear to be common in the art on the cave walls. On the other hand, Davidson (Ch. 1), Culley (Ch. 12) and Villaverde (Ch. 15) demonstrate that the view is distorted by the concentration on cave art to the neglect of portable art that is contemporary with it. Van Gelder and Nowell (Ch. 13) show also that the distortion derives from emphasizing representations of animals at the expense of other markings on the cave walls. When attention is turned to images engraved on bones or on plaquettes of stone or to more nuanced understandings of what constitutes a scene, scenes are not so rare. This suggested that the presence or absence of scenes might help reveal how the image making was used by the societies of the artists. Importantly, recent work by Fritz, Tossello, and Lenssen-Erz (2013) has addressed the problem of the lack of conventional scenes in cave art, identifying some instances where animals seem to have been represented with the ground on which they would be seen. The project, then, had its beginnings with one particular defi nition of how a scene might be recognized and has morphed, through the successive defi nitions by different authors in the book, into a broader discussion of scenes in rock art. The hope is that our broadening can contribute to correcting ideas about scenes that took hold early and have persisted despite general knowledge of exceptions that proved those ideas wrong. Kelly and David (Ch. 4) outline one history of the concept of scenes in rock art, and Lenssen-Erz and colleagues (Ch. 6) also address that history.
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Esta obra recoge los resultados de un amplio proyecto de investigación multidisciplinar destinado a revisar y analizar de forma integral el yacimiento arqueológico. Concentra en un mismo volumen toda la información disponible sobre el... more
Esta obra recoge los resultados de un amplio proyecto de investigación multidisciplinar destinado a revisar y analizar de forma integral el yacimiento arqueológico. Concentra en un mismo volumen toda la información disponible sobre el yacimiento, la historia de su investigación y su secuencia estratigráfica y cronológica. Supone la más completa y actualizada compilación sobre este yacimiento, único en la provincia.
Research Interests: Humanities, Iberian Prehistory (Archaeology), Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula, Arqueología, Middle Palaeolithic, and 11 morePrehistoric Rock Art, Rock Art, Archaeological Excavation, Middle Paleolithic, Arte Rupestre, Prehistoria, Upper Palaeolithic, Neolítico, Paleolítico, Discussion on Spanish Levantine rock art, and Upper Paleolithic Art
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Research Interests: Archaeology and Rock Art
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This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relation to historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence that may be called... more
This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relation to
historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence
that may be called archaeohistories. There are issues about the ways in which we learn about
Indigenous peoples, sometimes using non-Indigenous people as intermediaries and sometimes,
though rarely, in the direct voices of Indigenous peoples. This article discusses the relationships
among oral history, oral tradition, history from written texts, and archaeohistory, including the role of
sanctication in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the
accuracies of these sources given the dierent time and personal scales over which they operate.
Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in dierent
parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include
narratives about dierent sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the
complex interplay of memory and forgetting, veriable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and
dierent classes of historical knowledge. Application of dierent cultural knowledge to these sources
by dierent agents produces dierent accounts of the past.
historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence
that may be called archaeohistories. There are issues about the ways in which we learn about
Indigenous peoples, sometimes using non-Indigenous people as intermediaries and sometimes,
though rarely, in the direct voices of Indigenous peoples. This article discusses the relationships
among oral history, oral tradition, history from written texts, and archaeohistory, including the role of
sanctication in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the
accuracies of these sources given the dierent time and personal scales over which they operate.
Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in dierent
parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include
narratives about dierent sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the
complex interplay of memory and forgetting, veriable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and
dierent classes of historical knowledge. Application of dierent cultural knowledge to these sources
by dierent agents produces dierent accounts of the past.
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190 La Cueva del Niño fue oficialmente descubierta a comienzos de mayo de 1970. Aunque la cavidad ya se conocía con anterioridad y había sido visitada por vecinos de la zona, el descubrimiento se atribuye a Esteban Rodríguez Tercero,... more
190 La Cueva del Niño fue oficialmente descubierta a comienzos de
mayo de 1970. Aunque la cavidad ya se conocía con anterioridad y había
sido visitada por vecinos de la zona, el descubrimiento se atribuye a
Esteban Rodríguez Tercero, Emilio Rodríguez Tercero y Benito García
Roldán, quienes tras visitar la cueva informaron de la presencia de pinturas rupestres en su interior. La cavidad fue entonces visitada por Samuel
de los Santos, director del Museo de Albacete, quien tras constatar la
relevancia de las representaciones rupestres dio aviso del descubrimiento
a la Dirección General de Bellas Artes. Tras este aviso, la cueva es visitada por Almagro Gorbea (1971), por aquel entonces Conservador del
Museo Arqueológico Nacional, quien certifica la autenticidad y carácter
paleolítico de las pinturas, lo que conlleva el cierre de la misma en el mes
de agosto. También en el mes de mayo de 1970 se descubren las pinturas
rupestres de estilo Levantino situadas en el abrigo exterior de la cavidad,
gracias a tres vecinos de Aýna que visitaron la cueva pocos días después
del descubrimiento, pero antes de que fuese anunciado: Agustín Ortega,
Lorenzo Marco y Eusebio González, quien informó a Almagro Gorbea
de su existencia (Almagro Gorbea, 1971).
mayo de 1970. Aunque la cavidad ya se conocía con anterioridad y había
sido visitada por vecinos de la zona, el descubrimiento se atribuye a
Esteban Rodríguez Tercero, Emilio Rodríguez Tercero y Benito García
Roldán, quienes tras visitar la cueva informaron de la presencia de pinturas rupestres en su interior. La cavidad fue entonces visitada por Samuel
de los Santos, director del Museo de Albacete, quien tras constatar la
relevancia de las representaciones rupestres dio aviso del descubrimiento
a la Dirección General de Bellas Artes. Tras este aviso, la cueva es visitada por Almagro Gorbea (1971), por aquel entonces Conservador del
Museo Arqueológico Nacional, quien certifica la autenticidad y carácter
paleolítico de las pinturas, lo que conlleva el cierre de la misma en el mes
de agosto. También en el mes de mayo de 1970 se descubren las pinturas
rupestres de estilo Levantino situadas en el abrigo exterior de la cavidad,
gracias a tres vecinos de Aýna que visitaron la cueva pocos días después
del descubrimiento, pero antes de que fuese anunciado: Agustín Ortega,
Lorenzo Marco y Eusebio González, quien informó a Almagro Gorbea
de su existencia (Almagro Gorbea, 1971).
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Cuckadoo 1 rockshelter is situated 120km south of Cloncurry on the west bank of Sandy Creek, which drains south from the Selwyn Range into Lake Eyre, by way of the Georgina River. In this paper we discuss the stratigraphy, the artefacts... more
Cuckadoo 1 rockshelter is situated 120km south of Cloncurry on the west bank of Sandy Creek, which drains south from the Selwyn Range into Lake Eyre, by way of the Georgina River. In this paper we discuss the stratigraphy, the artefacts and the pattern of dates of occupation revealed by the excavations at Cuckadoo 1.
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Davidson, I. (1989). Freedom of information: aspects of art and society in western Europe during the last ice age. In H. Morphy (Ed.), Animals into art (pp. 440-456). London: Unwin Hyman.
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Abstract This chapter is about how we go about writing archaeohistory, a form of history written about the deep past from archaeological evidence. It is oriented towards an understanding that all knowledge is a product of the histories... more
Abstract
This chapter is about how we go about writing archaeohistory, a form of history written about the deep past from archaeological evidence. It is oriented towards an understanding that all knowledge is a product of the histories of the systems that produce it. Knowledge in the present is literally colonised by prior knowledge in the past. Writing such an archaeohistory of hominin and human evolution depends on knowing about the evolution of biology, behaviour and cognition since we shared ancestry and cognition with the ancestors of apes. How we know about them turn out to depend on how we knew about them in the past. Within the process of evolution, modern humans emerged, but because of problems of definition, the history of that emergence is an invention of scholars.
This paper will argue that ‘human origins’ is about the origins of people who are like the author and the readers in every respect as a result of using language. The paper and each of its sections has a title derived from ‘LOLspeak’ but with a deliberately different expansion of the acronym. The intention of this device is to keep to the fore the defining characteristic of language that meanings are conventional.
This chapter is about how we go about writing archaeohistory, a form of history written about the deep past from archaeological evidence. It is oriented towards an understanding that all knowledge is a product of the histories of the systems that produce it. Knowledge in the present is literally colonised by prior knowledge in the past. Writing such an archaeohistory of hominin and human evolution depends on knowing about the evolution of biology, behaviour and cognition since we shared ancestry and cognition with the ancestors of apes. How we know about them turn out to depend on how we knew about them in the past. Within the process of evolution, modern humans emerged, but because of problems of definition, the history of that emergence is an invention of scholars.
This paper will argue that ‘human origins’ is about the origins of people who are like the author and the readers in every respect as a result of using language. The paper and each of its sections has a title derived from ‘LOLspeak’ but with a deliberately different expansion of the acronym. The intention of this device is to keep to the fore the defining characteristic of language that meanings are conventional.
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This study began from a concern about how to describe variation within Australian Aboriginal societies. Analyses of the variation in material culture in Australia have been relatively underemphasised since scholars became disillusioned... more
This study began from a concern about how to describe variation within
Australian Aboriginal societies. Analyses of the variation in material culture
in Australia have been relatively underemphasised since scholars became disillusioned
with the hyper-diffusionist assumptions that drove the pioneering
studies by D.S. Davidson (Davidson 1930, 1933, 1934, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c,
1936a, 1936b, 1937a, 1937b, 1937c, 1937d). The present study addressed one
particular approach to variation that derives from Peterson’s (1976a) discussion
of the possibility of defining ‘culture areas’ in Australia delimited by drainage
basins. Peterson’s approach used an analogy with an analysis that had been
applied in North America, and was presented at a conference celebrating the
careers of Birdsell and Tindale, and reflected the interests of its time in territoriality
and ecology (Peterson 1976b). It did not contain any conclusive analysis
showing that social, material or linguistic evidence could be grouped into such
‘culture areas’ in Australia. The approach is now best known through Horton’s
use of drainage basins to group the languages of Australia on a map (Horton
1994). Language groupings were also a theme of Peterson’s initial proposition.
Bowern’s (Bowern and Atkinson 2012) phylogenetic analysis of the relations
among Pama-Nyungan (PN) languages shows that the drainage basins are not
a good way to group languages because many overlap the boundaries of the
basins. That analysis also shows that the historical relationships among the languages
make such bounding ahistorical.
Australian Aboriginal societies. Analyses of the variation in material culture
in Australia have been relatively underemphasised since scholars became disillusioned
with the hyper-diffusionist assumptions that drove the pioneering
studies by D.S. Davidson (Davidson 1930, 1933, 1934, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c,
1936a, 1936b, 1937a, 1937b, 1937c, 1937d). The present study addressed one
particular approach to variation that derives from Peterson’s (1976a) discussion
of the possibility of defining ‘culture areas’ in Australia delimited by drainage
basins. Peterson’s approach used an analogy with an analysis that had been
applied in North America, and was presented at a conference celebrating the
careers of Birdsell and Tindale, and reflected the interests of its time in territoriality
and ecology (Peterson 1976b). It did not contain any conclusive analysis
showing that social, material or linguistic evidence could be grouped into such
‘culture areas’ in Australia. The approach is now best known through Horton’s
use of drainage basins to group the languages of Australia on a map (Horton
1994). Language groupings were also a theme of Peterson’s initial proposition.
Bowern’s (Bowern and Atkinson 2012) phylogenetic analysis of the relations
among Pama-Nyungan (PN) languages shows that the drainage basins are not
a good way to group languages because many overlap the boundaries of the
basins. That analysis also shows that the historical relationships among the languages
make such bounding ahistorical.
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The Myall Creek Massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people on 10 June 1838 (Figure 1), was one of the key events in the ongoing frontier war between settlers or intruders and the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. The massacre was an act of... more
The Myall Creek Massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people on 10 June 1838 (Figure 1), was one of the key events in the ongoing frontier war between settlers or intruders and the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. The massacre was an act of brutal murder, for which eleven non-Aboriginal perpetrators were tried and seven were hanged. As Lyndall Ryan points out in another chapter in this book, there had been a number of mass killings of Gomeroi and Wirrayaraay people in the region over the previous year with the loss of many hundreds of lives. The Myall Creek Massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people and subsequent trial had a direct impact on policing in the colony, and affected the lives of people from different Aboriginal nations across eastern Australia. In this chapter we explore the aftermath of the Myall Creek Massacre in Queensland, where a Native Police force was formed a decade later. We also examine evidence for Aboriginal responses to the event in the past and the present, considering how people from different Aboriginal groups at the time may have heard about Myall Creek and other violent clashes with white settlers, and how their families remember frontier conflict today.
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In G. A. Clark (Ed.), Perspectives on the past. Theoretical biases in Mediterranean hunter-gatherer research (pp. 194-203). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Images of animals are among the most frequent marks people made on rock surfaces. They occur around the world in more than 100 countries, in caves, rock shelters and in the open air. They were made as early as about 40,000 years ago until... more
Images of animals are among the most frequent marks people made on rock surfaces. They occur around the world in more than 100 countries, in caves, rock shelters and in the open air. They were made as early as about 40,000 years ago until very recently. Between those dates and across those regions, there is much variation in the way images of animals have come down to us. Sometimes the species are difficult to identify, more often they are not, but the images are nevertheless variably stylised. The images occur singly (rather rarely) or in various combinations with other animals and with images of people. Scenes that take a form familiar to people accustomed to seeing paintings and sculptures in art galleries are rare for some times and places, but quite usual for others. Sometimes images of animals are combined with images of people either where the people wear parts of animals, or where images of the two appear in combination. Determining how to interpret images of animals is complicated by that fact that most ethnographic accounts of attitudes to animals and to making images depend on knowledge of the expressed views of the present day people. It is hazardous to attempt to infer the meanings from the images alone, at least in part because of variation through time and space. Nevertheless, it seems likely that differences between sets of images imply different worldviews, although similarities do not in themselves necessarily signify similar worldviews.
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This chapter, addresses questions about the emergence of art, sign, and representation, showing what these categories mean as applied to the archaeological record and how evidence of them may relate to the evolution of human cognitive... more
This chapter, addresses questions about the emergence of art, sign, and representation, showing what these categories mean as applied to the archaeological record and how evidence of them may relate to the evolution of human cognitive capacities. It goes beyond the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic to consider marked or decorated objects from significantly older sites associated with Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa and Indonesia, Neanderthals in Europe, and Homo erectus in Trinil, Java. The materials evidence a range of graphic production across significant space and time. They indicate the emergence of graphic expression and its role in human evolution is much more complex than traditional Eurocentric model, as well as more recent models, allow. The review points to problems with the current epistemology of symbolic evolution and emphasizes how the use of 'art' and other traditional artifact classes bias interpretations of prehistoric behaviors and models of when and why symbolling emerged.
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I have been encouraged by the example of two of my friends to write down these thoughts about the crisis in Palestine. The issues are terribly complicated because they involve the passionately held beliefs of people with long histories of... more
I have been encouraged by the example of two of my friends to write down these thoughts about the crisis in Palestine. The issues are terribly complicated because they involve the passionately held beliefs of people with long histories of passionately held beliefs. So I have tried to simplify my thoughts, and to avoid getting enmeshed in those beliefs. Clearly Israelis cannot be expected to yield to the passionately held beliefs of the Palestinians and the Palestinians cannot be expected to yield to those of the Israelis. The ideas from which we must hope they find solutions must come from more general principles. And we must hope that both sides can see that the only solutions that can work must involve both sides accepting one set of principles that do not derive from their own passionately held beliefs.
Although the historical record relating to nineteenth century frontier conflict between Aboriginal groups and Europeans in Queensland has been clearly documented, there have been limited associated archaeological studies. As part of the... more
Although the historical record relating to nineteenth century frontier conflict between Aboriginal groups and Europeans in Queensland has been clearly documented, there have been limited associated archaeological studies. As part of the Archaeology of the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP) project, this paper canvasses the physical imprint of frontier conflict across Queensland between 1849 and the early 1900s, focusing specifically on the activities and camp sites of the NMP, the government-sanctioned paramilitary force tasked with policing Aboriginal people to protect settler livelihoods. At least 148 NMP camps of varying duration once existed, and historical and archaeological investigations of these demonstrate some consistent patterning amongst them, as well as idiosyncrasies depending on individual locations and circumstances. All camps were positioned with primary regard to the availability of water and forage. Owing to their intended temporary nature and the frugality of the government, the surviving structural footprints of camps are generally limited. Buildings were typically timber slab and bark constructions with few permanent foundations and surviving architectural features are therefore rare, limited to elements such as ant bed flooring, remnant house or yard posts, stone lines demarcating pathways, and stone fireplaces. Architectural forms of spatial confinement, such as lockups or palisades, were absent from the camps themselves. The most distinctive features of NMP camps, and what allows them to be distinguished from the myriad pastoral sites of similar ages, are their artefact assemblages, especially the combined presence of gilt uniform buttons with the Victoria Regina insignia, knapped bottle glass, and certain ammunition-related objects.
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Although the historical record relating to nineteenth century frontier conflict between Aboriginal groups and Europeans in Queensland has been clearly documented, there have been limited associated archaeological studies. As part of the... more
Although the historical record relating to nineteenth century frontier conflict between Aboriginal groups and Europeans in Queensland has been clearly documented, there have been limited associated archaeological studies. As part of the Archaeology of the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP) project, this paper canvasses the physical imprint of frontier conflict across Queensland between 1849 and the early 1900s, focusing specifically on the activities and camp sites of the NMP, the government-sanctioned paramilitary force tasked with policing Aboriginal people to protect settler livelihoods. At least 148 NMP camps of varying duration once existed, and historical and archaeological investigations of these demonstrate some consistent patterning amongst them, as well as idiosyncrasies depending on individual locations and circumstances. All camps were positioned with primary regard to the availability of water and forage. Owing to their intended temporary nature and the frugality of the government, the surviving structural footprints of camps are generally limited. Buildings were typically timber slab and bark constructions with few permanent foundations and surviving architectural features are therefore rare, limited to elements such as ant bed flooring, remnant house or yard posts, stone lines demarcating pathways, and stone fireplaces. Architectural forms of spatial confinement, such as lockups or palisades, were absent from the camps themselves. The most distinctive features of NMP camps, and what allows them to be distinguished from the myriad pastoral sites of similar ages, are their artefact assemblages, especially the combined presence of gilt uniform buttons with the Victoria Regina insignia, knapped bottle glass, and certain ammunition-related objects.
One of the motivations for this collection of papers was articulated by one of us in an earlier publication that was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22): It seems likely that there is an argument to be... more
One of the motivations for this collection of papers was articulated by one of us in an earlier publication that
was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22):
It seems likely that there is an argument to be developed here about the emergence of the ‘Western’ styles of scene
representation (which is by no means confi ned to Western rock art traditions). Just as the emergence of naturalism
through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world
during the European Renaissance, so changes in the ways images of animals were represented with other animals
probably testify to changes in the ways people saw the world.
The initial intent was to explore the question of scenes in the Paleolithic broadly, but then the question was
expanded to include rock and cave art from later periods. It has been traditional to state that there are few
representations of scenes in the Upper Paleolithic Cave art of Western Europe. Davidson (Ch. 1) reviews some
of the ways the absence of scenes in Paleolithic art has been represented in textbooks over the last sixty years
or more. In general, it has persistently proved to be true that scenes do not appear to be common in the art on
the cave walls. On the other hand, Davidson (Ch. 1), Culley (Ch. 12) and Villaverde (Ch. 15) demonstrate that
the view is distorted by the concentration on cave art to the neglect of portable art that is contemporary with
it. Van Gelder and Nowell (Ch. 13) show also that the distortion derives from emphasizing representations of
animals at the expense of other markings on the cave walls. When attention is turned to images engraved on
bones or on plaquettes of stone or to more nuanced understandings of what constitutes a scene, scenes are
not so rare. This suggested that the presence or absence of scenes might help reveal how the image making
was used by the societies of the artists. Importantly, recent work by Fritz, Tossello, and Lenssen-Erz (2013)
has addressed the problem of the lack of conventional scenes in cave art, identifying some instances where
animals seem to have been represented with the ground on which they would be seen.
The project, then, had its beginnings with one particular defi nition of how a scene might be recognized
and has morphed, through the successive defi nitions by different authors in the book, into a broader discussion
of scenes in rock art. The hope is that our broadening can contribute to correcting ideas about
scenes that took hold early and have persisted despite general knowledge of exceptions that proved those
ideas wrong. Kelly and David (Ch. 4) outline one history of the concept of scenes in rock art, and Lenssen-Erz
and colleagues (Ch. 6) also address that history.
was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22):
It seems likely that there is an argument to be developed here about the emergence of the ‘Western’ styles of scene
representation (which is by no means confi ned to Western rock art traditions). Just as the emergence of naturalism
through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world
during the European Renaissance, so changes in the ways images of animals were represented with other animals
probably testify to changes in the ways people saw the world.
The initial intent was to explore the question of scenes in the Paleolithic broadly, but then the question was
expanded to include rock and cave art from later periods. It has been traditional to state that there are few
representations of scenes in the Upper Paleolithic Cave art of Western Europe. Davidson (Ch. 1) reviews some
of the ways the absence of scenes in Paleolithic art has been represented in textbooks over the last sixty years
or more. In general, it has persistently proved to be true that scenes do not appear to be common in the art on
the cave walls. On the other hand, Davidson (Ch. 1), Culley (Ch. 12) and Villaverde (Ch. 15) demonstrate that
the view is distorted by the concentration on cave art to the neglect of portable art that is contemporary with
it. Van Gelder and Nowell (Ch. 13) show also that the distortion derives from emphasizing representations of
animals at the expense of other markings on the cave walls. When attention is turned to images engraved on
bones or on plaquettes of stone or to more nuanced understandings of what constitutes a scene, scenes are
not so rare. This suggested that the presence or absence of scenes might help reveal how the image making
was used by the societies of the artists. Importantly, recent work by Fritz, Tossello, and Lenssen-Erz (2013)
has addressed the problem of the lack of conventional scenes in cave art, identifying some instances where
animals seem to have been represented with the ground on which they would be seen.
The project, then, had its beginnings with one particular defi nition of how a scene might be recognized
and has morphed, through the successive defi nitions by different authors in the book, into a broader discussion
of scenes in rock art. The hope is that our broadening can contribute to correcting ideas about
scenes that took hold early and have persisted despite general knowledge of exceptions that proved those
ideas wrong. Kelly and David (Ch. 4) outline one history of the concept of scenes in rock art, and Lenssen-Erz
and colleagues (Ch. 6) also address that history.