Martin Gibbs

Shipwreck survivor camps are a neglected terrestrial com-ponent of maritime archaeology, usually being investigated purely as an adjunct to work on the associated wreck site. Most studies have considered these sites as individual and unique, molded by the particulars of the historic events that created them. However, by considering the history, anthro-pology, and archaeology of a series of Australasian survivor incidents and sites, this paper highlights common elements and themes, which allow examination of these sites within a comparative framework. These include the development of authority structures, social organization, salvage and subsis-tence strategies, material culture, short-and long-term rescue strategies, and the possible influences of crisis-related stress upon the decisions made by individuals and groups. Survivor camp studies are linked into the wider concerns of maritime archaeology and anthropology by placing them within the context of wreck formation models.

The mid-nineteenth-century shore-based whaling stations scattered along the western and southern Western Allstralian coasts were often at the extreme edge of the frontier of European settlement. This paper explores the archaeological evidence for food supply at the Cheyne Beach whaling station, northeast of Albany. It establishes that, despite the difficulties of supply, the occupants of the station retained a heavy reliance on sheep in preference to either salted meats or readily accessible native fauna. It is suggested that this may have been a result of dietary preference, but could also result from whaling requiring a state of constant preparedness that kept the workers in the immediate vicinity of the site and unable to undertake hunting or farming activities.

This paper describes a long-term historical archaeological field training program, formalised during the 1990s as the Midwest Archaeological Survey, which developed in concert with and was largely funded by a local community in Northampton, Western Australia. While a series of crises in Indigenous archaeology in Australia have driven a new found interest in engagements between archaeologists and descent communities, we observe that the tradition of collecting oral histories and the involvement of local people in rural historical archaeologies in Australia has meant that the engagements of communities and historical archaeologies have developed as part of a different trajectory to that described in several papers in this volume; in particular, it is one which has largely not been enforced by the State, unlike the case of Indigenous archaeology. We also draw out the various collaborations that developed as a part of this project between students, project organisers and local community...

Over the last half a decade or more professional archaeologists have been voicing a deepening sense of dissatisfaction with both undergraduate training and opportunities for graduate skill development. Much of this appears to arise from continuing transformations in industry directions and needs colliding with a period of significant reduction in university staff numbers and capabilities. This paper presents the results of both a qualitative questionnaire and an informal discussion on the AUSARCH-L listserver, setting out the nature of some of these concerns and identifying some possible areas where consistency and agreement might be reached. Introduction There is little doubt that many Australian archaeologists feel that there is a crisis with the standard of new (and in some instances not-so-new) graduates. This situation is frequently, and on occasion angrily, articulated to university-based archaeologists as their failure to train students so that they meet the current needs or ...

The development of an archaeological and heritage consultancy industry external to Australian universities has also created a strong market demand for archaeology graduates with understanding and experience of Australian archaeology and heritage practice. The ...

ABSTRACT In the early years of the twentieth century, anthropologists recorded evidence for the movement of the circumcision rite into the non-circumcising southwest region of Western Australia. Archaeological and linguistic evidence from central Australia suggests that this may have been a continuation of an expansion of the boundaries of the Western Desert 'cultural group' which began almost 1,500 years ago. This paper considers how the sorts of social mechanisms recorded during the historic period for the push of circumcision into the southwest, what we will characterise here as 'ritual engines', may well inform on much wider processes responsible for the remarkable geographic spread and speed of the transmission of the Western Desert culture group. Introduction Australian archaeologists have frequently alluded to long-term cultural change as an explanation for shifts in artefact types, raw material distributions and graphic vocabularies. It is presumed that these transitions in the archaeological record are in many instances indicative of wider transformations in social, economic and ritual relationships across various kinds of cultural boundaries. However, the reality is that once we stray away from environmental determinism we have almost no genuine examples or models of why or how such changes have occurred in Australia. One of the major and most widely recognised 'boundaries' in Aboriginal Australia is the so-called 'circumcision/subincision line', demarcating the division between major ritual and cultural traditions, namely the inland Western Desert culture bloc versus a number of other culture areas ranged along the coastal fringe (Figure 1). The presence of this border on Tindale's (1974) and other maps has lent it an air of immutability. However, in this paper we will argue that this line represents not a boundary, but a rapidly moving frontier of cultural change. Specifically, we attempt to connect archaeological evidence for the emergence and spread of 'Western Desert' cultural practices over the last 1,500 years to the historically-documented processes of the introduction of the circumcision rite into central and southwest Western Australia within the last 160 years. In particular, we will argue that the remarkable geographic spread and speed of transmission was driven by a set of social imperatives that we will characterise here as 'ritual engines'. The Emergence and Spread of 'Western Desert' Culture From an archaeological perspective, earlier characterisations of the Western Desert culture bloc have

This study focuses on the archaeology of the c.1835–1877 Prisoner Barracks constructed at Port Arthur, the domestic quarters for civilian, military and incarcerated occupants spanning almost the entire convict period. Faunal and artefact analyses of the assemblage uncovered at this site were used to provide a more complex understanding of institutional life. The quality of life of the occupants, and how they chose
to improve it, is identified through a range of documentary and archaeological sources. It is shown that the barracks complex was a place of domestic life within the confines of an institution. It is evident in the material culture that everyday activities of occupants included the preparation of food, presentation of the home and self, manual tasks such as the production of domestic items, and recreational activities
including tobacco smoking and hunting. By assessing indicators of quality of life within an institutional framework, namely the supply of local and imported goods and the material culture of recreation, this work is able to explore potential activities of the occupants that are often hidden from official records. This is examined through a number of scalar units, considering global, local and individual perspectives of the Prisoner Barracks’ landscape.

Excavation of three middens on Mwanihuki, located on the north coast of Makira in the southeast Solomon Islands has returned radiocarbon dates that show an initial occupation bracket between 3351 ± 42 BP and 2975 ± 21 BP (uncalibrated). The material culture of this phase consisted of a small amount of subsistence shell and worked chert, and an absence of any ceramics. This date range, along with the absence of the distinctive Lapita type dentate stamped pottery has aligned phasing of this site with the contemporaneous aceramic Vatuluma Posovi cave site in central Guadalcanal.

We present the results of instrumental neutron activation analysis of ceramics recovered from the Solomon Islands, associated with Alvaro de Mendaña y Neira’s 16th century colonizing expedition to the region (c.1595–6). Based on the chemical and typological data and previously published petrological and geochronological research, this study assigns the provenance of the ceramics variously to Peru, Panama, Spain, China and Thailand. A comparison of the provenance results with historical records related to Mendaña’s voyage also shows the value of the archaeological assemblage in providing a detailed picture of provisioned ceramic types and their provenance.

We present U-Pb ages of zircons extracted from olive jars recovered from two sites associated with Alvaro de Mendan˜a y Neyra’s colonising expedition to the Solomon Islands, c. 1595–1596 A.D. The olive jars were previously associated with Panamanian and Peruvian origins based on petrological and geochemical studies. To further define provenance, 143 zircons were extracted from five olive jar sherds, analyzed and dated. The resultant U-Pb ages range from the Archaean to the Cenozoic (2977.2 ± 29.0–3.2 ± 4.0 Ma), but the dominance of Cretaceous and Palaeogene ages (∼ 90% of the total age population is between ∼ 145 and 23 Ma) supports a Peruvian origin based on comparative geology, with the Coastal Batholith of Peru a prime candidate area of ceramic production. These results are significant for the characterization of 16th Century Peruvian-made pottery and our understanding of its production and trade.

In 2009 we produced a series of edited video clips to demonstrate practical methods to archaeology students at the University of Sydney. The videos were made publicly accessible on the internet via YouTube and incorporated into teaching of an undergraduate archaeological field methods unit in 2010 and 2011. This paper outlines the authors’ experiences of making and using the videos for teaching and discusses results of student questionnaire feedback about the videos and the unit. The results provide insight into the effectiveness of different ways of teaching practical archaeology in the context of large class sizes and limited resources, and the potential of using digital video technologies to communicate archaeology to students and other audiences.

We present evidence linking vessel forms with ceramic wares resulting from the petrological analysis of 33 sherds from two sixteenthcentury Spanish colonial sites in the Solomon Islands. Our results expand the range of fabric types previously published, and comparative literature analyses support earlier studies suggesting probable ceramic origins in the Americas and Spain.

The New South Wales Archaeology Online (NSW AOL) Project
aims to enhance the research, professional and educational
value of archaeological information by using digital
technology. Stages 1 and 2 (2009-13) involve collaboration
with the University of Sydney Library eScholarship
Repository and archaeologists studying colonial historic
places and archaeological sites in New South Wales. So far
the project has collected and digitised over 1000 hard-copy
reports produced mainly before the mid 1990s that document
previously unpublished heritage consultancy projects and
student research. This ‘grey literature’ is being archived and
content made publicly accessible online. The first version of
the current NSW AOL sustainable digital archive was launched
in March 2011 at http://nswaol.library.usyd.edu.au. This is
designed to support preservation of digital content into the
future, despite technology change, and is linked to a website
with full-text search functionality and facetted-browsing that
provides online access to over 600 PDF versions of digitised
hard-copy reports. Stage 2 (2011-3) will archive and make
further, and different kinds of, information accessible. Here
we explain the background to the NSW AOL Project and our
approach to creating a sustainable, scalable and interoperable
digital archive and online publication. We outline the limits
and future potential of the current digital tools and discuss
key issues about digital preservation and online access facing
archaeology in many countries, including Australia.

This paper presents historical data from 19th century shore whaling stations along the Western Australian coast, complementing data already presented in an earlier 1985 analysis. In particular, catch records of the Castle Rock whaling station, Geographe Bay, Western Australia, for the period 1846–53 together with other contemporary records indicate that humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) comprised the majority of the colonial shore whalers’ catch. It is suggested that this could have been a result of a significant presence of American whale ships in the region in the early 1840s, which had presumably already reduced southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) numbers by the time these detailed colonial
records were kept.

The last ten years of archaeological research on convict sites in NSW has seen a wealth of new discoveries thanks to unprecedented access to urban settings as a result of the development boom in the greater Sydney area. Not surprisingly, the direction of research has therefore largely been dictated by the nature of these mitigation projects and consequently favors greater understanding of convict urban landscapes. However, the pressure to complete successive large scale projects, limited funding for post-excavation analysis and interpretation, a growing body of incomplete reports, and the lack of an overall framework for NSW convict archaeological studies has seen an uneven advance in our knowledge of convict life since the last review by Denis Gojak in 2001. This paper reports on some of the main discoveries and describes efforts by academic and professional archaeologists to collaborate and facilitate further convict research in NSW, especially further analysis and syntheses of material, through the Archaeology of Sydney Research Group, the NSW Archaeology Online grey literature project and targeted student research.

At the time of European invasion the Aboriginal people of the Swan Coastal Plain were engaged in a complex series of social economic and ceremonial networks which required regular face-to-face gatherings. The annual winter meeting at Barragup on the Serpentine River appears to have been one of the most important of these events, sustained by the operation of a wooden mungah fi shtrap which allowed harvesting of sea mullet (Mugil cephalus) and Australian salmon (Arripis truttaceus). This paper provides historical material on the nature and operation of the Barragup mungah and the associated gathering as part of an appreciation of the research of the ethnohistorical research
by Sylvia Hallam.

Understanding the processes of European expansion remains one of the key interests of historical archaeology. The study of colonization invariably crosses the boundaries between historical, indigenous, and maritime archaeologies, and demands that we draw upon a broad palette of theoretical and methodological approaches from all three fields as well as from cognate disciplines. In this essay I explore some of the structures of colonization, using my current research on the failed 16th century Spanish colonizations of the Solomon Islands. In particular I consider the separated halves of the 1595 Mendaña expedition: one group having a short-lived colony with a surviving documentary record, while the other survives only as an archaeological site where the nature and duration of occupation and the eventual fate of the colonists remains unknown. In trying to understand the apparent differences in the archaeological records of the two sites, I consider the importance of context as well as the significance of understanding the processes and pattern of colonization as means of comparison.

This paper presents alternative readings of the archaeology of a series of nineteenth-century industrial and convict sites in the midwest region of Western Australia. In particular it employs the biography of Joseph Horrocks a former convict turned mine manager, to reinterpret the relationship between these places, considering the agency of the individual and suggesting how his experiences at some sites may have influenced him to attempt to create an idealised industrial settlement aimed at assisting with the reform of convicts.

The application of remote sensing techniques to Australian
historical archaeological sites is becoming increasingly
popular, given the increased need for focused excavation
strategies or non-invasive investigations. Despite this, many
archaeologists remain unconvinced of the potential of
these techniques or misunderstand their capabilities. Three
commonly-used techniques – resistivity, magnetometry and
ground-penetrating radar – were applied to the site of the
1820s Hereford House in urban Sydney, now used as the Dr
H.J. Foley Rest Park. Given the urban setting and multiple
magnetic sources, magnetometry proved to be of limited use,
although resistivity and ground-penetrating radar provided
detailed information on subsurface archaeological structural
remains. Excavation showed a high correlation with the
remote sensing results.

The archaeological study of Aboriginal knapped glass
artefacts in Australia has focused almost entirely on glass
tool production, and more particularly, on the technology of
glass tool production (as opposed, for example, to the social
context of glass tool production). In this paper, we suggest
the value of an approach which foregrounds context in an
attempt to point towards new directions for knapped glass
artefact studies in Australia. We make reference to qualitative
fi eld observations of Aboriginal knapped glass artefacts
located on early copper and lead mining settlements from
mid-Western Australia, and return to pioneering work done
by Denis Byrne in the same region on silcrete artefacts to
illustrate our argument. In doing so, we note the ways in
which these studies demonstrate historically changing
approaches to the archaeological record by archaeologists
from the University of Western Australia, and our own work
as Sandra Bowdler’s students in the late 1980s and late
1990s respectively.

This paper describes a long-term historical archaeological field training program, formalised during the 1990s as the Midwest. Archaeological Survey, which developed in concert with and was largely funded by a local community in Northampton, Western Australia. While a series of crises in Indigenous archaeology in Australia have driven a well-found interest in engagements between archaeologists and descent communities, we observe that the tradition of collecting oral histories and the involvement of local people in rural historical archaeologies has meant that the engagements of broader communities and archaeologists have developed as part of a different trajectory to that described in several papers in this book. In particular, unlike the case of indigenous archaeology, it is one which has largely not been enforced by the State. We also draw out the various collaborations that developed as a part of this project between students) project organizers and local community members. Collaborations such as this one are not only generated by community desires to understand and conserve their heritage, but the project itself can be described as a kind of shared community, generating shared understandings of the past. We discuss the role of ordinary people in the community in interpreting the archaeological remains and the way in which each field trip was active iniH1JollJing an ever broadening community of local people and students, who were encouraged to assist in producing interpretations which fed into the overall project, We conclude with a discussion of the way in which various archaeological discoveries made during the project have generated a need for broader local interpretations of heritage and community.

Archaeological investigations of the convict systems that operated in Australia between 1788 and 1868 have invited a variety of interpretations ranging from exploration of ideologies of punishment and reform through to consideration of convictism as a colonisation strategy. The regional convict hiring system which operated in Western Australia from 1850 until c.1857 coincided with the initial expansion of European settlement into the midwest region. The fossilized landscape of the failed 1853 Lynton town site inclusive of the convict hiring depot, pensioner guard village and model farm allows us to explore some of the possible social and economic relationships intended to underpin both the introduction of unfree labour and the second stage of colonisation. It is suggested on the basis of the archaeological evidence that the Lynton landscape exhibits another manifestation of the 'yeoman ideal', with the convicts cast as agricultural/manual labour force and the pensioners as smallholders and tenant farmers servicing the pastoral elite.

Thirty years after Muckelroy’s seminal 1976 paper on shipwreck site formation, research on the cultural processes which contribute to the creation and modification of shipwrecks remains limited. It is proposed that by adopting a process-oriented framework, we can integrate and synthesize the documentary, oral and archaeological evidence of human response to shipwreck into a structure which parallels the physical progress of the disaster. Possible cultural responses to shipwreck are considered, from pre-voyage planning through to post-impact salvage, including physical correlations potentially visible in the archaeological
record.

This archaeological survey and geophysical ground penetrating radar (GPR) investigation was conducted on several sites on the grounds of Brickendon and Woolmers, two properties currently under nomination for heritage listing as part of the serial nomination of Australian convict sites. Both properties are associated with members of the extended Archer family and represent rural/farming landscapes closely associated with the convict Assignment phase of Tasmania’s history. Both properties have preserved significant numbers of early 19th century structures and retain the general aspect of their 19th century landscapes. However, in both instances there have been buildings and structures demolished over time, including the buildings thought to have been associated with housing at least some of the
convict workforce, usually referred to as ‘barracks’, although the nature of these structures remains unknown. As a contribution to the documentation and understanding of these key components of these landscapes, a GPR survey with recording of visible surface features was conducted of those areas on each property.