Jane Balme

Systematic excavation of Devil's Lair, a small limestone cave in the Cape Leeuwin-Cape Naturaliste area of south-western Austr-alia, began in 1970 by staff of the Western Australian Museum. Radiocarbon age estim-ates obtained from charcoal, suggest that the deposit accumulated in late ...

In this article we discuss responses to the threatened destruction of an Aboriginal police trackers hut in Halls Creek in the East Kimberley, Western Australia (Figure 1). These responses were recorded by us in late 1996 when we were commissioned by architects working for the ...

Western New South Wales is well known as one of the largest regional data sets of Pleistocene archaeological material in Australia. Dating of aeolian sediments has been possible through the archaeological accumula-tion and subsequent preservation of organic remains within ...

IntroductionRock art as a means to mark landscape (for example, David and Wilson 2002, Part 1) and to mark and reinforce group identity and distinguish it from 'other' (for example, Sanz et al. 2008) are common themes in the interpretation of rock art motif distribution across time and space. We have previously reported on changes in the rock art of the south central Kimberley region of Australia (Fig. 1) that appear to be associated with the European contact period (O'Connor et al. 2013; Balme and O'Connor 2014). In these papers we argued that, while the pre-European motifs of Ancestral Beings and other landscape marking motifs continued after European arrival, new styles of art appeared using new techniques and with motifs which we interpreted as emphasising group identity. Here we discuss an unusual panel in this contact period art of the region that seems to depart from this pattern in that it appears to mark individual identity, and we discuss the historical circumstances in which such a departure might occur.In Australia, Indigenous rock art images of European material culture and animals were a common response to European contact (Tacon et al. 2012). However, in the richly decorated cave and rocksheiter walls of the Devonian limestone reef system of the south central Kimberley, home of Bunuba and Gooniyandi people, such motifs are very rare. Despite over 20 years of archaeological research in the area, we have only found one panel, the subject of this paper, relating to the contact period that contains images of European material culture. However, rock art continued to be created and was refreshed until recent times and the rock art of the region remains an important part of Bunuba and Gooniyandi identity and connection to the landscape today.O'Connor et al. (2013) describes the rock art in the region that varies across time and space and includes anthropomorphs, phytomorphs, zoomorphs, geometric designs, and tracks using a variety of techniques including painting, engraving and drawing. On the basis of our interpretation of superimposition and oral testimony, we identified a new body of art within the region that we interpreted to be associated with the contact period (O'Connor et al. 2013; Balme and O'Connor 2014). While continuing to produce old motifs and long-used techniques of painting, drawing, stencilling and engraving, the new body introduces new motifs and two new techniques: scratch-work and dry black pigment drawing. Amongst this contact art, for the first time in this region, there are depictions of active figures with headdresses resembling those used in ceremonies by Bunuba and Gooniyandi people (Balme and O'Connor 2014). The active poses in ceremonial dress appear to self-reference rather than depict Ancestral Beings.In our previous work we suggested that these changes within the rock art may relate to the particular relations with Europeans during the contact period in the region. European expansion into the south central Kimberley did not begin until after land was released to settlers in 1881 and it was very rapid (Bolton and Pedersen 1980). Until about 1920, relations between Aboriginal people and Europeans were so violent that the period is often referred to as the 'killing times' by Aboriginal people (Kimberley Language Resource Centre 1996). Aboriginal movement was more restricted, making it difficult to access resources, including ochre, and so more use was made of abundant and accessible resources (charcoal) and techniques that did not require pigment (scratch-work) in the art. In this violent context Europeans and the objects that were the instruments of their control may have been unattractive (O'Connor et al. 2013:15) and could explain the lack of European motifs being introduced in the art. Instead, people continued the visual traditions of pre-contact, including Ancestral Beings such as the Wanjina-style figures that emphasised their relationship to the landscape (Blundell and Woolagoodja 2005) but added to these motifs to include depictions of people performing ceremonies - motifs that we suggest emphasised group identity (Balme and O'Connor 2014:38). …

Balme, J. (1983). Prehistoric fishing in the lower Darling, western New South Wales . pp. 19 32 in Clutton-Brock, J. & Grigson, C. (eds) Animals and Archaeology. Part 2. Shell Middens, Fishes and Birds. BAR International Series 183 . : . ... Reference record (intRefID=4831) created ...

The dingo, or native dog, arrived in Australia with people traveling on watercraft in the Late Holocene. By the time Europeans colonized the continent, dingoes were incorporated into the lives of Indigenous Australians, integrated into their kin systems and songlines, and used for a variety of purposes, including as companion animals, as guards, and as a biotechnology for hunting. Women, in particular, formed close bonds with dingoes, and they were widely used in women’s hunting. The incorporation of dingoes into Indigenous societies would therefore have had a significant impact on people’s lives. The greater contribution of meat to the diet would have allowed increased sedentism, improved fecundity, and therefore population growth. Such changes are hinted at in the archaeological record and indicate that more analysis of subsistence evidence could identify when and how the dingo–human relationship formed and how it varied in different environments across Australia.

Feminist knowledge and its impact on other academic disciplines arose in the 1970s, but it has had an uneven impact in different disciplines. We argue that gender as a theoretical concept has challenged both sociology and archaeology but analyses of gender practices and embodiment which challenge the homogenous categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ have made much less impact in archaeology – particularly the archaeology of deep time. The paper concludes by suggesting that feminist archaeology’s exploration of the origins of gender offers critical insights concerning the ways in which feminist sociologists defi ne their theories with and against the ‘Western folk model’ of sex and gender.

The economic life of the early colonisers of semi-arid western New South Wales is represented by many small open sites mainly preserved within sand dunes. Preservation of organic materials in this environment has been dependent upon rapid deposition of overlying sediments to protect them from erosion and degradation. Once uncovered, fragile material such as freshwater crustacea carapace and fish bone rapidly decays, shell fragments and disperses, while other materials such as fish otoliths and clay hearthstones survive much longer. An understanding of this problem has allowed analysis to proceed to the following results: 1. The 232 recorded archaeological sites containing faunal remains and associated with the water channels and lakes of the lower Darling River region in western New South Wales span a period of 27,000 years BP to the present. However preservation of materials within this time span is uneven both spatially and temporally. The distribution pattern of these archaeological sites in time and space is largely a reflection of past geomorphological processes rather than past cultural preference of campsite positions. 2. By noting the condition of the site materials it is possible to determine their contemporaneity to some extent. Typically a well- preserved Pleistocene site in the lower Darling River region consists of a single concentration of bivalve remains but species other than shell fish dominate some of the other Pleistocene sites. Sites dominated by other species, however, resemble the shell middens in that they characteristically consist of a single cluster of faunal remains. Species other than the dominant species are rare or absent. This suggests a foraging strategy in which collectors targeted a single species for each foraging expedition. 3. The large numbers of individual animals in some of the sites which represent such single expeditions indicate that the gathering of aquatic species was not incidental to basic survival strategies. In addition, the large numbers of fish present in such si [...]

Isobel White's article on Daisy Bates considers the case for and against the claim that Bates should be counted as an anthropologist. White decides in favour, largely on the basis of Bates' genuine contribution to anthropological knowledge and her innovative field methods, which ...

Supplemental material, Dilkes-Hall_etal_Supplemental_material for Evaluating human responses to ENSO driven climate change during the Holocene in northwest Australia through macrobotanical analyses by India Ella Dilkes-Hall, Jane Balme, Sue O'Connor and Emilie Dotte-Sarout in The Holocene

Review(s) of: The Illustrated History of Humankind, edited by Goran Burenhult, five volumes. Volume 1, The First Humans: Human Origins and History to 10.000BC, Harper- San Francisco (1993) 239 pages, ISBN 0702226904 (hardback). Price $49.95. Volume 2, People of the Stone Age: Hunter-Gatherers and Early Farmers, University of Queensland Press (1993) 240 pages, ISBN 0702226777 (hardback). Price $49.95. Volume 3, Old World Civilizations: The Rise of Cities and States, University of Queensland Press (1994) 240 pages, ISBN 0702226785 (hardback). Price $49.95. Volume 4, New World and Pacific Civilizations: Cultures of America, Asia, and the Pacific, University of Queensland Press (1994) 239 pages, ISBN 0702226793 (hardback). Price $49.95. Volume 5, Traditional Peoples Today: Continuity and Change in the Modern World, University of Queensland Press (1994) 240 pages, ISBN 0702227668 (hardback). Price $49.95.

We also thank the Australian Research Council for funding the research through LP140100393 Murujuga: Dynamics of the Dreaming; DP130100802 Barrow Island Archaeological Project; LP100200415 Lifeways of the First Australians; FT100100206 Rock Art of the Western Desert & Great Basin; LP0776332 Rock art and related dreaming (Jukurrpa) sites on the Canning Stock Route, Western Australia; and LP0669233 Aboriginal Landscape Transformations. Funding was also generously provided by Kimberley Foundation Australia, Rio Tinto and Atlas Iron.