The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies

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   Part 1 The emergence of social archaeology in Australia Bevel-edged tool dating to the last 1000 years. It was used by an Aboriginal woman in southeast Queensland to process the starchy rhizome of Bungwall fern (a local staple plant food). 1. The social archaeology of Indigenous Australia Ian J McNiven, Bruno David and Bryce Barker December 1978 A large group of volunteers is helping record and excavate Aboriginal cultural sites during an archaeology field summer school at Wood Wood, near Swan Hill in northern Victoria. The days are exciting, dirty and dusty but rich in the promise of better understanding through archaeological research the local Aboriginal past. The afternoons are abuzz with the day’s discoveries, the seventy-odd people sharing ideas and interpretations with a communal sense of research achievement. Each evening the day is capped by a lecture by one of the distinguished staff attending the school. One evening made a particularly profound impact on the audience. The director of the field program had delivered his daily ‘sermon’, this time a lecture on the late British archaeologist David Clarke’s influential characterisation of what archaeology is all about: understanding how environmental ‘subsystems’ (the fauna, climate, geology and flora) interact with various cultural ‘subsystems’ (the economic, religious, psychological, social and material culture). On the blackboard these subsystems are depicted as a set of circles each interlinked by arrows (Clarke 1978, figure 23). Archaeology, it is claimed, concerns these subsystems; it tries to reveal information about each of them, and to understand the past means to understand the nature of their interactions. Question time. One man stepped forward — a local Koorie man, a stranger to most present — with one deeply simple statement that reached to the heart of the matter. He said: ‘This is all very well, but you forgot one thing’. With chalk in hand he reached to the blackboard, drew a large circle over the subsystems diagram, and inscribed the word ‘people’ into our hearts and souls. Towards a social archaeology If archaeology concerns human history, then by definition archaeology is about people both past and present. For most, this statement seems simple and 2 McNiven, David & Barker self-evident. Think of the archaeology of ancient Egypt and we think of Pharaohs, the worship of animal gods, and the millions of hours worked by people building those same pyramids that continue to entertain our imaginations today. Think of the archaeology of ancient Rome and we think of the Colosseum and gladiators fighting to the death, or perhaps of Roman legions battling it out on some far-flung frontier. In each of these cases the past is filled with people and with forms of social interaction far removed from the daily activities we see in modern Egypt or Italy. Now think of ancient Australia, the Australia of, say, 2000 years ago, or 5000 or 40 000 years ago. Who do we see? What are they doing? Are these ancient Indigenous Australians hunting and gathering for food in a dry land? Perhaps a man, spear in hand and kangaroo over one shoulder, or a small group of women gathering birds’ eggs or digging for goannas? In what ways do our images of those distant times differ from what we know of Indigenous Australians of the last 200 years? After thousands of journal articles — academic and popular — and hundreds of books written about the archaeology of Indigenous Australia over the last fifty years, why is it so difficult to imagine ancient Indigenous Australians (sometimes many thousands of years past) as anything more than ethnographically known peoples wandering across a timeless landscape in search of food? In some respects lack of relevant imagery for what ancient Indigenous Australians did in the past reflects a general ignorance of the fruits of archaeological research and poor public education (Balme & Wilson 2004). But we also suggest that the problem lies elsewhere. We contend that the issue is not so much about selling the ‘product’ of archaeological research as about the nature of the ‘product’ being produced by archaeologists. We cannot expect the public to easily imagine the rich and varied lives of Aboriginal peoples living 1000, 5000, 10 000 or even 40 000 years ago if archaeology always focuses on diet and stone tools and changing adaptations to different environments through time and across space. The history of ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies is like the history of any society. It concerns the ways that people interacted with each other in the past, and about ways people structured — and were structured by — their social and ecological settings. This ‘social’ archaeology is an explicit attempt to access a peopled past through the material remains of that past. This book explores such social archaeologies and the varied ways of understanding the history of Indigenous Australians through archaeological practice. In doing so, it honours the work of Harry Lourandos who, for some thirty years, has been pivotal to the establishment of a social archaeology in Australia (see Bowdler, this volume). 3 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia A different social archaeology for Indigenous societies? In their influential book Archaeology Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (2000, p. 173) note that social archaeology is ‘about people and about relations between people, about the exercise of power and about the nature of organisation’. They present two major approaches to social archaeology. The first, a ‘topdown’ approach, focuses on inter- and intra-group organisation. The second, a ‘bottom-up’ approach, focuses on the individual as the smallest unit of social organisation and investigates inter-individual dynamics and issues such as identity, gender and status. But is the social archaeology of Indigenous peoples any different to the social archaeology of any other group of people? According to Renfrew and Bahn (2000, p. 173), the answer is yes: Different kinds of society need different kinds of question. For example, if we are dealing with a mobile group of hunter-gatherers, there is unlikely to be a complex centralized organization. And the techniques of investigation will need to vary radically with the nature of the evidence. One cannot tackle an early hunter-gatherer camp in Australia in the same way as the capital city of a province in China during the Shang Dynasty. Thus, the questions we put, and the methods for answering them, must be tailored to the sort of community we are dealing with. So it is all the more necessary to be clear at the outset about the general nature of that community, which is why the basic social questions are the first ones to ask. While in some respects we agree with these claims, exactly how and why the study of identity, gender, and status for ‘hunter-gatherers’ should be fundamentally different to state societies is not clear. Nor is it clear how different questions and methods for different types of societies allow for crosscultural comparisons. Despite these problems, however, we agree with Renfrew and Bahn for the distinctiveness of ‘hunter-gatherer’ (and by extension Indigenous) social archaeology, but for different reasons to those given by their explanation. Indigenous peoples around the world have had their societies and power bases transformed in the last two to five hundred years as a result of European colonialism. In settler-colonial contexts, Indigenous peoples have had to contend with a broad range of onslaughts: the expropriation of land, genocide, assimilation, oppression and neglect. Colonialism has constructed a view of Indigenous societies, and of hunter-gatherer societies in particular, that has fundamentally and uniquely shaped archaeological approaches to their pasts. In the context of this book, a social archaeology of Indigenous societies must therefore incorporate three key dimensions: understanding social interactions 4 McNiven, David & Barker in the past; understanding the contemporary social contexts of researching Indigenous pasts; and understanding contemporary social impacts of archaeological representations of Indigenous pasts. Immediately apparent is that two of these three dimensions relate to people in the present. Social archaeology engages with and interrogates, often with reflexive discursiveness, our opening point that ‘archaeology is about people both past and present’. The critical point here is that most archaeological research on Indigenous societies is undertaken in settler-colonial contexts where Indigenous peoples represent a colonised, and numerically a minority, culture (e.g. North America and Australia). In contrast, most archaeologists are inheritors of that hegemonic, colonising, majority culture. Yet such a power differential is only part of the issue. It is generally accepted that the development of archaeology in colonial contexts such as Australia, North America and Africa, has been (and in some ways continues to be) tied intimately to the colonising project. That is, conceptual frameworks — such as social evolutionism, diffusionism and migrationism — produced archaeologies that represent Indigenous peoples and their pasts in an inferior light (Trigger 1984; McNiven & Russell 2005). Far from simply presenting distorted representations of Indigenous pasts, such archaeologies have helped legitimise the colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands by representing Indigenous peoples as unevolved savages with rudimentary culture tied closely to the environment. William Sollas’ (1911, p. 383) extraordinary conclusion, in his famous 1911 book Ancient hunters, illustrates the point well: What part is to be assigned to justice in the government of human affairs? So far as the facts are clear they teach in no equivocal terms that there is no right which is not founded on might. Justice belongs to the strong, and has been meted out to each race according to its strength; each has received as much justice as it deserved. What perhaps is most impressive in each of the cases we have discussed is this, that the dispossession by a new-comer of a race already in occupation of the soil has marked an upward step in the intellectual progress of mankind. It is not priority of occupation, but the power to utilise, which establishes a claim to the land. In this sense, the link between archaeology and contemporary Indigenous peoples is not new, and the political and social implications of archaeological historicism become abundantly apparent and integral to the birth of ‘pre-historic’ archaeology, as is equally well demonstrated by the title of prehistoric archaeology’s foundational text, John Lubbock’s 1865 Pre-historic times, 5 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. Beyond ecology: socialising Indigenous pasts While archaeology has produced many negative images of Indigenous peoples and their pasts, attention also needs to be given to what archaeologists have neglected to say. For example, there has been a lack of research into social processes. The archaeology of Indigenous peoples has traditionally been the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, with an analytical focus on subsistence, settlement and human-environmental interaction. This focus became entrenched during the mid-twentieth century as anthropologists produced sophisticated conceptual frameworks that appeared to support the view that the form and structure of hunter-gatherer societies was conditional on the form and structure of the environment. When this spatialised framework was transposed into archaeology, chronological changes in the form and structure of these societies were linked somewhat mechanistically — and in many cases deterministically — to chronological changes in the form and structure of the environment. Within the Australian context, this environmentally deterministic view is best represented by the work of Joseph Birdsell (1953) and his attempt to link Aboriginal population density to rainfall levels. At least as influential in the English-speaking world was Julian Steward’s theory of cultural ecology, which developed out of his work with Shoshonean groups in the Great Basin, USA. Indeed, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (1968b, p. 5), in their introductory chapter to the classic Man the hunter, state that Steward largely founded modern ‘hunter-gatherer’ studies. Cultural ecology was keenly taken up by processual archaeologists (of the ‘New Archaeology’ movement) in the 1960s and 1970s, with Brian Fagan (1995, p. 51) suggesting that it ‘was, perhaps, the most important theoretical development in North American archaeology in a century’. The key dimension of cultural ecology adopted by archaeologists was the notion of the ‘cultural core’. According to Steward (1955, p. 37), this cultural core should be seen as: [the] constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements. The core includes such social, political, and religious patterns as are empirically determined to be closely connected with these arrangements. Innumerable other features may have great potential variability because they are less strongly tied to the core. These latter, or secondary features, are determined to a greater extent by purely cultural-historical factors — by random innovations or by diffusion — and they give the appearance of outward distinctiveness to cultures with similar cores. 6 McNiven, David & Barker Cultural ecology pays primary attention to those features which empirical analysis shows to be most closely involved in the utilization of environment in culturally prescribed ways. Steward (1955, p. 89) emphasised that the cultural core concept was simply a ‘heuristic’ device to facilitate ‘cross-cultural’ comparisons. The reality for most archaeologists was that subsistence not only became a simple proxy for Steward’s cultural core but, along with environmental interaction, an end in itself when researching single cultural groups or small regions. In this sense, most archaeologists employed an abstract version of cultural ecology. However, as Daniel Myers pointed out (2004, p. 185), the fact remains that ‘Religion, ritual and much of the social order were dismissed or completely abandoned in Steward’s work’. Australia, the continent of paradigmatic hunter-gatherers, developed a tradition of environmentally based ‘prehistoric’ archaeology that was closely tied to the American theoretical traditions of cultural ecology (Steward 1955) and its derivative, cultural materialism (M Harris 1979). While both theoretical approaches focus on environmental adaptation, cultural materialism also places emphasis on the deterministic properties of technology and demography. Bernard Huchet (1991) found that cultural materialist approaches dominated Australian archaeology during the 1960s, Seventies and Eighties. Although Huchet considered cultural ecology per se to have been an insignificant theoretical framework for Australian archaeology during this period, he did note that in many ways cultural ecology is subsumed within cultural materialism. Ecologically based archaeological studies have made significant contributions to understanding Australia’s Aboriginal past. As with all societies, Aboriginal peoples have had to contend with a broad range of spatial and chronological changes in environment and resource availability through the course of their long history (see overview by Veth et al. 2000). But the success of the archaeological studies that have attempted to investigate those cultural histories through environmental and resource-based explanations belies a series of deep-seated theoretical problems. The early 1980s marked an epistemological and theoretical revolution in Australian archaeology, a revolution that had parallels with the post-processual movement in English archaeology (e.g. Hodder 1985). Nicholas Thomas (1981) delivered a broadside on the discipline, focusing on the misguided use of empiricism and environmental determinism to epistemologically and theoretically frame and constrain research approaches and agendas. Rhys Jones’ (1978) Tasmanian research was singled out for critique, particularly the characterisation of the cessation of fish eating around 3500 years ago as ‘strange’ and maladaptive. Thomas pointed out that those critics of Jones who attempted 7 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia to argue that removal of fish from the diet was somehow ‘adaptive’ were in fact employing the same form of ‘vulgar [cultural] materialism which reduces economy to ecology’ (Allen 1979; Horton 1979; Parry 1981). Drawing on Marxist and neo-Marxist theoretical frameworks and the work of Tim Ingold (1980), Thomas (1981, p. 171) concluded that ‘It is clearly the case that subsistence practices have both a social and an ecological dimension’. He recommended that ‘serious consideration needs to be given to the formation of social approaches in [Australian] archaeology’ (Thomas 1981, p. 172). However, the most far-reaching and piercing critique of the discipline came from Harry Lourandos (1980b, 1983b). Like Thomas (1981), Lourandos advocated a historical materialist (neo-Marxist) approach (cf. Friedman 1974) whereby social change is better understood and explained by examining the dialectical relationship between the forces of production (e.g. technology) and social relations of production. Ultimately, Lourandos argued that causality is centred on social relations of production for they ‘set the limits on the development and stability of the system as a whole’ (Friedman 1974, p. 448). Under the label of ‘intensification’, Lourandos showed by example the way towards a socially oriented archaeology for Australia’s Aboriginal past. At key was his epistemological and theoretical critique of the environmental focus of Australian archaeology and his plea for archaeologists to analyse and represent the Aboriginal past as socially dynamic, Aboriginal environments as socially constructed, Aboriginal landscapes as socially inscribed, and Aboriginal history as social agency. For Lourandos, and often in contrast to his predecessors, the land was inscribed with social relations (see Langton, this volume), and the archaeologist’s task was to figure out the changing configurations and dynamics of such relations over time. Out of this critique, Lourandos offered an alternative way of constructing and interpreting Australia’s Aboriginal past, particularly with regard to historical transformations of the last 4000 years. Significantly, and as Deborah Brian (this volume) elaborates, debate about ‘intensification’ has focused narrowly (and in some cases trivially) on the nature of the archaeological record and the empirical basis of Lourandos’ new synthesis of Australian ‘prehistory’. Missing has been explicit appreciation of the new epistemological and theoretical arena established by Lourandos. This new arena is the true legacy of Lourandos and one that both frames the structure of the chapters in this volume and sets the foundations for social archaeologies of Aboriginal history into the future. The Aboriginal past as socially dynamic Lourandos (1980b, 1983b, 1985b) saw the environmental focus of Australian archaeology as (re)presenting a ‘static’ view of Aboriginal society and history. 8 McNiven, David & Barker That is, by analysing and (re)presenting cultural change simply in terms of adaptive responses to environmental change, Aboriginal history is seen to be at the mercy of external agents of change (in this case the environment). Such a view was not unique to Australian studies but part of a paradigmatic view of hunter-gatherers that had its origins with nineteenth-century social evolutionism and colonialist representations of Indigenous peoples. Steward (1955, p. 40) thus remarked that ‘The simpler societies [i.e. ‘hunter-gatherers’] are more directly conditioned by the environment than advanced ones’. Internally generated (social) changes were, under such logic, seen to have little role to play in understanding the Aboriginal past. As McNiven (this volume) points out, archaeology and anthropology’s obsession to analyse externally driven change in Aboriginal societies can also be extended to diffusionism. Indeed, both environmental determinism and diffusionism were long-established colonial tropes that aided the (mis)representation of Aboriginal peoples as ahistorical, non-inventive ‘savages’ time-locked to a Stone Age past. Thus, Lourandos’ critique was not about denying the potential effects of environmental change on Aboriginal history, but about an epistemological and theoretical rupture to the deterministic role of environmental change underpinning (and hence explaining) historical change. One of the most important epistemological and theoretical implications of Lourandos’ attempts to break the simplistic causative nexus between environmental and cultural change was reconceptualising hunter-gatherer archaeological records, and subsistence remains in particular, as more than the simple by-products of environmental adaptations. Subsistence remains were recast as the left-over materials of a society working to feed itself — not simply feeding the individuals, but also the social mechanisms which gave each group its particular character, and in the process creating self-generating social dynamisms. While environmental conditions affected individuals and groups, it was the social system that was now seen to make particular demands on the environment through the resourcing strategies employed. Changes in these social conditions were in turn generated by the social dynamics resulting from the way people related with each other, with their technologies, and with their broader environments: in this sense the social forces employed by people were now seen to regulate change. Change and stability became two sides of the same social coin. For example, Lourandos argued that in south-western Victoria Aboriginal people began to construct complex fish-trapping devices, not to maximise productivity as such but to ensure continual, year-round production to meet existing social needs in the face of an unpredictable environment (e.g. Lourandos 1980b). Once in place, the fish traps generated demands of maintenance and operation, as well as new means of representing corporate identities linking people with country, and a new configuration of 9 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia inter-personal dynamics involving place, people and resources ensued (see Lourandos 1980b, 1988a). Since the resource requirements of a society reflect both its internal structure and relationships (based on age, status, gender and so forth), and external structures and relationships (with other societies), the form and patterning of subsistence and other resourcing strategies that remain will by definition reflect these internal and external social structures and relationships (see also Bender 1978, 1981; Ingold 1979, 1980). To reduce subsistence remains simply to their collective energy function not only denies their social embeddedness but ultimately silences their cultural meaning and values. It renders the study of subsistence as ethology, not anthropology or archaeology. Again, Lourandos (1980b) illustrated this key point by reference to certain Aboriginal societies of south-western Victoria; these societies developed technological and landmanagement strategies for enhanced production of eels to support intergroup social gatherings. Lourandos also documented analogous ethnographically known examples of Aboriginal societies that placed extra-production/productivity demands on the economy to support inter-regional gatherings from across Australia and Papua New Guinea (Lourandos 1988a). With these examples, Lourandos demonstrated that Aboriginal societies could radically alter their subsistence activities and ‘levels of energy harnessing’ in response to relative changes in population density (in this case inter-regional gatherings) instigated by internally generated changes in social organisation and relations. It is significant that both Jones (1977a, 1977b, 1978) and Lourandos (1980b) documented subsistence practices (both associated with fishing) among Aboriginal Australians that were unorthodox in terms of the paradigmatic ecological constructions of ‘hunter-gatherers’. Yet while Jones interpreted his data as evidence of maladaptation and the result of failed hunter-gatherer strategies, Lourandos interpreted his data as evidence of the inadequacy of then-prevalent archaeological approaches to the past, and in doing so questioned the validity of simplistic, ecologically based constructions of ‘huntergatherers’. While both made reference to social explanations, Jones used his taboo-based interpretation to illustrate the negative consequences should hunter-gatherers allow social practices to impinge on ecological relations. This interpretation reinforced the orthodox view that hunter-gatherers were fundamentally ecological peoples who could not let epiphenomenal (social) practices impact upon their cultural core, lest they suffer the ‘maladaptive’ consequences. Jones’ view was further elaborated in his classic paper ‘Tasmanian paradox’, in which he stated that ‘the balance between man and land which is so deeply embedded within Aboriginal behaviour and lore, and which was the prime feature of his prehistory for three hundred centuries’ (Jones 1977b, p. 202). He further argued that technological innovations — such as the introduction of the 10 McNiven, David & Barker so-called Small Tool Tradition across mainland Australia during the late Holocene — should be seen as epiphenomenal, as these had little or no impact on demography (Jones 1977b). Assumed increases in subsistence efficiency from the new technology were seen (by Jones) to produce extra available time that was invested into extra (ephemeral) social gatherings and ceremonies. ‘Positive feedback’ and demographic expansion were considered to be ‘at best anarchic to the social order and, at worst, disastrous for the long-term balance of the community to its resources’ and the maintenance of ecological ‘homeostasy’ (Jones 1977b, p. 202). In this sense, Ian Lilley (2001) missed the point when he argued that the social approaches of Jones and Lourandos had ‘important areas of common ground’ (see also Brian, this volume). In many respects, Lourandos (1980b) shattered the colonial myth of Aboriginal demography as being deterministically shaped by the environment, and in the process destabilised the notion of ‘hunter-gatherer’ (see also Bender, this volume). In a pivotal shift, Lourandos demonstrated that Aboriginal societies were capable of demographic change for social reasons, with concomitant changes in subsistence and in ecological relations. Thus, it is worth asking the question as to whether or not archaeological studies that do little more than focus on subsistence practices to understand Aboriginal ecological relationships are not only profoundly inadequate, but also colonialist in approach. Aboriginal environments as socially constructed Lourandos (1980b) went further still with his social archaeology approach by revealing how Aboriginal societies could dramatically manipulate the so-called ‘natural’ environment, in this case by increasing the habitat of eels to accommodate social needs. Certainly Jones (1969) had already transformed our understanding of purposeful manipulation of the environment by Aboriginal people through his concept of ‘fire-stick farming’. The conceptual advance of Lourandos (1980b, p. 246) was his argument that ‘These environmental manipulations are not seen as attempts to increase environmental productivity, but to regularize (stabilize) the availability of resources’. Thus, ‘by relaxing pressures on other neighbouring resource areas’ (Lourandos 1980b, p. 256), Aboriginal communities could decrease mobility, increase the degree of sedentism, and be in a better position to contribute to the extra-productive demands of increased ceremonial and intergroup alliances and gatherings. Such changes have considerable potential for self-amplification and lay the foundations for possible demographic expansion. These insights had major implications for Australian archaeology, given that it was then generally accepted that most aspects of society adapt to the environment, either in a functional or evolutionary sense (see Head 1986). 11 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia Whether aimed at increasing production, productivity or regularity, environmental manipulations reveal that hunter-gatherers — and Aboriginal peoples in particular — were not simply adapting their society to the environment but also actively and intentionally adapting the environment to their society. John Tibby et al. and Cassandra Rowe (both this volume) each explore environmental change in Australia through this lens, specifically asking how we can investigate social history through environmental impacts. By looking at environmental change this way, they invert the classic ‘hunter-gather’ formula. No longer is a people’s physical surroundings seen simply as dictating social behaviour; it is the actions of people in and on place that are now seen as affecting environmental processes, be they vegetation succession, hydrologic processes or sedimentation regimes. Given this dynamic interplay between people and their engaged worlds, it has become possible to investigate social history through environmental impacts, and it is towards this new possibility that Tibby et al. and Rowe (respectively) explore south-western Victorian and Torres Strait history. Perhaps the most important outcome of Lourandos’ theorising on Aboriginal environmental manipulation was a blurring of the conceptual boundary between ‘hunter-gatherers’ and ‘agriculturalists’. His 1980 World Archaeology paper described how the highest population densities for Aboriginal Australia overlapped with certain New Guinea agriculturalists. In an instant, Lourandos shattered the myth that agriculture automatically supports higher population densities. Furthermore, it helped explain why Aboriginal hunter-gatherers ‘resisted the direct imposition of food producing techniques’, as their own subsistence strategies produced ‘commensurable levels of energy harnessing’ (Lourandos 1980b, pp. 258–9). Lourandos’ blurring not only asked us to question the validity and heuristic utility of the ‘hunter-gatherer’ and ‘agriculturalist’ conceptual categories, but also to interrogate the ‘prejudicial homologues used in the interpretation of Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean cultures’ (David & Denham, this volume). As John Terrell et al. (2003, p. 323) recently argued, rather than attempting to straightjacket cultural practice into either of these two opposed normative categories, one should investigate the particular skills involved with the harvesting of individual or sets of species along with ‘the circumstances under which they are being taken’. Melissa Carter (this volume) uses a similar logic to destabilise the notion of the ‘agricultural frontier’ in Torres Strait, and instead aims to track — archaeologically — the history of intergroup dynamics and the emergence of specific ethnographically documented cultural practices through time, thereby better allowing an understanding of the historical trajectories engendered. One of the key contributions of a social archaeology is this tracing of ethnography — that is, the observed cultural practices of living peoples — through archaeology to create a history 12 McNiven, David & Barker that extends seamlessly from the present or near-present into the deeper past. In this sense a social archaeology enables us to create a material understanding of the ethnographic present by which to trace its historical emergence. In recent years, Lourandos’ concept of socially constructed environments has been extended to spiritscapes and to sites associated with what McNiven and Feldman (2003) refer to as the ‘ritual orchestration’ of landscapes and seascapes. Whereas previous investigations of environmental manipulation investigated technological facilities — eel traps/canals (e.g. Lourandos 1980b) and fire-managed resource zones (e.g. Godfrey 1983; Head 1988; Jones 1969) — ritual orchestration focuses on ritual sites — stone arrangements (e.g. David et al. 2004c; McNiven 2003), bone arrangements (e.g. McNiven & Feldman 2003) and general areas of ceremonial agglomeration (e.g. David 2002) — and the ways in which these were used to spiritually alter the elements (tides, wind and so forth), animal behaviour and availability. While traditional ecological approaches tended to relegate such behaviours as epiphenomenal to understanding hunter-gatherer environmental interactions, it is now clear that rituals of orchestration not only mediated peoples’ interactions with their environment, but also dramatically impacted on the nature of subsistence sites, such as middens. As others in this volume point out (see Langton; Bradley; Kearney & Bradley), individual features of the landscape, including water, are each imbued with meaning, and it is this meaningfulness that guides people’s environmental engagements. Because this meaningfulness is socially circumscribed — involving a present that is already historicised through memory and through ancestral connections — its material expressions are never random and always ordered in social engagement. Social landscapes, through their already-meaningful material patterning, are thus amenable to archaeological enquiry. Aboriginal landscapes as socially inscribed As noted above, an ecological view of the Aboriginal past constructs Aboriginal landscapes as little more than assemblages of subsistence sites whose patterning reflects environmental interaction and adaptation. Symbolic and ceremonial sites, while acknowledged, are seen to have little analytical value as they are transformed into epiphenomena peripheral to a sociocultural core consisting of settlement-subsistence strategies. This approach, the cornerstone of the processual archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s, marginalised and silenced considerable dimensions of the archaeological record. For example, one of the paradigmatic studies of processual archaeology has been Lewis Binford’s 1980 American Antiquity paper ‘Willow smoke and dogs’ tails: hunter-gatherer settlement systems and archaeological site formation’. Junko Habu and Ben Fitzhugh (2002, p. 1) rightly note that this ethnoarchaeological 13 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia study of the Nunamiut of Alaska ‘revolutionized the study of hunter-gatherer settlement and land use’. Binford focused his research on Anaktuvuk Pass and documented complex mobility patterns associated with a broad range of site types such as kill sites, butchering sites, hunting stands and storage sites. We are presented with a secular landscape where ecological relationships are materially manifested in settlement patterns and different site types. But as Insoll (2004, p. 48) pointed out, this secular view is at odds with Nunamiut cosmology and shamanism. Binford stripped Nunamiut landscapes of their cosmological, symbolic and spiritual meaning and failed to mention ‘shrines’ and ‘sacred sites’ that clearly structured and mediated ecological relationships. This is an archaeology of place devoid of meaningful place and of meaningful emplacement, just as it is devoid of social experience and salience. Within the Australian context, the spiritual and symbolic aspects of Aboriginal landscapes were well appreciated by anthropologists and many archaeologists long before Lourandos’ voice entered archaeological discourse. While archaeologists had systematically documented rock art, stone arrangements and burials since the early twentieth century at least, the apparent non-ecological dimension of such sites resulted in their marginalised (epiphenomenal) status as far as the grand narratives of Australian prehistory were concerned. For example, prior to the 1980s, burial sites were only considered archaeologically significant if they contributed to understanding the antiquity of colonisation (e.g. Lake Mungo burials) or evolutionary relationships (e.g. Kow Swamp burials), and rock-art sites only became important to Australian archaeology after they became subject to radiocarbon dating, hereby positioning the art in more secure chronological contexts. Yet as Veth (this volume) shows, archaeological studies of rock art, social gatherings and emplacement are now at the forefront of our understanding of Aboriginal history. It is therefore even more remarkable that little theorising has been undertaken on the social significance (beyond issues of repatriation) of the Lake Mungo burials, given that they are among the world’s oldest known burials, and the fact that Kow Swamp may well be the world’s oldest known cemetery (cf. Pardoe 1988; Stone & Cupper 2003). One exception to this is the large cemetery at Roonka, South Australia. Here, researchers have explored in some detail more than just biological relationships to also consider patterns of sedentism, intergroup competition, territoriality, gendered patterns of authority, and social ranking in the past (Pate, this volume). Perhaps the key contribution of Lourandos — at least in terms of seeing Aboriginal landscapes as socially inscribed — concerns the theorising of the emergence of mound sites in western Victoria. Such anthropogenic mounds tend to have a diameter of 5–10 m with a height range of 0.5–1 m, although some are more than 100 m long and 3 m high. Most contain subsis14 McNiven, David & Barker tence remains, stone artefacts, and a matrix dominated by ground-oven materials such as burnt earth and charcoal. While some mounds contain burials, for the most part these sites have been treated by archaeologists as secular facilities that had the added advantage of providing elevated and dry camping locations during floods (e.g. Coutts et al. 1979). Lourandos (1993) pointed out that mound sites were a distinctive manifestation of broader social changes taking place in south-eastern Australia during the last 3000 years (see also E Williams, 1988). He also pointed out that if such sites were an adaptation to allow use of the swampy and flooding landscapes of the region (i.e. the creation of elevated and dry campsites), evidence for such sites should also occur during the early Holocene (when climatic conditions were wetter than during the late Holocene), but it does not. Clearly, mound sites had extra layers of social meaning beyond their secular and utilitarian value as wetland camping/ cooking facilities. This question of extra layers of social meaning for mounds was taken up by Nathan Wolski (1995). Noting that many mounds are located away from swampy areas (some even on top of granite outcrops), Wolski recast the mound question to ask why Aboriginal people during the last 3000 years used campsite remains to construct ‘protuberances’ (up to 6 m in height according to one nineteenth-century observer) across their landscapes? The subtle phenomenological move of Wolski was to consider mound sites as deliberately built and ‘imposing’ landscape ‘structures’ (i.e. ‘monuments’) as part of a constructed ‘social landscape’. Wolski noted the intriguing spatial ‘overlap’ between the distribution of mounds and the distribution of greenstone axes within the Kulinic language group of western and central Victoria (e.g. McBryde 1978). Informed by McBryde’s argument that greenstone-axe trade relationships were an expression of social relationships, Wolski (1995, p. 64) concluded that mounds were employed as a form of landscape ‘social marker’ that were ‘connected with a more intricate web of social, economic and linguistic factors’. Wolski encouraged extension of his ‘interactional phenomena’ model to the Weipa shell mounds of north-eastern Australia. In doing so, and by applying the notion of ‘monument’ to Aboriginal inscriptions of place, he helped to further break down the erroneous yet popular notion that Aboriginal relations to place were subject to environmental agency, with negligible social inscription from Aboriginal people as agents themselves. Like rock art, the presence of monuments helps illustrate to a public that expects material evidence that Aboriginal people did indeed actively engage in social discourse with the land. These processes of engagement, like the mounds themselves, generated cumulative responses by Aboriginal people as historically positioned agents, with those mounds embodying the ancestors as they embody the present-past for their Aboriginal owners and custodians. This approach to material expressions of 15 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia history acknowledges an embodied presence of the past on the land that is much more akin to Indigenous approaches to ancestral presences than more conventional forms of archaeology allow. Archaeological ‘sites’ and objects are now no longer so distant from the Indigenous present and presence. And through such rapprochements, new doors are opened towards archaeologies of experience — where ‘sites’ are no longer abstract archaeological places, but locations of social and personal experience, where the past is engaged in the present, where the ancestors live and breathe — not yesterday, but today and on to tomorrow. It is with such logic in mind that Franca Tamisari and James Wallace (this volume) develop a new sense of archaeological place where archaeology itself is extended, newly overlapping with Aboriginal meaningfulness as it reaches out to ancestral pasts, through the notion of place. It is in this logic also that John Bradley (this volume) and Amanda Kearney and John Bradley (this volume) newly conceptualise and subjectify an archaeology of the everyday objects, such as cycads and stone markers, that archaeologists have for so long made the objects of their enquiries. Aboriginal history as social agency In Continent of hunter-gatherers, Lourandos (1997, p. xv) made explicit the proposition that archaeology is about people past and present: Traditionally, prehistory, like its data, was considered as yet another resource for scientific investigation; as there for the taking. With some notable exceptions, little consideration was given to the descendants of that past — the Australian and Tasmanian Aboriginal people — let alone their viewpoints. This attitude has now changed considerably. Australian prehistoric archaeology is now a highly politicized, complex arena of negotiation . . . Today, it is becoming increasingly common for anthropologists and also archaeologists to work on behalf of particular Aboriginal communities who employ them as specialists and direct their research. Archaeology and its findings on the prehistoric past are part of the consciousness of Aboriginal communities, to use in whatever way suits them. Lourandos was well aware that Aboriginal people were now engaging archaeologists to research aspects of their own history, for their own reasons. Yet Lourandos was also keenly aware that the theoretical frameworks employed by archaeologists also played into the hands of colonialist discourses of Aboriginality (Lourandos 1997, p. xvi): The inheritance of colonialism includes the ways indigenous people’s history and ‘prehistory’ was presented and interpreted, often 16 McNiven, David & Barker to the disadvantage of the people themselves; often as a means of social control. The story of Aboriginal Australia and Tasmania is much the same. Unilinear evolutionary models of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, presented by anthropologists and archaeologists, which placed these peoples on the lowest rungs of the socio-cultural evolutionary ‘ladder’, have largely served to preserve the status quo; to keep Aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians in their place — as dependent, ‘conquered’ peoples, largely divorced from land, society, economy and their past. The traditional models of Australian prehistory, discussed above, with their emphasis upon the dominance of the natural environment over Aboriginal society — assigning to the latter a passive role — producing long-term stability and lack of change, have, in their own way, also reinforced these conditions. For some two decades Australian archaeologists have been attempting to decolonise work practices and to embrace the rights of Indigenous Australians to own and control their heritage and their past. While all archaeologists acknowledge and understand the inherent colonialist and racist fabric of nineteenth century theoretical constructs such as social evolutionism, little theorising has been undertaken on the more subtle but no less colonial aspects of modern archaeological research (see McNiven & Russell 2005). For most of his career, Lourandos was troubled by the colonialist overtones of the ecological focus of Australian archaeology. How could we expect the general public to engage with and appreciate archaeological characterisations of Australia’s Aboriginal past when ecological relationships and stone-implement typologies continued to masquerade as history? And, more pertinently, how could we expect Aboriginal people to engage with and accept this past; a past in which their most complex religious and spiritual knowledge systems are reduced to mere subsistence and settlement patterns and statistical characterisations of stone tools (of which the most significant implements such as microliths were said to be ‘external diffusions’)? With Lourandos’ concept of ‘intensification’ came the possibility of a social archaeology and of an ancient history of Indigenous Australians. Perhaps most significantly of all, Lourandos dared us to realise that a social archaeology by definition implicates people; and in doing so he introduced ‘people’ into discourses of Australian Indigenous archaeology; the people of the past, the people of the present whose ancestors and history we write about, and the people of the present who participate in this history writing and history reading. The New Archaeology’s emphasis on cultural processes abstracted the past actions of people to composite ‘human behaviour’. Social archaeology 17 Part 1 • The emergence of social archaeology in Australia explicitly focuses on social relations and people–people relationships. In this formulation, people make decisions that alter both their lives and the lives of those around them, near and far. Thus, the past — and cultural change — are imbued with social agency. The social archaeology of Indigenous Australians moves away from passive ecological relationships to people actively engaging with and constructing their social and ecological worlds. It also considers archaeology as interpersonal engagement, and the archaeologist as author, replete with his or her own social, cultural and personal prejudices. This is what philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1988) meant when he coined the word ‘preunderstanding’, a notion which is founded on the philosophy of hermeneutics. A past filled with people and social agency is history, rendering the term ‘prehistory’ a redundant relic of the colonial culture of archaeology (see David & Denham, this volume). In the context of Australia, such an archaeological construction is much more appealing to Aboriginal people because a past with people is a past with ancestors, and a past with ancestors is history. All Aboriginal people — and most archaeologists — appreciate the phenomenological difference in describing an exposed Aboriginal burial as ‘a person’ as opposed to the scientising label of ‘skeletal remains’. This is not simply a basic issue of respect. If archaeologists acknowledge a past with Aboriginal people and Aboriginal ancestors it is obvious that contemporary Aboriginal people have a right to engage with and control that, their own, past. Furthermore, such acknowledgement presents a challenge for Australian archaeology to develop epistemological strategies to accommodate Aboriginal historiographical traditions such as oral history, particularly when oral history questions the veracity and authority of archival records (see Barker this volume). It is salutary to remember that the writing of history is always about people choosing to historicise a past; the question is, which past, and under whose power to determine the nature of evidential strengths and the validity of approaches? Finally, Luke Godwin and Jimmy Weiner (this volume) remind us that Aboriginal people have their own reflexive ‘archaeological’ traditions of reading the material traces of their past — ‘footprints of the ancestors’ — when they walk across their ancestral lands. In this sense, Aboriginal people have always had their own traditions of social archaeologies that recognise the inherent social, historical and spiritual properties of material remains. Epistemologically and ontologically these traditions recognise the inherent and pervasive links between people past and present, a dimension of social archaeology that we in the West are slowly coming to understand and appreciate. As Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders constantly remind us, understanding the past requires more than epistemological refinements; it necessitates a heightened awareness of ontological differences as well as meeting points. Indigenous 18 McNiven, David & Barker people have always used falsification in going about their everyday life, and the epistemology of archaeological practice — including methodological principles of falsification — is nothing new. What is different is how we filter our epistemological approaches ontologically, through our world views. We can thus have the same evidential bases for different understandings, not because of epistemological differences (i.e. not because of differences as to the methods of enquiry and how knowledge can be validated), but because of different understanding of how the world works. Here, then, is a meeting point: if social archaeology is anything, then surely it is a remembrance of people past in present social practice; with chalk in hand, to inscribe ‘people’ onto history, in the present and into the past. 19