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Shared histories and the archaeology of the pastoral industry in Australia
No full textAbout the book: The original papers collected in this pioneering volume address the historical archaeology of Aboriginal Australia and its application in researching the shared history of Aboriginal and settler Australians. The authors draw on case studies from across the continent to show how archaeology can illuminate the continuum of responses by indigenous Australians to European settlement and colonization. Taking an innovative approach to the relationship between archaeological theory and contemporary Australian history, the book also examines the role of archaeology in current debates over Aboriginal land rights and the role of "post-contact" archaeology in cultural heritage management. An introduction by the series editors places the Australian material in the context of indigenous archaeological studies worldwide. The volume will be of interest to academic and public archaeologists, indigenous people, anthropologists, historians, and heritage managers who deal with indigenous communities
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Too many Captain Cooks? An archaeology of Aboriginal Australia after 1788
No full textAbout the book: The original papers collected in this pioneering volume address the historical archaeology of Aboriginal Australia and its application in researching the shared history of Aboriginal and settler Australians. The authors draw on case studies from across the continent to show how archaeology can illuminate the continuum of responses by indigenous Australians to European settlement and colonization. Taking an innovative approach to the relationship between archaeological theory and contemporary Australian history, the book also examines the role of archaeology in current debates over Aboriginal land rights and the role of "post-contact" archaeology in cultural heritage management. An introduction by the series editors places the Australian material in the context of indigenous archaeological studies worldwide. The volume will be of interest to academic and public archaeologists, indigenous people, anthropologists, historians, and heritage managers who deal with indigenous communities
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Assembling and governing cultures ‘at risk’: centers of collection and calculation, from ethnographic museums to UNESCO World Heritage Lists
No full text[About the book]
Reassembling the Collection presents innovative approaches to the study of historical and contemporary engagements between museums and the various individuals and communities who were (and are) involved in their production and consumption. Reassembling the Collection is interdisciplinary in scope and international in coverage. It addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value, and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world, and the entangled agencies of those who have made, traded, received, collected, curated, worked with, researched, viewed, and experienced them in the past and present. In moving beyond the concerns of the politics of representation that have dominated critical museum studies, Reassembling the Collection considers the material networks and affective qualities of “things” alongside their representational role within the museum and explores the ways in which concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured in light of the study of these concepts within the museum context. The contributors explore key concepts including the idea of museums as “meshworks” of material and social assemblages; how an “archaeological sensibility” might inform approaches to understanding past and present relationships between people, “things,” and institutions in relation to museums; and the “weight of things” and sense of “curatorial responsibility,” which arises from a reconsideration of the nature of museum objects
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Reassembling ethnographic museum collections
No full textThis volume addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value, and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world and the agency of indigenous people in their production. The book’s primary focus lies with those objects that, by way of their specific histories, have been defined as “ethnographic”; however, the question of the contexts in which things are defined as “art” as opposed to “artifact” (e.g., Clifford 1988, 1997; Danto 1988; Putnam 1991; Marcus and Myers 1995; Gell 1998; Thomas 1999b; Myers 2001) also constitutes a key concern. The book is most appropriately situated within the context of various postcolonial critiques of the role of museums and museum collections in the politics of indigenous representation (e.g., Clifford 1988, 1995; O’Hanlon 1993; Greenfield 1996; Lidchi 1997; Barringer and Flynn 1998; Russell 2001; Karp and Lavine 1991; Fforde, Hubert, and Turnbull 2002; Kramer 2006; Cuno 2008; Lonetree and Cobb 2008; Sleeper-Smith 2009) and as a reaction to the perception that indigenous people had little or no agency in the processes that were responsible for the genesis of ethnographic museum collections (largely a phenomenon of the exercising of asymmetrical colonial power relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Although we see this book as a product of that literature and its accompanying themes, what sets it apart from much of the current literature is that it makes a significant attempt to move beyond the concerns of the politics of representation, which have tended to dominate critical museum studies (Macdonald 2011), to consider the affective qualities of things alongside their representational role in the museum. Similarly, in considering the complex material and social interactions of things, people, and institutions that constitute ethnographic collections, we attempt to move beyond the observation that indigenous people and ethnographic objects had (and continue to have) agency, to consider how concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured in the light of their study within the context of the museum. In doing so, the volume develops a series of new concepts and considers their application to historical and contemporary engagements between ethnographic museums and the various individuals and communities who were and are involved in their production. These themes have profound implications not only for understanding the ongoing processes that have formed museum collections in the past and present but also for developing new and innovative curatorial practices in the future. Key concepts include the idea of museums as meshworks and as material and social assemblages; the ways in which the application of an archaeological sensibility might inform approaches to understanding the past and present relationships between people, “things,” and institutions in relation to museums; and the curatorial responsibility that arises from a reconsideration of the nature of museum “objects.
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Contact archaeology and native title
No full textContact archaeology in Australia is emerging as an important tool in the independent verification of claimant’s testimony regarding the post-Sovereignty occupation and use of particular parts of the landscape in a continuous and ‘traditional’ manner. This paper reviews the literature on post-contact archaeology and material culture in Australia, and provides an assessment of the ways in which this evidence has been used in native title claims to date. The utility of post-contact artefact forms, both in terms of providing evidence of post-Sovereignty use and occupation, as well as in demonstrating long term continuities in claimant land-use patterns is discussed, with reference both to knapped bottle glass artefacts, the most well known post-contact Aboriginal artefact type in Australia, as well as other post-contact artefact forms such as stone artefacts and modified metal tools. It is argued that an examination of a broader range of post-contact material culture items and archaeological site patterning has potential not only to directly inform native title archaeology, but also in developing more complex archaeological narratives concerning both continuity and change in Aboriginal societies in the past, which serve political and social agendas in the present
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The Politics of the Past: Conflict in the use of heritage in the modern world
No full textAssembling and governing cultures ‘at risk’ : centers of collection and calculation, from the museum to world heritage
No full textI begin by bringing together two statements, written just over a century apart,
that present arguments for the formation of different kinds of collections. The first was written by Alfred Cort Haddon in his introduction to Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown (1901), a popular account of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Borneo. The expedition was responsible for the collection of thousands of objects and recordings of indigenous people (including photographs, films, wax cylinder recordings, quantitative observations of physiology, and volumes of hand-written field notes), which were subsequently removed and relocated to the University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in England (and elsewhere)
Shared histories : rethinking 'colonized' and 'colonizer' in the archaeology of colonialism
No full textIn this chapter, I want to explore a framework which was developed to deal with the archaeology and heritage of cross-cultural interactions in the cattle and sheep ranching (‘pastoral’) industries of Australia to suggest some ways in which archaeology might trouble some of these idealized notions of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, and in doing so, contribute to the development of archaeological and postcolonial theory more generally. ¬This framework acknowledges the need to simultaneously explore the various strategic and mundane ways in which both colonized and colonizer engage with their social and Indigenous worlds (e.g. Silliman 2001, 2005, 2010) and express notions of individual and group identity, while attempting to deal with the very real inequalities and conflicts which characterize colonial and postcolonial relations of difference (González-Ruibal 2010)
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