Thanks!

One of the key motivations for publishing the papers was to showcase the diverse histories of Indigenous missions in the region, and the equally diverse approaches employed in the investigation of those histories. Lydon and Ash wrote a great introduction to the volume which aptly locates the papers in relation to international debates on missions and the archaeology of cross-cultural interactions, as well as the history of research into Indigenous missions and reserves in Australia and the Pacific.

Darlene McNaughton, Justin Shiner and I wrote a paper that set out to explore the economic contributions of Indigenous people who lived in and near a former Presbyterian mission at Weipa, and the significance of those contributions to both the mission and the health and wellbeing of the mission community. We were most interested in looking at wild food (that is, foods that were gathered and hunted from the bush by Aboriginal people), and we focused upon the case study of culturally modified trees (scarred trees) as well as relevant historical and oral history data. The abstract is below:

Mission-based Indigenous Production at the Weipa Presbyterian Mission, Western Cape York Peninsula (1932-1966)
Michael Morrison, Darlene McNaughton and Justin Shiner

Previous research on remote nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Indigenous missions in northern and central Australia point
to their often tenuous existence and the complex nature of engagements between Christian Missionaries and Indigenous people.
This paper explores the contribution and significance of Indigenous production of wild foods in the context of one such settlement
located at Weipa on Cape York Peninsula, north eastern Australia. It is premised on the assertion that investigation of the
economies of these often remote settlements has the potential to reveal much about the character of cross-cultural engagements
within the context of early mission settlements. Many remote missions had a far from secure economic basis and were sometimes
unable to produce the consistent food supplies that were central to their proselytizing efforts. In this paper it is suggested
that Indigenous-produced wild foods were of significant importance to the mission on a day-to-day basis in terms of their
dietary contribution (particularly in terms of protein sources) and were also important to Indigenous people from a social
and cultural perspective. We develop this argument through the case study of culturally modified trees that resulted from
the collection of wild honey.

Highlights in the volume for me included the paper by Lydon and Burns on the Ebenezer Mission in Victoria (see also Lydon’s recently published book), Angela Middleton’s comparative paper on Missionization in New Zealand and Australia, and finally, the paper by Birmingham and Wilson comparing the well known Wybalenna Settlement (Tasmania) with  the Killalpaninna Mission (central Australia). We hope to have the volume reviewed in the coming months and I’ll post that once it comes out.

EDIT (26 Mar 2010): Alun Salt has written a great blog post about our paper, which you can read here.

In 1932 a Presbyterian Mission was established on Alngith Lands after an earlier settlement inland had failed. It was small, supported a small population (< 200 people) and more to the point, represented the beginnings of the modern Aboriginal community of Napranum. During the 1950s mineral exploration identified extensive bauxite deposits in the region and by the late 1960s a substantial strip mining operation had been established and the mission was closed. Thus, Alngith land is in many ways central to the history of Weipa and Napranum and has a diverse cultural heritage that reflects this. It is is also one of most seriously impacted and developed areas around Weipa, if not on Cape York Peninsula and thousands of hectares of open woodland have been removed to make way for mining as well as industrial, administrative and residential facilities. My own estimate is that well over 60 – 70% of their land has been seriously (and probably irreparably) impacted upon by this development. Despite this, there are some simply magical areas that remain in wonderful condition: wetlands, riverine forests, remnant Eucalypt woodlands,  mangrove lined estuaries and residual dry notophyll vine forests.

The Alngith Cultural Heritage Project began several years ago when I was invited to assist the Alngith Traditional Owner group with developing a project to document their cultural heritage. They specifically requested that the project look at heritage in a very broad sense, including archaeology, oral histories, Traditional places, significant resource areas and natural heritage places. In a sense, they essentially wanted me to help begin to map their Country and heritage: a very broad scope indeed, and one that initially had me scrambling in terms of developing a system for this type of cultural landscapes approach to Indigenous heritage.

There is of course an extensive literature on documenting both tangible and ‘intangible’ cultural places and  landscapes (for example, Byrne, Brayshaw and Ireland 2003; Byrne and Nugent 2004; Clarke 2000; Greer 1995; Greer, Harrison and Tamwoy 2002; Mahood 2006; Pannell 2006) which I am only just beginning to come to grips with. Based on my rather preliminary reviews thus far, much of the literature seems to focus on historic or archaeological heritage places with much less consideration of the ways Traditional Owners value natural heritage places, though Pannell (2006) and Mahood (2006) provide notable exceptions from the respective perspectives of an anthropologist and artist. One of the underlying themes across this work is the need for people engaged in research into Aboriginal cultural heritage values to broaden their views and consider cultural values around natural heritage as part of cultural heritage management work, particularly when their work is driven by community groups themselves. This is what the Alngith people were seeking in any case. So recording Alngith natural heritage assets – places that are laden in cultural values – is a critical part of the project that we have developed. Indeed, the approach we take in many ways attempts to document the sort of information required by UNESCO’s definition of a ‘cultural landscape’ which I think is important given the recent beginnings of the world heritage nomination process for Cape York Peninsula.

Within this context of a broadened definition of cultural heritage, natural resource management (NRM) concerns – which are often well off the radar in cultural heritage research – take on a different light. NRM issues include threats to natural heritage places, such as weed outbreaks, erosion, visitor management, littering, mine rehabilitation concerns, theft of natural resources (eg plants), poor fire management and so on. If one adopts a view of  heritage similar to that held by the Alngith people whereby natural heritage assets should be considered part of the cultural heritage assessment process, then it equally stands that NRM issues need to be systematically documented, where possible.

In some respects the process of identifying, recording and managing Alngith natural heritage assets (and associated threats) is very straightforward. Many Alngith natural heritage values are localised and occur at specific places in the landscape (i.e. they can be ‘mapped’ in space). Often they are large areas and are best mapped with a desktop GIS rather than in the field, however the approach we take is to visit important places with elders where we obtain preliminary geographic data along with detailed oral histories, photos, notes and so on about the place and its importance. Follow up work involving more detailed field or desktop mapping with younger, more mobile Traditional Owners takes place later. All of this data is entered into a database and GIS which, ultimately, will sit in Google Earth or Google Fusion Tables as a resource for the Alngith ranger program (more on that in a future post). Threats or management concerns about those places, such as illegal rubbish dumping, weed outbreaks, vehicle tracks and so on, can usually be recorded in similar ways.

Alngith land has been home to the broader local Indigenous community since the 1930s and so in addition to Alngith knowledge and histories, their country is intimately associated with the shared histories of a large portion of the broader local Aboriginal community. It was quite important that the project set out to document these histories, requiring us to shift from mapping places with ‘things’ (ie tangible heritage) to mapping places with historical, cultural or traditional associations. This includes remembered places like former camping sites, ceremonial or story places, locations of former buildings or features, paths or tracks, named places, or where specific remembered events occurred. Byrne and Nugent (2004) use the term ‘geobiographies’ to describe similar work, which is a term I like a lot.

Oral histories are quite critical to documenting this kind of information and the project began by undertaking both semi-structured and unstructured interviews (both in the office and at particular places) to both record oral histories and to identify associated remembered places. This is supplemented by mapping work where we visit prominent places to record stories and recollections about those places, as well as to draw on people’s first hand knowledge to try and reconstruct  what was formerly there, or how a place might have changed.

In addition to all of this, the project draws upon traditional archaeological techniques. We use archaeology to record known places, to document the archaeological component of places identified through oral history work, and finally, to survey in order to identify previously unrecorded features. We have had a lot of great results from this work as well, with several hundred features in the database and more sure to come. We have not had need to carry out any excavations as yet, though that may come.

The project still has a few months left to run as it enters the reporting phase, however the results thus far have been very positive. We have recorded oral history interviews with a wide range of community elders, many of which are associated with particular places and in addition we have documented hundreds of tangible and associative heritage places (natural, historical, archaeological). The work is quite fun for all involved, because instead of taking an overtly blinkered approach (ie. only looking for archaeological sites) we are effectively mapping Alngith cultural landscapes in what I think is reasonably useful way. At this stage, I am calling this a ‘cultural  mapping’ framework (after Mahood 2006) until I discover something better, or until someone points out an inherent flaw in this terminology.

I think this cultural mapping approach has a great deal of applicability to cultural heritage research projects that are driven by Indigenous community groups. While the idea of mapping cultural values around natural heritage places is by no means new, I have experienced some criticism  about this type of approach. So, I should clarify my point: cultural heritage specialists are, in many contexts, in an ideal position to begin to record the cultural values associated with natural heritage places, and the NRM issues that threaten those places, and should endeavour to obtain information that is relevant to the management of cultural values associated with these places. However, just as a cultural heritage specialist might undertake preliminary recording then draw upon additional expertise for types of heritage requiring specialist attention (e.g. a heritage architect or lithic specialist), so too should we draw on environmental scientists, biologists and other scientific specialists to record other dimensions of natural heritage places and assess their overall scientific importance. Anthropologists have an important role to play and, if not undertaking the initial recording work, then they may be required to undertake more detailed follow up work to record and manage important places, and to understand the way people value those places.

I would be very interested to find out if other people are using similar approaches or have any ideas, suggestions or critical comments about this approach. If so, leave a comment here or send me a tweet @mickmorrison. I shall endeavour to follow up on this with a post about the data management issues we are dealing with in the next week or two.

References

Greer, S., Rodney Harrison, and S.R. McIntyre-Tamwoy. 2002. Community-based archaeology in Australia. World Archaeology 34, no. 2: 265-287.

Pannell, S. 2006. Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? Lessons from the world heritage list. Cairns: Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management.

–

The shell mounds of Albatross Bay: an archaeological investigation of late Holocene gatherer-hunter production strategies near Weipa, north eastern Australia.

This thesis presents the results of an archaeological investigation of shell matrix sites, and in particular, shell mounds sites that occur around the shores of Albatross Bay, near Weipa on the north western Cape York Peninsula, northern Australia. It is the contention of this thesis that earlier approaches to the investigation of shell mound sites in northern Australia have tended to place too much emphasis on developing long-term explanatory models that gloss over explanations for the specific roles of these unique sites in past economic systems. While long-term explanations represent important contributions, it is argued here that short-term decadal scale modelling of the production systems associated with shell mound formation and use are required in order to fully understand the significance of the mid- to late Holocene emergence of these types of sites. It is argued that a focus on production – defined in a substantive economic sense – is a suitable avenue through which archaeologists can expand our understanding of the role of these features in past Indigenous societies, and their broader importance on longer-term time scales

The thesis thus develops a detailed model of the production strategies associated with the formation of shell mound sites that occur around Albatross Bay, while also considering the broader significance of this model, particularly within the context of Cape York Peninsula. It presents the results of field surveys and excavations carried out around Albatross Bay by the author, as well as a detailed review and analysis of work carried out by others. It is argued that shell mounds are the result of relatively specialised production activities focussing on a very specific resource base: mudflat shellfish species. Shell mounds offered a range of unique benefits for people engaged in these specialised activities, including as camp sites and as specialised activity areas. These events were inherently flexible in size and in terms of timing, reflecting the dynamic nature of the resource base itself; yet the flexible nature of this production strategy also enabled more regular small scale social gatherings, along with a range of social and economic benefits to participants, than would have been otherwise possible. It is proposed that these types of strategies may represent an important characteristic of the production systems employed by gatherer-hunter peoples in late Holocene Cape York.

Overall, this thesis makes a significant contribution to both our understanding of late Holocene lifeways at Albatross Bay as well as to our understanding of the significance of the emergence of shell mound sites in Cape York. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of a focus on short-term modelling of Indigenous lifeways alongside approaches oriented toward longer-term explanations of economic, social and environmental change.

- -

I’m in the process of making the final corrections and within a few months expect it to be available online and open access via the Open Digital Thesis Program. I’ll post again when that happens.

Morrison, M.J. 2010 The shell mounds of Albatross Bay: an archaeological investigation of late Holocene production strategies near Weipa, north eastern Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, Adelaide: Department of Archaeology, Flinders University.

The last decade has seen major changes in the environment of Australian archaeology. The mining boom has created new job markets, with new requirements for education and training in archaeology. In several states, new heritage legislation has been introduced, and more heritage Acts are currently under review. Australian archaeology and archaeologists have gained a wider global audience in the wake of controversies such as those over the Flores hominids and rock art management on the Burrup peninsula, and global issues such as climate change have permeated academic and public discourses about the past.  At the same time, academic baby boomers have been approaching retirement, leading to predictions of a shortfall of experienced people in the tertiary education sector, as well as a general change in the complexion of professional archaeology. In the 2009 AAA Conference “Old Guard, New Guard”, we ask participants to consider what will be the major directions for archaeology as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. How will new generations of archaeologists build on – or deconstruct – the research and practice of the past 50 years?

Proposed sessions include:

• Archaeology to excite and inspire (Duncan Wright and Alice Gorman);
• Research outcomes in Australian Archaeology (Sandra Bowdler);
• Engineering archaeological solutions: how technological advancements have been implmented in cultural heritage management (Faye Prideaux);
• Seeing beneath the soil: the possibilities of archaeological geophysics in Australia (Ian Moffat);
• Archaeology and anthropology (Fiona Sutherland and Neale Draper);
• The real dirt game: archaeology and mining in the Pilbara (Boon Law and Dawn Cropper);
• The archaeology of Australasian coasts and islands (Duncan Wright and Michael Morrison);
• “Old problems new shit” or “Old paradigms, new applications: the application of cultural heritage legislation in modern cultural heritage situations (Annie Ross);
• Google earth, open source and other emerging spatial technologies: innovation and application in archaeology (Illya Santos and Stafford Smith);
• Engaged archaeology, consultancies and management planning: research directions (Steve Hemming, Chris Wilson and Kelly Wiltshire);
• Palaeoecology and its role in archaeology: current research and future directions (Jillian Garvey and Judith Field);
• Valued stones: understanding the manufacture, use and distribution of transported stone artefacts (Clair Harris and Chris Clarkson).

There are a couple of sessions I am particularly looking forward to. The first will be Sandra Bowdler’s session on research outcomes in Australian archaeology, which hopefully will include some good thematic papers on key research issues being addressed by people working in Australia. I was also interested to see the proposed session exploring the application of ‘Google earth, open source and other emerging spatial technologies’ to archaeology in Australia. It is not something I can remember seeing before at a AAA conference and so I hope it garners enough support to run.

In recent years I have co-convened several sessions on topics not strictly within my primary area of research and so this year decided that  it would be good to do something on coastal archaeology. After a few chats with Duncan Wright (Monash University) we decided to propose a session entitled ‘The archaeology of Australasia’s coastlines and islands’. It looks as if we have eight confirmed papers and I shall post details once the organising committee finalise the program. In the meantime, our abstract is:

The archaeology of Australasia’s coastlines and islands has been an important focus for archaeologists carrying out research in the region, particularly since the pursuit was recognised as a distinct sub-field of research in the early 1980s (Bowdler 1982; Hall and McNiven 1999). Since then, there has been a relative efflorescence of research into the circumstances and character of human settlement and use of coastal and island regions. This session hopes to showcase the diverse range of research being undertaken in such contexts throughout Australasia. Speakers may wish to address the following broad themes within coastal or island settings:

• The role of islands and coastlines, liminal zones and the sea for both communities and archaeologists;
• Colonisation and settlement;
• Economies and subsistence;
• Rock art research;
• Methodological and technical issues;
• The question of mid- to late Holocene economic, social and technological change;
• Approaches to managing cultural heritage in coastal settings;
• Human-environment interactions;
• The archaeology of cross-cultural contact and interaction in coastal settings.

AAA is always good fun and a great chance to catch up with colleagues and old friends. I’ll post more about the final program once it is finalised, which should hopefully be in the next week or so.

Update: 15 October 2009

In the past week or so I have made some changes to the aims and purpose of this site and you can read all about those in the About section. I have also moved to a new domain (mickmorrison.com) and also have imported selected posts from my old blogger site. Before I can start posting again I need to edit these, this should be completed in the coming days.

I will also be adding separate permanent pages for each of my current research projects as well as details on publications, seminars, reports and so on.

Our complete mtDNA sequencing of 966 individuals frm 26 relic populations of India identified seven individuals from central Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic tribes who share two basal synonymous mtDNA polymorphisms … with the M42 haplogroup, which is specific to Australian Aboriginies.

They suggest that divergence between the two populations occurred at 55,000±10,800 years BP, an estimate based on statistical analysis of mtDNA mutation rates. They argue that this is consistent with current evidence for early occupation of Australia and suggest their data supports Australian colonisation via the southern dispersal route through south Asia ~60-50,000 years BP. Kris Hurst at About.com has a good overview of the southern disperal route though her suggested dates for earliest colonisation of Australia are quite conservative.

ABC Science (2) have published comments from Dr Jeremy Austin at the University of Adelaide who suggests that “…this is the first time people have been able to find these exact same mitochondrial DNA types inside and outside Australia”.

Full abstract and the open source paper can be accessed from the Biomedcentral website. Thanks to Tim Jones who first blogged this at Anthropology.net as well as @jorgenholm on twitter who picked up the ABC story.

Sources:

In February 1948, a team of Australian and American researchers and support staff came together in northern Australia to begin, what was then, one of the largest scientific expeditions ever to have taken place in this country—the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (also known as the Arnhem Land Expedition). Today it remains one of the most significant, most ambitious and least understood expeditions ever mounted^[1]. Seventeen men and women journeyed across the remote region known as Arnhem Land in northern Australia for nine months. From varying disciplinary perspectives, and under the guidance of expedition leader Charles Mountford, they investigated the Indigenous populations and the environment of Arnhem Land. In addition to an ethnographer, archaeologist, photographer, and filmmaker, the expedition included a botanist, a mammalogist, an ichthyologist, an ornithologist, and a team of medical and nutritional scientists. Their first base camp was Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Three months later they moved to Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula and three months following that to Oenpelli (now Gunbalanya) in west Arnhem Land^[2]. The journey involved the collaboration of different sponsors and partners (among them the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and various agencies of the Commonwealth of Australia). In the wake of the expedition came volumes of scientific publications, kilometres of film, thousands of photographs, tens of thousands of scientific specimens, and a vast array of artefacts and paintings from across Arnhem Land. The legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition is vast, complex, and, at times, contentious.^[3]

Details on the symposium can be found on the NMA website, but in summary:

Six decades have passed since the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. So it is a fitting moment for celebration, re-evaluation and renewed collaboration between the individuals, institutions and countries touched by this formative research venture.

In 2009 the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia will be hosting Barks, Birds & Billabongs: Exploring the legacy of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, an international symposium that will investigate the Expedition’s significant and often controversial legacy.

This symposium will be organised around three core themes: Histories, Legacies and Continuity & Change. Particular emphasis will be placed on Indigenous perspectives.

This volume emerged from the 2005 meeting of the Australasian Archaeometry Association and includes papers on geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, materials analysis and chronometry:

Archaeological Science meetings will have a personality of their own depending on the focus of the host archaeological fraternity itself. The 8th Australasian Archaeometry meeting follows this pattern but underlying the regional emphasis is the continuing concern for the processes of change in the landscape that simultaneously effect and illuminate the archaeological record. These are universal themes for any archaeological research with the increasing employment of science-based studies proving to be a key to understanding the place of humans as subjects and agents of change over time.

This collection of refereed papers covers the thematic fields of geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, materials analysis and chronometry, with particular emphasis on the first two. The editors Andrew Fairbairn, Sue O’Connor and Ben Marwick outline the special value of these contributions in the introduction. The international nature of archaeological science will mean that the advances set out in these papers will find a receptive audience among many archaeologists elsewhere. There is no doubt that the story that Australasian archaeology has to tell has been copiously enriched by incorporating a widening net of advanced science-based studies. This has brought attention to the nature of the environment as a human artefact, a fact now more widely appreciated, and archaeology deals with these artefacts, among others, in this way in this publication.

You can find the chapter list here and the editors provide a good overview of the volume in their foreword. For me, stand out papers include a series on open sites within the complex semi-arid landscapes of western New South Wales (papers by Fanning, Holdaway and Phillips; Shiner; and Holdaway, Fanning and Littleton) as well as several considering some of the complexities of using marine shell for radiocarbon dating (Petchey; Bourke and Hua). However this only reflects my personel interests rather than the quality of other papers on topics including OSL dating, chemical characterisation of pottery, analysis of megafaunal bones and macrobotanical analysis.

Significantly, the volume is published both in printed form and as a (free) electronic download by the Australian National University E-Press. For some reason, it appears as Terra Australis 28 (2009 publication date) while another good volume published last year (Islands of Inquiry: colonisation, seafaring and the archaeology of maritime seascapes edited by Clark, Leach and O’Connor) was published in 2008 as volume 29.

Via the Archaeometry blog