Oyster Cove: Archaeological traces of the last Tasmanians and notes on the criteria for the authentication of flaked glass artefacts

Stone, bottle glass and pottery artefacts occur at the Oyster Cove Aboriginal Station, occupied from 1847 to 1869. Criteria are advanced for recognition as artefacts of bottle glass fragments

Rewriting the History of the Native Mounted Police in Queensland

The Archaeology of the Native Mounted Police in Queensland project, jointly led by Nulungu research fellow Dr Lynley Wallis, is a long-overdue exploration into the nature of frontier invasion. Several of our team members have worked in Queensland for many decades and, in every Aboriginal community in which we’ve worked, stories are told about the ‘killing times’ or the ‘war’, as community members call the period when the Native Mounted Police (NMP, also referred to as the ‘Native Police’) were operating. Many community members have asked us over the years to record their stories about the massacres that took place, or have shown us places associated with the police camps or the massacre sites, and often told us that they would like to know more about what happened. These requests eventually led to the archaeologists on this project coming together, talking with key Aboriginal people and communities, and developing a research project to address their interests — the project described in this paper is the result.https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/nulungu_insights/1000/thumbnail.jp

'Where the cattle went, they went': towards a phenomenological archaeology of mustering in the Kunderang Gorges, northeastern New South Wales

The paper seeks to understand the relationships that developed between former pastoral workers and the rugged landscape of the Kunderang Ravines through a consideration of the results of a joint program of archaeological and oral history research. Mapping the 'landscape biographies' of former Aboriginal and settler pastoral workers and their descendents, and 'story-trekking' (after Green et al. 2003) along their remembered narrative paths allows a more embodied approach to the archaeology of cattle mustering to emerge. By riding and walking along familiar pathways and mustering routes, pastoral workers and their kin created a familiar sense of being-in-the-landscape (after Bender 2001), while simultaneously creating that landscape. In many ways, the work on Kunderang can be understood as a response to Gaston Bachelard's call for 'each one of us [to] speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost field and meadows' (1969: 11) and to understand those habits which he describes in the same work as the 'passionate liaison of our bodies' with a space or landscape (in Wise 2000)

Orientations of linear stone arrangements in New South Wales

We test the hypothesis that Aboriginal linear stone arrangements in New South Wales (NSW) are oriented to cardinal directions. We accomplish this by measuring the azimuths of stone arrangements described in site cards from the NSW Aboriginal Heritage Information Management System. We then survey a subset of these sites to test the accuracy of information recorded on the site cards. We find a preference recorded in the site cards for cardinal orientations among azimuths. The field surveys show that the site cards are reasonably accurate, but the surveyors probably did not correct for magnetic declinations. Using Monte Carlo statistics, we show that these preferred orientations did not occur by chance and that Aboriginal people deliberately aligned these arrangements to the approximate cardinal directions. We briefly explore possible reasons for these preferred orientations and highlight the need for future work.Comment: Australian Archaeology, Volume 75 (December 2012), accepte

Wurdi Youang: an Australian Aboriginal stone arrangement with possible solar indications

Wurdi Youang is an egg-shaped Aboriginal stone arrangement in Victoria, Australia. Here we present a new survey of the site, and show that its major axis is aligned within a few degrees of east-west. We confirm a previous hypothesis that it contains alignments to the position on the horizon of the setting sun at the equinox and the solstices, and show that two independent sets of indicators are aligned in these directions. We show that these alignments are unlikely to have arisen by chance, and instead the builders of this stone arrangement appear to have deliberately aligned the site on astronomically significant positions.Comment: Accepted by Rock Art Researc

Indigenous human rights and knowledge in archives, museums, and libraries: Some international perspectives with specific reference to New Zealand and Canada

This article highlights the extent to which international law has changed rapidly in recent years in relation to the rights of Indigenous peoples generally and in particular how this impacts upon the legal status of traditional knowledge and culture. It reviews the recognition of the unique legal status of Māori in Aotearoa and Aboriginal peoples in Canada in relation to self-determination and how their changing place within these nations are affecting the operations of museums, libraries, and archives as case studies, illustrating some of the key legal and practical challenges that now impinge upon the work of archivists and related professionals in many countries

People of the Lakes

Publisher PD

Design for the contact zone. Knowledge management software and the structures of indigenous knowledges

This article examines the design of digital indigenous knowledge archives. In a discussion of the distinction between indigenous knowledge and western science, a decentred perspective is developed, in which the relationship between different local knowledges is explored. The particular characteristics of indigenous knowledges raise questions about if and how these knowledges can be managed. The role of technology in managing indigenous knowledges is explored with examples from fieldwork in India and Kenya and from web-based databases and digital archives. The concept of contact zone is introduced to explore the space in which different knowledges meet and are performed, such as indigenous knowledge and the technoscientific knowledge of the database. Design for the contact zone, this article proposes, is an intra-active and adaptive process for in creating databases that are meaningful for indigenous knowers. The meta-design approach is introduced as a methodology, which may provide indigenous knowers tools for self-representation and self-organisation through design

Resisting the Far-Right: Indigenous Perspectives, Community Arts and Story-Based Strategy

This article explores how we might resist and confront anti-immigration and anti-refugee politics by addressing the social and historical well-spring from which these discriminatory and damaging politics emerge and take sustenance. In doing this, I draw upon the concept of story-based strategy and the idea that our potential to address this issue relies on our capacity to fundamentally shift the dominant ways in which people understand and engage with it. This discussion occurs with reference to one practical application of story-based strategy – a community-arts project titled Stories of Hope and Migration – which attempted to re-frame the migration and refugee debate in Australia by funnelling it through a localised Indigenous perspective. In so doing, this article challenges the way in which early British migrants and their descendants have continually excised themselves from the rhetoric of migration, and furthermore, suggests that through a more nuanced conversation regarding the migration stories of all non-Aboriginal people, we might better promote a more historically aware, compassionate and inclusive society