'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)

Returning home: heritage work among the Stl'atl'imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley

This article focusses on heritage practices in the tensioned landscape of the Stl’atl’imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the Lower Lillooet River Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Displaced from their traditional territories and cultural traditions through the colonial encounter, they are enacting, challenging and remaking their heritage as part of their long term goal to reclaim their land and return ‘home’. I draw on three examples of their heritage work: graveyard cleaning, the shifting ‘official’/‘unofficial’ heritage of a wagon road, and marshalling of the mountain named Nsvq’ts (pronounced In-SHUCK-ch) in order to illustrate how the past is strategically mobilised in order to substantiate positions in the present. While this paper focusses on heritage in an Indigenous and postcolonial context, I contend that the dynamics of heritage practices outlined here are applicable to all heritage practices

Shared landscapes: archaeologies of attachment and the pastoral industry in New South Wales

Shows that pastoral heritage is more than just 'woolsheds and homesteads', the showpieces of white, male settler colonial economies. Pastoral heritage is the product of the mutual histories of Aboriginal and settler Australians. It is a form of heritage that is both in, and a part of, the landscape. His 'archaeological' approach to the heritage of the pastoral industry involves both recording sites and excavating attachments to community heritage

The Current State of School Culture in Elementary Schools in Mississippi During the Covid-19 Pandemic

In the Spring of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic changed not only the way in which our daily lives were carried out, but it also drastically effected the way schools operated. Many if not all school districts in the state of Mississippi began operating in some type of remote fashion during the spring of 2020. Some school districts switched to an online format while others operated using a hybrid model which may have included work packets being completed at home or a combination of the two. The type of model by which each school operated often depended on the resources available to them. Regardless of the changes each individual school was forced to make, a profound impact was had on not only the students, but also the certified elementary school staff. The purpose of this study is to explore different perceptions among demographic groups as it relates to the six elements of the School Culture Survey (SCS) and determine if a statistically significant difference exists between identified groups of certified elementary school staff relating to their views on the culture within their schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. The groups which are being measured are certified elementary staff’s years of experience, highest level of degree earned, race, and gender. The primary data for this study were obtained from 129 certified elementary school staff using the School Culture Survey (SCS). Two school districts in north Mississippi participated in the study. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to determine whether a statistically significant difference existed among the identified groups relating to their view on the current state of their school’s culture during the Covid-19 pandemic

Heritage Futures

Heritage Futures is a four-year collaborative international research programme (2015–2019) funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Care for the Future’ Theme Large Grant, and supported additionally by its host universities and partner organisations. The research programme involves ambitious interdisciplinary research to explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange across a broad range of heritage and related fields, in partnership with a number of academic and non-academic institutions and interest groups. It is distinctive in its comparative approach which aims to bring heritage conservation practices of various forms into closer dialogue with the management of other material and virtual legacies such as nuclear waste management. It is also distinctive in its exploration of different forms of heritage as future-making practices. This brief paper provides an introduction to the research programme and its aims and methods

Ghosts of solid air: contested heritage and augmented reality in public space

This article critically reflects on the design and development of a new Augmented Reality (AR) experience addressing issues of contested heritage in the historic built environment. The experience – Ghosts of Solid Air – is a 45-minute interactive theatrical narrative for mobile phones that tells a critical story about the legacies of colonialism and histories of protest and disobedience that have shaped contemporary Britain. Audiences follow the story from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square in central London, encountering varied contested monuments and activist figures from the past along the route. This article describes the main elements of the experience before tracing the evolution of the project and its relationship to shifting debates on contested heritage in the UK since 2020. We conclude with reflections on the challenges and opportunities of AR when it comes to opening up new modes of heritage engagement, paying particular attention to questions of justice and participation that transcend issues of representation, recognition, and reinterpretation

Who\u27s Afraid of the World Wide Web? An Initial Investigation into the Relative Impact of Two Salient Beliefs on Web Shopping Intent

The growth of World Wide Web consumer activity that requires that an individual place sensitive personal information online continues to increase at a phenomenal rate. This study investigates two beliefs about shopping on the web (perceived usefulness and perceived web security) to determine their impact on intent to gather information about products and to purchase products using the World Wide Web. Data from 119 university students is used to develop a scale to assess web security concerns and to perform an initial analysis. Implications are discussed

Exorcising the ‘plague of fantasies’: mass media and archaeology's role in the present; or, why we need an archaeology of ‘now’

Taking as its starting point Slavoj Žižek’s (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, this paper considers how the electronic mediascape and its contagious practices have come to dominate all areas of contemporary reportage and history-making. It suggests that Web 2.0’s reliance on ‘mob thinking’ and ‘wiki-histories’ can lead to a rapid and widespread erasure of alternative accounts and nondominant narratives. Against this background, the paper explores the urgency of developing an ‘archaeology of now’ which could provide a stimulus for the exploration of marginal and subaltern viewpoints and alternative contemporary histories. Such an archaeology might involve not only a focus on contemporary material evidence, but also the analysis of virtual material culture and the excavation of virtual media to reveal the power structures and micro-histories of the World Wide Web’s dominant narratives. The paper is intentionally provocative, and aims to stimulate a broader engagement with an archaeology of the present