Islandborn: Country, Sea Country and Encounters with Outside

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Seacountries of Northern Australia and Island Neighbours", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For 7,000 years the Dampier Archipelago (Murujuga) was the traditional land and sea country of the Yaburara and Mardudunhera. Ngarda ngarli have inscribed and deliberately modified this landscape for 50,000 years. After the LGM, rapid sea level rise brought demographic packing and intensive mangal-forest occupation. Social signalling dramatically increased as this coastal landscape transformed. Island life continued through the Holocene and this coastal economy included engineered fishing weirs and other landscape modifications and fibrecraft fishing equipment: but no boats or fishhooks. Historic encounters brought the watery worldwide networks of north American whalers and explorers with ‘contact’ truncated by pearling and pastoralism and the Flying Foam Massacre (1868). This paper describes the major transformations of this land to sea country through a rock art lens that reveals both deep time long distance desert connections and complex island and coastal interactions through the more recent past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Seacountries of Northern Australia and Island Neighbours   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow