Australia (Other Keyword)
1-14 (14 Records)
Agent-based models are useful tools for modeling decision making and its system level effects when the system being modeled is too complex to be accurately described by a simple mathematical model. This is important archaeologically because site distributions and material assemblages represent the aggregate results of many individual subsistence decisions that take place in a complex ecological and social landscape. In this poster, we present an agent-based model for subsistence intensification...
Assessing hunter-gatherer mobility in Australia's Western Desert using historic aerial imagery from the 1950s (2017)
Access to water, food, and other resources is a critical factor structuring hunter-gatherer mobility, but few landscape-level studies have examined how resource availability influences where foragers go and how long they remain at one place before moving on. Using a newly available set of aerial images from the Western Desert of Australia taken in 1953, we utilize a simple ideal-free distribution model to reconstruct forager mobility by the fire footprints they leave behind. We examine three...
Carpeted with Ammunition: Investigations of the Florence D shipwreck site, Northern Territory, Australia (2017)
The American transport ship Florence D disappeared in the murky waters off of the Tiwi Islands after being bombed by Japanese fighter planes on their return from the first air attack on Darwin Harbour on 19 February 1942. Considered one Australia’s great wartime mysteries, the location of the site was unknown until discovered by a local fisherman in 2006. Archaeological investigations of the wreck later conducted by teams from the Northern Territory’s Heritage Branch verified the identity of the...
Digging deeper: The use of rock art in archaeological contexts to understand past lifeways on Murujuga, Northwest Australia. (2015)
Murujuga comprises one of the most complex rock art provinces in the world.The iron red boulders of this ancient landscape host petroglyphs which communicate a myriad of sociocultural dynamics of groups utilizing changing landscapes over millennia.These petroglyphs are situated within a landscape marked by complex and diverse archaeological signatures including stone arrangements,lithic scatters,quarries,middens and hut structures.Currently our archaeological understanding of the prehistoric...
Embodiment and Relatedness: the rock art of Muluwa, Wulibirra, and Kamandarringabaya (2017)
As an interpretive tool for rock art studies, the concept of embodiment has much to offer especially when used in conjunction with ethnographic data. In this paper we focus on embodiment in the context of relatedness using a case study involving Yanyuwa rock art from three sites – Muluwa, Wulibirra, and Kamandaringabaya – in the Sir Edward Pellew islands in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region. Although not stylistically similar, the rock art from these sites is intimately...
Human-Environment Interaction in Colonial Queensland: Establishment, Use and Abandonment of the Port of St Lawrence and Implications for the Archaeological Record (2015)
This paper explores the recursive relationships between people and the environment in a colonial port setting on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Established in c.1860, the St Lawrence port settlement and the lives of its inhabitants were mediated by the dynamic coastal environment which characterises the surrounding region. Transformations of the physical environment prompted by settlers to allow for port development changed the geomorphology of the creek environment and led to accelerated...
Lapita - the Australian connection (2015)
Recent research in southern New Guinea, Torres Strait and northeastern Australia suggests that Lapita users and possibly makers may have been present in regions hitherto believed to be beyond their reach. In New Guinea, the discovery of late Lapita near Port Moresby has just been complemented by findings of late Lapita ceramics in the western Gulf of Papua. Southwest of the Gulf, undiagnostic ceramics dating to perhaps 2500 years are now known in the Torres Strait. Bill Dickinson showed that...
Local Contexts, Global Application - A Comparative Analysis of Collaborative and Community Archaeology Projects in Western Australia, British Columbia and Alaska. (2015)
Collaborative heritage management projects requires adaptation to local customary protocols, local structures, and local community goals, and so necessitates a uniquely, localized focus. At the same time, developing, formalized approaches to collaboration that have universal elements – structures and processes - that are applicable in any context, is a goal in the continual evolution and development of a fully integrated collaborative, community archaeology. This means identifying those...
Patterns through space: a spatial analysis of Murujuga rock art, Northwest Australia. (2015)
Spatial analysis is a methodology that has been widely used for researching rock art. It has had a wide-ranging focus, varying from informed methods (using ethnographic information), to formal, and experiential methods. Spatial analyses undertaken on Murujuga, the Burrup Peninsula in northwest Australia, have primarily focused on establishing chronologies, the clustering of rock art motifs at a broad landscape scale, and the relationship with resource foci. My research has focused on formal...
A review of the Submerged: stories of Australia’s shipwrecks program. (2018)
The Australian National Maritime Museum and the Australian Maritime Museums Council invited regional maritime museums to submit local content, or ‘shipwreck stories’, for a nationally travelling banner exhibition on Australian shipwrecks. The final graphic panel exhibition, Submerged: stories of Australia's shipwrecks, is produced by the ANMM, touring nationally and free of charge from 2018. Host venues may display their own/loaned objects with the graphic panel exhibition and are provided...
The Significance of Surface Artifact Scatters: Case Studies from Australia and North America (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The three authors research surface archaeological records dominated by scatters of lithic artefacts, a class of archaeological data frequently encountered during CRM projects in areas of North America and Australia. We each began researching surface lithic scatters...
‘Strewed with Wrecks’: Results of the 2017 Archaeological Survey of Kenn Reefs, Australian Coral Sea Territory (2018)
In February 2017, maritime archaeologists affiliated with the Australian National Maritime Museum and Silentworld Foundation conducted a survey of Kenn Reefs. Located at the far eastern extremity of Australia’s Coral Sea Territory, this reef system was an uncharted hazard to navigation in the middle of the ‘Outer Route’, a shipping corridor used by nineteenth-century mariners wishing to avoid transiting through the Great Barrier Reef. Not surprisingly, several shipwrecks occurred at Kenn Reefs...
Using Food Web Models to Examine Desert Networks in the American Southwest and Western Australia (2018)
Archaeological studies benefit from rich ecological data, yet linking ecological data to narratives of the past can be difficult. Here I use trophic network modeling to understand both Ancestral Pueblo and Australian Aboriginal food webs, comparing these systems for a greater understanding of human and environmental resilience. Here I show that Ancestral Pueblo people connected themselves into a greater environmental web and use network analysis to examine how the changing network properties of...
Von Brandenstein's turtle: Expanding histories of interaction between Indigenous Australians of the Northern Pilbara and Islanders of Eastern Indonesia (2023)
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. In the 1970s, the linguist Carl-Georg von Brandenstein claimed that the Portuguese had established a "secret colony" in the Pilbara. He argued that linguistic material from Indigenous Australian languages of the northern Pilbara which looked to be Portguese in origin supported his hypothesis. Archaeological research has...