Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology (ASHA) Archive

PROJECT Uploaded by: Penny Crook

Archive of papers from Volume 1 of the Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, published by the Australian Society for Historical Society (ASHA) in 1983.

PROJECT Uploaded by: Penny Crook

Archive of papers from Volume 2 of the Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, published by the Australian Society for Historical Society (ASHA) in 1984.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Judy M Birmingham. Denis Jeans.

Australian historical archaeology is now at a stage of development where it is essential that we pause and ask ourselves: 'What are we doing and why are we doing it?' In this paper Judy Birmingham of the Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney, and Denis Jeans of the Department of Geography, University of Sydney, strongly advocate an explicit problem-oriented approach to our subject matter rather than merely descriptive data collection. Clearly, Australian historical archaeology offers...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Graham Connah.

The following is the text of a paper that was presented at the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology First Conference on Historical Archaeology, held in Sydney on 29-30 October 1981. In this paper Graham Connah of the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, University of New England, identifies what he regards as a dilemma presently facing Australian historical archaeology. On the one hand, there is an urgent need for historical archaeologists to record rapidly vanishing data; and on...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jane P Wesson.

Bibliographies are a basic working tool for researching or teaching any subject, or merely for following up a casual interest. The person who undertakes to construct a bibliography, however, must have courage indeed. There will always be users of the end-product who will complain that it is incomplete or inaccurate or both. The proof of the bibliography, like the pudding, is in the eating! Jane Wesson, who has produced the following bibliography, is very conscious of these things. She invites...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Edward Higginbotham.

One of the most important contributions that can be made by historical archaeology is to throw light on aspects of the past neglected by most historians. Drains, for instance, have tended to be ignored by traditional scholarship. Yet the development of drainage systems of one sort or another was extremely important to the occupants of Australia's towns and cities during the 19th century. In the following paper Edward Higginbotham, a consultant archaeologist in Sydney, discusses his excavation of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Michael Pearson.

This study of the technology of the whaling industry in 19th century Australia originated as a part of a wider continuing research project into whaling in southern NS. W. It is necessary to be aware of the technology and the artifacts involved in order to understand the surviving artifacts of the industry, both in a museum and an archaeological context, to understand the technology of the sites being studied, and to understand the economic implications of the industry both locally and in the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Peter J F Coutts.

In this, the first of two papers, Peter Coutts, Director of the Victoria Archaeological Survey, writes about part of his work in New Zealand some years ago. In New Zealand, as also in Australia, historical archaeologists are faced with the problem of constructing a usable data base, comprising both documentary and archaeological material, on which future research workers can draw. In the following paper this task is attempted for the New Zealand building industry in the 19th century. Other...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Luke Godwin.

To varying extents old buildings are historical documents. In the following paper Luke Godwin of the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, University of New England, discusses his recent investigations of McCrossin's Mill, a late 19th century flourmill at Uralla in northern New South Wales. He sees the construction of the mill and the material remains of its working life, closure and subsequent use, as a reflection of the economic history of New England, in particular of the history of the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kate Holmes.

The White Range settlement on the Arltunga Goldfield must have been as remote a spot as any group of miners could have found in Australia in 1903, the high point of its history. Although supplies arrived only at two or three month intervals, and had to be carried from far-off Oodnadatta by camel and horse-teams, it was nevertheless at White Range that John Wilson set up his store and that Patrick O'Neil (and his wife) apparently set up his billiard table! In the following paper Kate Holmes, of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Ian R Jack.

Review of Totley: a study of the silver mines at One Mile, Ravenswood District, by K. H. Kennedy, P. Bell and C. Edmondson, Department of History, James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, 1981.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Graham Connah.

Editorial for the inaugural volume of the Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Graham Connah.

Editorial for Volume 2 of the Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Damaris Bairstow.

In their paper, The Swiss Family Robinson and the archaeology of colonisations, in Volume 1 of this journal, Birmingham and Jeans advocate adoption by Australian historical archaeologists of the American hypothetico-deductive method for investigating historic sites and propose a model of colonisation and development from which hypotheses can be drawn. In this paper by Damaris Bairstow, of Newcastle, NSW, it is maintained that historical archaeology is fundamentally inductive, that the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text J. V. S. Megaw.

In this paper, originally prepared as the concluding contribution to the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology's 1982 conference on 'Talking rubbish: or what does archaeology mean to the historian?', Vincent Megaw, the Society's first Vice-President, offered a semi-autobiographical and historical answer to the question posed by the conference title, citing examples from the United Kingdom, the United States of America and, of course, Australia.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Grace Karskens.

In examining the contribution of the convicts to Australia's early material history, archaeologists and architectural historians usually focus on impressive, durable structures such as public buildings and bridges. The convict road station site at Wisemans Ferry presents an alternative record. It comprises the remains of the temporary, rough dwellings of the convict gangs which constructed the Great North Road between 1826 and 1836, and it is particularly valuable because of the absence of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text J. H. Winston-Gregson.

Interpreting the Australian rural landscape is presently an uncommon skill. While developing an archaeological test for historical and geographical locational models, the author, a consultant archaeologist based in Canberra, discovered a string of deserted villages in the eastern Riverina. This paper summarises the historical material about two of the villages to indicate the scope of data that may be overlooked by other disciplines but rediscovered by archaeologically guided research. The...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Michael Pearson.

In this paper the author, who is Historian in the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, reconstructs the little-known process of station-based woolscouring from documentary and archaeological evidence. It is argued that the relatively Late survival of this form of scouring In western New South Wales resulted primarily from severely limited transport facilities. The considerable variation in scour design, evident in the literature and at Mount Wood, as attributed to individual...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Ian R Jack. Kate Holmes. Ruth Kerr.

The Chinese on the Palmer River goldfield of North Queensland from the 1870s onwards were involved in market gardening as well as mining. This paper examines in detail the history and archaeology of one such garden occupied by Chinese from 1883 until 1934. The results of an archaeological survey of the garden area, including habitation sites, graves and an irrigation system, and excavation of the principal Chinese house-site and several rubbish dumps, are analysed in the context of documentary...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Brian Rogers.

Salt production in nineteenth-century Australia was often based on the evaporation of sea-water by boiling. This required large quantities of fuel because of the low salt-content of sea-water, and there were obvious advantages in pre-concentrating the brine before boiling. Although solar evaporation was a well-established way of doing this, a handful of Australian manufacturers attempted to use the 'thorn graduation' process, in which water was evaporated from the brine by trickling it through...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Brian J Egloff.

The following is a rewritten version of a paper that was presented at the Second Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology, held in Sydney in October 1982. In this paper Brian Egloff, of the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service, examines the subject of cultural resource management, in the light of his experiences as manager of the Port Arthur Conservation Project. He demonstrates that cultural resource management involves collaboration between a number of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Michael Zeman. B Blakeman.

The Conservation Commission of the Northern Territory has recently funded a study for conservation and presentation of historic sites at Arltunga Historic Reserve, Northern Territory. Support for this project has come from the National Estate Programme. The study concentrated upon investigative and recording work in the field as a preliminary to a capital works programme. Previous documentation work at Arltunga was carried out by conventional surveying techniques. While they may have been...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Michael Pearson.

Review of Industrial archaeology in Australia: Rural industry by J. Birmingham, I. Jack and D. Jeans (Heinemann, Australia, 1983).

DOCUMENT Full-Text James Semple Kerr.

Review of 'Proceedings of the Cultural Heritage Conference: The future of our past, the preservation of our cultural heritage; held at the Department of Geography, University of Sydney, 17 October 1981' edited by G. Aplin. S. Riley and R. Cardew (Geographical Society of New South Wales, n.d.).