Seacountries of Northern Australia and Island Neighbours
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2023
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Seacountries of Northern Australia and Island Neighbours," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
In this session we will explore interdisciplinary approaches to studies of maritime interactions and encounters with a particular focus on the Seacountries of Northern Australia. We aim to productively engage with the complexity of ocean based social relationships, as well as the mobility of people and things. Inspired by the oceanic turn in the humanities, the so called ‘blue humanities’, or the “New Thalassology” we are seeking a range of perspectives that offer innovative methodological and theoretical approaches and new intellectual avenues for understanding the dynamic trajectories of ocean encounters. We encourage maritime and historical archaeological approaches along with text-based histories, and anthropological archaeology. We are particularly interested in studies where the sea provides interactions, encounters, followed by accommodation, resistance, trade, exchange and ‘settlement’. We encourage advances in the integration of maritime, coastal and island landscapes and a deeper understanding of complex social, sentient, and geomorphic relationships through time.
Other Keywords
seascapes •
Art •
Archaeology •
Mobility •
Narrative •
Rock Art •
Australia •
Indonesia •
seafaring •
Encounters
Geographic Keywords
AUSTRALIA •
Commonwealth of Australia (Country) •
Queensland (State / Territory) •
Australia (Continent) •
Victoria (State / Territory) •
New South Wales (State / Territory) •
Tasmania (State / Territory) •
South Australia (State / Territory) •
Western Australia (State / Territory) •
Australian Capital Territory (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)
- Documents (7)
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Hands across the water: Exploring maritime networks in Pleistocene Wallacea (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Once characterised as a cultural backwater due to the lack of traditional markers of modern human behaviour, the last few decades have seen Southeast Asia’s archaeological record re-evaluated following finds of the world’s earliest evidence for rock art and Pleistocene fishing technology. Now research in the islands of...
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Islandborn: Country, Sea Country and Encounters with Outside (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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....
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Making Waves: sea, art and archaeology (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The sea country of Groote Eylandt was formed by ancestral beings who made a vast interconnecting network of islands and waterways; the saltwater that defines the contours of the land has also profoundly shaped Groote Eylandt culture, history and archaeology. Rock paintings of boats and fishing scenes occur from beach to...
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Memories of Seascapes? (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Most of the curated seascapes noted from ethnohistoric records come from the tropical north of Sahul and Wallacea. Whether these marine estates are vestiges of maritime expansions or autochthonous remains an intriguing question given recently described marine interaction zones from the southern islands of Wallacea, the...
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Planning Voyages: Cargo, Culture, and Concepts. (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. From Norse sagas to Polynesian origin tales, to Bugis songs of Macassan voyages to Marege narratives of mapping, exploring, discovering, settling, trading, and returning are told across many maritime cultures. A close reading of these sources shows even the most mythic of stories can contain surprisingly specific...
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Seafaring in Seacountry (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Multiple Indigenous stories along the northern Australian coast talk of seafaring and the coastal environments encountered and created. These stories form an intangible maritime cultural heritage of Seacountry that is entangled with narratives of sea level rise and changes in the marine environment. These narratives...
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Von Brandenstein's turtle: Expanding histories of interaction between Indigenous Australians of the Northern Pilbara and Islanders of Eastern Indonesia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...