Planning Voyages: Cargo, Culture, and Concepts.

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.

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 details. What can these grand sweeping epic stories of heroes and heroines tell us about maritime travel and its history? In this paper, I consider how we might use these records of exploration to determine what is needed to undertake maritime travel. Consideration will be given to the prosaic and pragmatic ‘how to prevent a canoe from sinking’ to the philosophical ‘what rituals are required for safe passage’. Finally, the paper will offer a theoretical discussion concerning how we might use the models developed here to reflect on travel in the deep past when Australia was first encountered some seventy millennia ago.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow