Connecting Bark and Wooden Material Culture to Culturally Modified Trees in Yagera Country, South East Queensland, Australia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper will present research findings of a PhD project conducted in a collaborative partnership with Jagera Daran (Indigenous Traditional Owners) research partners. In Australian archaeology there has been a relative absence of research linking bark/wooden material culture to culturally modified trees. This paper argues that understanding the form of bark/wooden artefacts, the tree species and the part of the tree that they are created from, is fundamental to understanding the full context of culturally modified trees. Often, significance assessments about culturally modified trees are carried out without a base knowledge of the cultural and socio-economic importance of trees to Traditional Owners. Such an approach can lead to the destruction of culturally modified trees for residential housing, roads and other infrastructure development projects. Museums in Australia and the United Kingdom which house bark/wooden material culture removed from Yagera Country in South East Queensland were recorded as part of this research. In this paper it is argued that connecting Traditional Owners with their material culture heritage, along with fieldwork to document culturally modified trees and interviews to embed community perspectives, will lead to more holistic significance assessments—resulting in the better protection of these endangered Indigenous cultural heritage sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 54111