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In this guest editor's introduction to this thematic volume on the historical archaeology of Queensland, Australia, I briefly discuss some of the history and archaeology of Queensland in light of some of the major themes currently being investigated. The papers presented in this volume are also introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Australian boab tree and its potential for research as living historical archaeology. Boab trees play an important role in the economy, culture, and cosmology of Indigenous people in northwest Australia and continue to hold a powerful presence in the Kimberley region today. Working with Nyikina and Mangala Traditional Owners we have undertaken to document examples of this iconic tree and its cultural and historical associations, particularly in the form of carvings and inscriptions embedded in the bark. Focusing on four individual trees located in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia, we propose that the modification of boab trees, as a practice undertaken by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, offers important insights into the everyday lives and historic events that shaped this cultural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a collection of objects deliberately concealed beneath the verandah of a ward for middle-class, female, paying patients at Australia's longest continuously operating mental health institution, the Royal Derwent Hospital in Tasmania. Cached in small discrete mounds across an area of some 50 square metres, the collection was probably concealed in the mid-20th century and contains over 1000 items of clothing, ephemera and other objects dating from 1880 to the mid-1940s. In achieving a possessional territory of such magnitude, this patient achieved a level of personal self-expression that is rarely encountered archaeologically, particularly within an institutional context. Analysis of this collection as an 'underlife' illuminates both functional aspects of the hospital and the hopes and desires of this particular, though still anonymous, patient and her vibrant world of things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) in archaeological prospection is not a new phenomenon; its capacity to enhance fieldwork processes is well proven. Use of the technology makes it possible to identify potential archaeological features and sites across large swathes of the landscape quickly and accurately. In addition, the data captured by LiDAR open up landscapes to differing forms of analysis, improving understandings of how people interacted with each other and the landscape. Despite this, few Australian historical archaeologists are publishing on the application of this technology in their research. This paper presents the results of a research project where LiDAR has been incorporated from the beginning. Part of an ARC project examining nineteenth century landscapes of convict labour and punishment on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, this research employed LiDAR to identify, classify and analyse the extended landscapes formed by and for convict labour. Results of an archaeological survey of the Cascades probation station (1842–1855) are presented and the efficacy of LiDAR in an Australian bush setting is discussed. The paper also reviews different forms of analyses that have been undertaken of the convict landscape, using LiDAR to repopulate this landscape with people and labour processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, the 150th historical archaeology project was conducted in the central city area of Melbourne. Almost all of these investigations have been undertaken since the introduction of the Victorian Heritage Act 1995. With the Act recently under review, it is timely to look back on the lessons learned by heritage managers and archaeologists over the last 25 years. It is also an opportunity to review current practices to ensure that future site investigations are conducted efficiently and achieve meaningful outcomes. How can information obtained from the previous 150 projects inform and enhance the research frameworks of future work? What can we learn about Melbourne’s historical archaeology that we do not already know? How can community benefits be optimized? This paper will evaluate the successes and failures associated with the implementation of historical archaeology legislation in an urban setting and consider how the past 25 years of archaeology in the city can inform our approach to future opportunities in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The nature of institutions in Australian archaeology is reviewed and the five papers of this special section introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an historical archaeological examination of the socioeconomic relations of the Chinese and European communities of Cooktown in north Queensland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It looks at the social landscape and production, exchange and consumption of material culture to show that the Chinese were not a disengaged group, as depicted in conventional understandings of colonial life, but integral to the town's socioeconomic fabric. This close relationship arose out of a process of negotiation between Chinese and Europeans which responded to the strengths, weaknesses and resources of their individual business networks, and the particular conditions of Cooktown's frontier environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of archaeological site formation processes, although routinely undertaken for prehistoric sites, is only carried out in historical archaeology in a limited way. Understanding the processes which formed the archaeological record of a site is an important first step towards developing justifiable inferences about past behavior and past societies regardless of the age of the site. This paper identifies and examines the cultural and non-cultural processes that formed the archaeological record at the Commissariat Store, Brisbane. The history of the site, from its construction in 1829 as part of the Moreton Bay penal settlement to the present, is examined and the expected impacts and processes on the archaeological record are identified. Archaeological evidence from the salvage excavation of the site undertaken in 1978 and 1979 is analyzed to identify the cultural and non-cultural site formation processes. This study identifies the presence of cultural formation processes including discard, loss, abandonment and re-use from an examination of the historical and archaeological evidence. Non-cultural formation processes at work in the site include faunalturbation, floralturbation, flooding, and aquaturbation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents alternative readings of the archaeology of a series of nineteenth-century industrial and convict sites in the midwest region of Western Australia. In particular it employs the biography of Joseph Horrocks a former convict turned mine manager, to reinterpret the relationship between these places, considering the agency of the individual and suggesting how his experiences at some sites may have influenced him to attempt to create an idealised industrial settlement aimed at assisting with the reform of convicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many artefacts in museums lack adequate information about the context from which they were collected. Not surprisingly, this often applies to artefacts recovered from battlefields, where chaotic conditions can result in uncertainty about their origins. This paper examines the case of a Second World War German 88 mm gun preserved in an Australian museum. The museum had little contextual information for this weapon, except that the Australian Army captured it in North Africa in 1942, probably after the Second Battle of El Alamein. However, an archaeological analysis of the gun, particularly of damage incurred during battle, can link it to photographs taken after the battle and re-establish its historical context and the circumstances of its acquisition. In this way, a museum artefact can become more than a mere exhibit: it can be made to document its own past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the vulnerabilities of archaeological grey literature, including unpublished reports and non-statutory databases, to loss or corruption. The experience of managing these types of products in Tasmania, Australia, is outlined with particular reference to historical archaeological grey literature. Factors affecting long-term management and continuity are discussed and successful strategies being adopted in Tasmania to maintain these resources are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical archaeologists have advocated the need to explore the archaeology of the modern city using several different scales or frames of reference—the household and the district being the most common. In this paper, we discuss the value of comparisons at larger scales, for example between cities or countries, as a basis for understanding archaeology of the modern western city. We argue that patterns of similarity and dissimilarity detected at these larger scales can (and should) become part of our interpretive and explanatory armoury, when it comes to understanding patterns and processes at smaller scales. However, we also believe that these larger scale enquiries do not by any means exhaust (or diminish the importance of) the site- or household-specific questions that continue to demand adequate answers. By reporting some of the thinking behind the work that has been done in Melbourne, Sydney and shortly to begin in London, we seek to more clearly establish the value of this broader comparative agenda in urban historical archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have generally been slow to recognize the value of Annales approaches to their discipline, and maritime archaeologists, in particular, have been even slower. The analytical framework used in this paper draws on applications of Annales approaches to archaeology in what is termed the "archaeology of the event." The resulting holistic approach places the specificity of the event within the wider cultural context. Furthermore, terrestrial historical archaeology has largely ignored the potential that cargo material, derived from maritime archaeological excavations, has to contribute to understandings of colonial settlement. This paper moves beyond the usual functional approaches to the analysis of the meanings of material culture. A major part of the archaeological data used here is drawn from the cargo assemblages of four postsettlement shipwrecks excavated in Australian waters during the past 30 years: Sydney Cove, James Matthews, William Salthouse, and Eglinton. This paper provides a theoretical and methodological model for the systematic analysis of consumer goods that can be used to better understand cultural aspects of colonial settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reanalysis of archaeological and documentary evidence of a vanished community (that of Casselden Place in the heart of the area known as "Little Lon" in central Melbourne) has fostered a more thoroughgoing exploration of the nature of the urban slum in Australia. There are significant questions raised by the interpretation of Casselden Place (and Little Lon) as a community during the 19th century (some of the most important of which center on the nature of assemblage composition among poor households of the period). This paper also touches on the means by which new and more complex histories of such vanished communities can be written. As such, the discussion builds on earlier methodological statements and more detailed discussions of the life histories of individuals who lived in Casselden Place (Mayne and Lawrence 1998; Mayne and Murray 1999; Mayne et al. 2000; Murray and Mayne 2002) to provide a more specific discussion of the archaeological elements of the project. The analysis of the assemblage reported here is very much a work in progress. Analysis of assemblages drawn from Casselden Place and those from the rest of Little Lon continues, reaching beyond the level of establishing artifact frequencies and exploring the meaning of the counter-intuitive patterns that are discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal people have lived in Australia, continuously, for tens of thousands of years. Over that time, they developed complex knowledge systems that were committed to memory and passed to successive generations through oral tradition. The length of time oral traditions can be passed down while maintaining vitality is a topic of ongoing debate in the social sciences. In recent years, scientists have weighed into the debate by studying traditions that describe natural events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts, which can be dated using scientific techniques. Here, we bring together a trans-disciplinary team of scholars to apply this approach to Tasmanian Aboriginal (palawa) oral traditions that were recorded in the early nineteenth century. These traditions describe the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge connecting Tasmania to mainland Australia and the presence of a culturally significant "Great South Star", identified as Canopus (α Carinae). Utilising bathymetric and topographic data of the land and sea floor in the Bass Strait, we estimate the Bassian Land Bridge was finally submerged approximately 12,000 years ago. We then calculate the declination of the star Canopus over the last precessional cycle (26,000 years) to show that it was at a far southerly declination (δ < −75°) between 16,300 and 11,800 years ago, reaching its minimum declination approximately 14,000 years ago. These lines of evidence provide a terminus ante quem of the Tasmanian traditions to the end of the Late Pleistocene. This paper supports arguments that the longevity of orality can exceed ten millennia, providing critical information essential to the further development of theoretical frameworks regarding the archaeology of orality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outside the Antipodes, Australian archaeology is best known as an archaeology of the distant Palaeolithic past. However, where communities have been closely involved in developing and undertaking archaeological research programs, the focus of archaeological research has been radically different, often dealing with the archaeology of the recent, remembered past and crossing disciplinary boundaries between Aboriginal and historical archaeology. Distinguishing between 'community-based archaeology' and reactive or 'consent-based' community involvement in archaeology,this paper reviews the state of archaeology and its engagement with communities in Australia. Through several case studies in both indigenous and post-contact archaeology, it demonstrates the way in which community-based research and practise is changing what it is we think of as 'archaeology' in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of historical archaeology to make a significant contribution to our understanding of Queensland's recent past is hindered by factors including few practitioners, limited publications about historical archaeological research and a need to establish its relevance beyond the archaeological community. There exists great opportunities in Queensland for researchers to explore a diverse range of research topics of which only some are beginning to be investigated through historical archaeological enquiry. This paper investigates the current state of the discipline in Queensland, the challenges practitioners face today and into the future, and the avenues down which historical archaeologists may make significant contributions to our understanding of Queensland's recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between anthropogenic and coastal geomorphologic processes in relation to archaeological site formation processes for foreshore maritime infrastructure such as piers and baths. The natural and cultural history of Queenscliff, a nineteenth-century Victorian township, is explored to understand the historical reasoning for the development of many diverse types of coastal architecture associated with use of the sea in the area. The effects of environmental processes on these structures are demonstrated, along with the role these structures play in subsequently shaping the environment. It is demonstrated that changing coastal dynamics play a major role in shaping the final locations and condition of archaeological maritime infrastructure sites. By understanding these processes it is possible to make predictive statements about the, often unexpected location and integrity of these sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonists who took up land in the new colony of South Australia following its proclamation in 1836 introduced water management technologies from their homelands, generally the United Kingdom and Europe. The aim of this paper is to present some archaeological evidence of nineteenth-century water management strategies identified in field surveys undertaken by the Hills Face Zone Cultural Heritage Project. This evidence includes nineteenth-century strategies to conserve water, control water flow and to irrigate orchards and crops. The analysis of the GIS data collected through field studies, together with several case studies, showed how some irrigation and water control methods were effective, whilst others were found to be unsuitable for the Australian environment and resulted in the destruction of property and degradation of the environment by occasional severe floods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shipwreck survivor camps are a neglected terrestrial component of maritime archaeology, usually being investigated purely as an adjunct to work on the associated wreck site. Most studies have considered these sites as individual and unique, molded by the particulars of the historic events that created them. However, by considering the history, anthropology, and archaeology of a series of Australasian survivor incidents and sites, this paper highlights common elements and themes, which allow examination of these sites within a comparative framework. These include the development of authority structures, social organization, salvage and subsistence strategies, material culture, short- and long-term rescue strategies, and the possible influences of crisis-related stress upon the decisions made by individuals and groups. Survivor camp studies are linked into the wider concerns of maritime archaeology and anthropology by placing them within the context of wreck formation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study investigating archaeology as a practice embedded in a complex web of culturally constructed codes of meaning or discourses. A distinctive form of discourse concerning the landscape and its rote in determining national identity characterizes Australian culture. This discourse has been central to the construction of the idea of the nation and its past: in particular, concepts of the land as hostile and empty, of the bush as the essence of Australia, and of the landscape as feminine. The paper considers the ways in which this landscape discourse has operated within historical archaeological research and heritage management and discusses the implications of these discursive relationships for past and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excavation of the Cumberland/Gloucester Streets Site in Sydney's historic Rocks area in 1994 was marked by the successful application of an innovative, integrated approach to urban archaeology in Australia. This approach allowed fresh explorations of many aspects of Sydney's social and cultural development, including the material world of the first generation of convict settlers. This paper examines that world within the wider context of standard and more recent interpretations of the convict colony, as well as drawing on and evaluating scholarship in the history of material life over the last 20-odd years. It offers some reflections on the idea of the worldview, the importance of local context, and the ways in which we approach the archaeology of settler societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sort of canon with which I am concerned is neither a misspelled antiquated weapon nor a member of the Christian clergy. Instead I use the word in the sense of a generally recognized body of major publications which are central to a particular discipline and that represent a material expression of its scholarship. The matter with which I am concerned is that, after a gestation of over thirty years, historical archaeology in Australia still appears to lack such a canon. By now we might have expected to have major research publications about Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, Sydney's First Government House, Port Essington, and other notable sites, as well as published versions of major doctoral theses, but instead we are mainly restricted to necessarily brief journal papers, or generalizing books that publishers have considered commercially viable, or grey literature that is difficult of access. There are a number of reasons for this situation, of which the difficulty of publishing the major studies that we lack is perhaps the most important. However, we must ask whether we think it matters that such major studies are so rare. Do we wish to see our work contribute to a central core of scholarship that represents the discipline, or is it enough that we concentrate on the preservation of our material heritage instead of materializing it in a literary form? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melbourne was a major global city in the nineteenth century. Founded by pastoralists in 1835, the settlement grew explosively following the discovery of gold in 1851, and within a decade the population had reached half a million people. New settlers and new wealth brought a boom in housing construction, manufacturing, civic institutions, and transport and communication infrastructure, as the city became the leading urban center in Australasia. The structure and fabric of the city today expresses much of its colonial development, when “Marvellous Melbourne” was among the most remarkable metropolitan centers in the Asia-Pacific region. In the last ten years, the intersection of more rigorous heritage protection and a boom in large-scale urban development means that there has been a fluorescence of historical archaeological work carried out in Melbourne, especially in the central business district. We draw upon this extensive archive of material to highlight the results of major archaeological discoveries that have occurred in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are there traditions of folk ritual practice in Australian historical contexts, and are they observable in the archaeological record? Studies from the US and UK have documented a range of practices suggesting the persistence of British and European traditions of folk magic well into the twentieth century and previous historical work has identified numerous examples of ritual concealments in Australian buildings. In examining over 4,500 Australian historical archaeological sources, however, we found very few examples of possible folk ritual practices. This raises the question of why such practices are not being captured by current archaeological recording methods. As counterpoint, a general model is constructed from US, UK and Australian work that raises intriguing possibilities for the situating of superstitious behavior in Australian historical archaeology, including the contexts in which people might be more prone to practise such behaviors and how they might be materially identifiable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The site of St John's provides a unique insight into the internal dynamics and materiality of a nineteenth century Catholic girls' reformatory and the silent lives of the young women, both inmates and nuns, who were confined there. The organisation and material culture of the site reflects the intersection of Australian colonial, Catholic and 'middle-class' ideologies. This institution's purpose was to reform through the imparting of a Catholic hegemony of 'appropriate' female behaviour and sexuality; this hegemony was supported by enculturation, which included the altering, confining, decorating and ordering of the St John's space. The site and its assemblage, whilst small, demonstrate the framework for, and materiality of, the reformatory system that was underpinned by deep traditions of female confinement based in Catholic institutional models. Gender as a social process is key to reading and interpreting the materiality of the St John's Reformatory for girls. Gender frames, informs and contextualises the materiality of the site, its aims, its operation and thus its archaeological interpretation. Further, the ideological gender roles and regimes related through historical accounts provide the context for the embeddedness of gender in the material culture found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pastoralism was the mainstay of the developing economy of Queensland. The men and women who owned the pastoral properties were mainly from upper and middle class English and Scottish families. One such family, the Somersets, occupied Caboonbah, a pastoral property in the Brisbane Valley of Queensland in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Excavation of the rubbish gully associated with the homestead provided material evidence of how this family adhered to the tenets of middle class family life while living in an isolated rural area and contending with the fluctuating fortunes of life on the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within institutions, a separate social world comes into existence. Gender is a crucial shaper of relations in this new world, defining status, relationships to others and personal identity. Understanding the gendered conditions of, and responses to, institutional care is an important social contribution of historical archaeology to contemporary society. Research on the Peel Island Lazaret in Moreton Bay, Queensland, uses a model for engendering archaeology, with modifications pertinent to historical archaeology. Analysis builds on the work of others who have investigated the ways in which men and women of the confined and confining classes experienced institutions and interacted with each other. This study also extends beyond these approaches in exploring the areas of 'interpersonal agency' and relationship building, and the ways in which disadvantage minimization was mediated by the structuring principle of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Textile remains were discovered during a salvage excavation at the site of the North Brisbane Burial Ground, a nineteenth-century cemetery in the city of Brisbane, Australia. Ninety-six textile samples were collected at excavation, comprising 39 twill weaves, 17 tabby weaves, one haircord weave, one satin weave, three knitted fabrics, one piece of felt and 34 masses of loose wool packing. Most of the woven textiles recovered were coffin coverings or coffin linings. Similarly, the majority of non-woven textile samples were also associated with coffins and their dressing. Five of the identified textiles were likely to have been fragments of garments worn by the deceased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preliminary historical archaeological research on Lizard Island in far north Queensland is enabling the Queensland Government to develop more effective management strategies for on-site interpretation of the historical precinct of Watsons Bay. Although popularly associated with the north Queensland colonial heroine Mary Watson, the Bay can now be understood as a large multilayered cultural landscape with meaning to a wide variety of groups. The common aspects of the three known beche-de-mer operations that occupied the Bay between 1860 and 1881 and the nature of the emerging archaeological record afford many opportunities for scaled archaeological research. It further highlights aspects of historical archaeological theory and the relationship between the discipline and the historical record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses some of the more important implications of a long-term research project into the archaeology of the modern city in Australia. It discusses how we can explore domesticity, community, family life, and issues of residence and mobility through urban archaeology, as well as providing evidence of larger issues about how and what people produce and consume in cities. In the five projects that followed the original research at Melboune’s “Little Lon” district, we developed new strategies to increase both temporal and spatial scales as we sought to focus on ways of reconciling differences in the resolving powers of different types of data. During the course of the nineteenth-century patterns of production, consumption, work, and residence changed across the Western world, and it became clear that comparisons between sites in Melbourne and Sydney (and later in London) were required to get a better understanding of the genesis and development of urban communities (and, at a more pragmatic level, to see whether it was possible to generalize about the composition of “working class” or indeed “middle class” assemblages). This article presents what is, in effect, a progress report on that broad comparative agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This reflective piece draws together the themes and issues presented within the volume, exploring historic and contemporary definitions and attitudes towards poverty and their implications of the archaeological study of 'slum' neighborhoods. It compares and contrasts the individual case studies from York and Manchester with investigations in America and Australia, drawing attention to the differences between them. Suggestions are made for future investigations, particularly in the potential for further comparative work at an international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume on the archaeology of urban poverty arises from a three-day symposium hosted by York Archaeological Trust and the University of York in July 2009 to establish the wider intellectual framework for the investigation of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology of the Hungate neighborhood of York. In this opening article, the trajectory of medieval and post-medieval archaeology in Britain is contrasted with historical archaeology in the United States and Australia, and the influence of the pre-modern history of the Hungate neighborhood on its development since 1800 is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partnership with Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, which was aimed at understanding Aboriginal place knowledges, we develop the concept of conversation for analysing the research process between archaeology and oral history. We define co-opting conversations as the most usual conversations engaged in between disciplines, research paradigms and between scientific and Indigenous knowledges. We then identify several more productive kinds of conversation that occurred between oral history and archaeology in our research: intersecting, parallel, complementary and contradictory. We found contradictory conversations, usually regarded as failures by other researchers, yielded the most productive analytic understandings. As a result of these different types of conversations we were able to produce a richer understanding of placeness ( sensu Mayne and Lawrence 1998). The richest understandings of place at Yarrawarra develop only through such interdisciplinary conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past year or more there has been a refreshing sea breeze passing through the area of Chinese Australian history. Some of this change has its origins in a number of seminars and conferences held over the past five years, which are now finding their way into journals, books and other publications.' This scholarship will contribute to a much more precise and informed discourse on the history of the Chinese people in Australia, particularly in the fields of historical archaeology, material culture and racial identity. and the momentum is poised to continue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A regional historical archaeological analysis of Strangways Springs Station, northern South Australia, reveals the evidence for interaction in the period 1850-1900 between Aboriginal people and newly arrived European pastoralists. The evidence from campsites and worksites demonstrates differential Aboriginal involvement in the nineteenth century pastoral domain. The nature of cultural interaction changed as the pastoralists adapted and transformed their economic and social behaviour in response to the harsh Lake Eyre Basin environment and to economic and technical parameters related to the fledgling pastoral industry. The case study shows that archaeological and historical evidence each provide different perspectives on past culture contact and human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists working in post-colonial nations are still coming to terms with the contextuality of their data. This is accentuated for archaeologists researching sites of indigenous/colonizer contact. Here descendants of the indigenous people who confronted European colonizers or invaders often possess rich narratives of those events. These narratives form a culturescape, a physical place composed of localities where the events of the remembered past took place. Archaeologists working with indigenous communities are confronted with these culturescapes, which tell the community history of places and give them cultural significance. Archaeological investigation of the early colonial site of Fort Dundas/Punata in northern Australia has encountered a Tiwi culturescape that is entwined with archaeological narrative constructed over the past twenty-five years. The discursive nature of culturescape formation at Fort Dundas/Punata is examined in the context of the articulation between Tiwi and archaeological narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the archaeological record and models of colonization among the U.S., Europe and Australia. It presents a comparison systematically, considering the implications of interregional differences in greater detail in terms of both the accumulated archaeological record and current models of colonization. The North America and Australia have no systematically gathered all-encompassing databases of dated archeological sites and list of dates sites is gathered from general literature reviews. Europe has a very large database of archaeological sites and dates from the late Quaternary and is unlikely that all of them have been discussed with the same care as those in America and Australia because many sites and dates have been found there.

We discuss four components of the post-European archaeological record of the northwest Northern Territory, Australia; site locations and contents, rock art, stone tools, and evidence of plant food use. These provide insights into how Aboriginal hunter-gatherers have negotiated their interaction with pastoral colonization, and the conditions under which either continuity or change occurred. The strongest influence on both the latter was Aboriginal people's attempt to maintain both social obligations and attachments to particular places. This was more successful than in many parts of Australia because of the limitations the wet season placed on pastoral activity. We discuss the implications of this particular contact situation for understanding longer term change in hunter-gatherer societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]