School News

Archaeology book nominated for Prime Minister's prize

Peter Hiscock's latest book, Archaeology of Ancient Australia (Routledge 2008) has been nominated for the 2008 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, an award made for an outstanding publication that contributes significantly to an understanding of Australian history. The nomination describes the book as follows:

“This book shows how it is possible to unearth this country's long human history, even though our written records are limited to the few hundred years since its European discovery. Beginning with the first human colonization and ending with European contact in the eighteenth century, Peter Hiscock traces the ever-changing and sometimes turbulent history of the Australian Aboriginal peoples and their ancestors. While they remained hunters and gatherers throughout this time, their economies, technologies, cosmologies, beliefs and social life continually evolved.

Hiscock shows how this human past can be reconstructed from archaeological evidence in easy-to-read style and without unnecessary jargon or detail, yet reflecting the weight of scientific research. Including information from genetics, environmental sciences, anthropology and history, this book encompasses the wide variety of disciplines in the sciences and humanities which contribute to an investigation of the human past in Australia.

Although the book serves as an introduction to the history of Aboriginal occupation it also presents an innovative synthesis that represents a fundamental challenge to the conventional images of the ancient Aboriginal past of Australia previously offered by historians, anthropologists and archaeologists. By demonstrating that throughout the last 50,000 years there were substantial and frequently repeated alterations to the economy, social practices and cosmology of Aboriginal people Hiscock shows why views of pre-contact Aboriginal life as unchanging or fixed are incorrect. The implication of that conclusion is that previous historical reconstructions which have used observations of Aboriginal life after European contact to understand the nature of pre-contact Aboriginal occupation have failed to identify how different and varied were the lives of early Australians. In the Archaeology of Ancient Australia Hiscock argues that the social and economic lives of Aboriginals were not only elaborate but also regionally diverse, adapted to local conditions and changing as those conditions changed. Furthermore, he argues that the fifty millennia of social and economic transformations were not merely an evolution from simple to complex cultural systems, nor a directional growth towards the kinds of Aboriginal cultures that existed historically. Instead Hiscock shows us that the history of Aboriginals in the continent has been dynamic and ever-changing, and deserving of appreciation as such. The book encourages us to celebrate change and adaptability of human life in ancient Australia.“

Vietnam Field School

Dr Ashley Carruthers is co-convening a field school in Vietnam during January, and will be presenting a conference paper: “A Superficial Ethnography of the Casinos of the Cambodian-Vietnamese Borderzone”, at the transPOP Viet Nam Korea Remix symposium, Seoul, January 18-19, 2008

Looking back over 2007

Reported in the monthly newsletter of the Society of Antiquaries of London:

The end of the year is an opportunity for retrospective and summation, and two recently published lists of the year’s most important archaeological rediscoveries have included projects connected with our Society. Archaeology magazine’s ‘Top 10 Discoveries of 2007’ includes a project led by Cambridge University archaeologist Joan Oates and partly funded by the Society looking into the origins of Tell Brak, in north-eastern Syria, the site of one of the world’s oldest cities. Analysis of pottery sherds from recent excavations here suggests that the city grew from the amalgamation of previously separate villages, with people moving in to the gaps and eventually filling the hole in the middle, rather than, as once assumed, growing from a central settlement that expanded outwards. Thus at least one ancient city is now known to have grown organically, rather than having been planned by some form of authority.

In its runners-up list of 2007’s other most important finds, the magazine features the work of Fellow Matthew Spriggs and colleagues at the Australian National University and the Vanuatu National Museum in excavating the Lapita cemetery at Teouma, on the south coast of the island of Efate. Visiting the UK for the Society’s Tercentenary celebrations, Matthew was interviewed by our Fellow Mike Pitts for British Archaeology magazine, where he explained how travels in India and China during his Oxbridge ‘gap year’ kindled an interest in Pacific archaeology, which led him to a PhD on the ancient landscapes of Vanuatu, then to teaching Pacific archaeology in Hawaii (‘a great place to live, but it’s very hard to get any work done – the lifestyle is just too good!’) and from there to the Australian National University.

In the same interview, Matthew explains the fascination with Vanuatu: ‘The big issue is where does the Lapita culture come from? Is it primarily the same people who have been around the New Guinea-Solomons area for 40,000 years, or does it represent a major migration that is primarily south-east Asian?’ DNA analysis of the human remains from the Teouma cemetery might well provide some answers during 2008, and the local people are as interested in the answer, says Matthew, as professional archaeologists: ‘they want to know “Are these our ancestors?”’

Matthew sees similar questions relating to origins and ancestry in the post-Roman archaeology of Britain, the other subject he teaches at ANU, and is blunt in rejecting the fashionable belief that fashions and styles migrated to Britain’s shores in the Anglo-Saxon period rather than people: ‘The total language shift from Celtic to Anglo-Saxon, that’s not usually how languages meet … I think there has to be a big immigration’.

The link to the Archaeology Magazine top ten is: www.archaeology.org/0801/topten/
and the link to the page where they suggest that Teouma only missed out because of a technicality is: www.archaeology.org/0801/topten/polynesian.html
On that page the editors state: “No matter how you date discoveries or publication of archaeological research, we will likely look back on 2007 as a watershed year for our understanding of the Lapita and the colonization of the Pacific”.

Christine Helliwell wins VC’s Teaching Award

Report from On Campus:

The New Zealand-born anthropologist wrote her Masters thesis on ‘the middle class ‘Pakeha’ (white) family’ in the land of the long white cloud. Having been raised in similar type of family, this research wasn’t too far removed from her own experience.

Yet when she took up a PhD project at ANU in the early 1980s, Dr Helliwell decided to study societies in Borneo, Indonesia. This included a stint living in a longhouse among the Dayak peoples. Life in these communal dwellings is a far cry from that of suburban New Zealand. But rather than being overwhelmed by this sense of cultural alienation, Dr Helliwell said she thrived on it.

“When I was growing up I became involved in student politics, movements like feminism, which were all about alternative ways in which society could be arranged.

“In essence, this is what Anthropology is all about: the many different ways in which humans can live.”

It’s the appreciation of human variety that Dr Helliwell said she tries to convey in her teaching, which also includes some entry level subjects for PhB and PhD students.

Dr Helliwell cut her teeth teaching at the University of Auckland, which offered a junior lectureship program for early career academics. One of her first roles behind the lectern was offering a subject in human society to engineering students. “They were great,” she recalled. “People have these preconceptions about engineering students being all about technical things, but these guys were really switched on and interested in people.”

Dr Helliwell returned to a position at ANU in 1995. After a stint as Deputy Dean in the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences last year, she now teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students, and has been Assistant Dean in charge of Honours and PhB at the College since 2005.

Aside from her interest in the societies of Borneo, she’s also fascinated by the theoretical side of Anthropology, particularly how ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are conceived.