The Curation and Abandonment of Australian Aboriginal Stone Artefacts

Tuesday 31 January 2012, 1.15PM

Speaker: Simon Holdaway, Auckland University

Aboriginal Australians apparently found expedient stone artefacts sufficient for many situations. Complex retouched forms do occur in Australia but they appear only around the mid-Holocene and are abundant only in some parts of the continent. In many assemblages retouched tools account for less than 5% of the artefacts and of these, heavily retouched forms like adzes (the local equivalent of scrapers) and points account for a smaller proportion still. The implication is that Aboriginal Australians were disinterested in stone artefacts using stone to manufacture important artefacts in other materials – particularly wood but not for primary purposes like food procurement. Because of this, stone artefact use in Australia is sometimes characterised as different to that attested in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Here I assess whether stone artefact manufacture, use and abandonment in parts of Aboriginal Australia is indeed fundamentally different to that observed in other parts of the world. My interest is not only in what Aboriginal people did in the past but also how archaeologist have analysed the record Aborigines created. In the ‘Continent of Hunter-gatherers’ archaeologists have applied many of the techniques developed in Western Europe and North America. That the inferences drawn from the application of these techniques are so different in Australia may have more to say about the practise of archaeology than the uniqueness of the Australian record.

Location: Biology

Admission: Open to all