Standing back, thinking forward, acting globally

Being asked to contribute as one of the ‘50 Voices’ was humbling and somewhat surprising. Over the last 10 years, my research has taken me beyond the bounds of Australia and Australian archaeology, however, there are a few points I consider worth reflecting on. I’ll start (somewhat selfishly) by considering the value of zooarchaeology in Australia, and then touch on issues of the broader relevance and significance of Australian research.

Cosgrove (2002:190) noted two decades ago that ‘Zooarchaeological studies have had an uneven history in Australia and a rather narrower range of study than elsewhere’. In many respects that statement still holds true, being borne out in the two most recent disciplinary surveys published in Australian Archaeology. Mate and Ulm (2016) highlighted faunal analysis as one of the top-10 skills gaps identified by all survey respondents, alongside ancient DNA and isotopes (highlighted for the first time in that survey). In fact, faunal analysis was the only skills gap common across all primary subject focus areas—Indigenous, historical, maritime and classical archaeology—and identified as being important by those working in government, university and private sectors. Shifting to the survey undertaken at the start of the pandemic (Mate and Ulm 2021), faunal analysis no longer appears as one of the skills gaps identified by respondents. By primary subject focus area, it now only appears as a skills gap identified by maritime archaeologists, although ancient DNA and isotopic analyses are highlighted under Indigenous and historical.

Given that the results around the importance of faunal analysis were consistent over the first three iterations of the survey (Mein and Manne 2021), as a zooarchaeologist the striking shift in the more recent survey is concerning. Why zooarchaeology now appears to be undervalued, particularly given the issues that can be addressed through faunal material, is not entirely clear.

In his earlier review of several decades of Australian zooarchaeology, Cosgrove (2002) flagged a decline in the output of zooarchaeological research between 1992 and 2002. Based on data covering the period between 2002 and 2020 incorporated into the more recent review published by Mein and Manne (2021) this has not improved, and at best has stabilised at a level comparable with that seen during the 1990s. Is this evidence of a decline in how the value of fundamental zooarchaeology is viewed concomitant with an uptick in biomolecular methods (such as DNA, isotopes and proteomics)?

This does feel something like a knife edge for zooarchaeology in Australia. As Cosgrove (2002) rightly noted, when zooarchaeology has ‘boomed’ here it has largely been on the back of the research being driven by particular individuals or through larger, interdisciplinary projects (e.g. Veth et al. 2017). This situation is therefore a wakeup call for all zooarchaeologists—we need to be more proactive. In this sense, we need to be setting the agenda for zooarchaeological research and more clearly articulating how zooarchaeology contributes to the bigger picture (such as in Ditchfield et al. 2022). Additionally, many of the problems with which we are grappling in Australian zooarchaeology are the same as those being discussed internationally (e.g. Mein and Manne 2021), so while much of our fauna may be unique, the issues of the place of fauna in human society are global. This provides us with opportunities to emphasise the importance of Australian zooarchaeology locally and to the broader discipline.

We have an outstanding, exceptionally long-term record of complex and dynamic human behaviour that is of global importance. Our colleagues investigating the Pleistocene record of human arrival and early behaviour, rock art and, more recently, submerged archaeology have rightly had clear impacts internationally. The Australian archaeological record beyond these areas is not as well recognised overseas; we need to address questions that are locally important but connect them to the relevant ‘grand challenges’ (Kintigh et al. 2014) of international significance.

In some ways related to this point, we are undoubtedly in an age of meta-analyses (e.g. Lambrides et al. 2019), modelling (e.g. Williams et al. 2015) and agenda-setting papers (e.g. Fitzhugh et al. 2019), with an increasing number of these types of ‘big picture’ publications over the last 10 years. This is not a criticism of this work, but one issue that we do need to think carefully about is how we use the results of meta-analyses and larger-scale models. This is an important consideration given that a model is only as good as the data used to generate it and requires validation or ground-truthing. Higher-resolution zooarchaeological data have the potential to make a significant contribution in this regard. For example, Williams et al. (2015) state quite clearly that their demographic and mobility model, linked to the onset of complex societies, is not fact but ‘a model of the timing, extent and nature of mobility across the Australian continent with which to compare local and regional archaeological records’. What we have, therefore, is a baseline that allows us to establish regional research agenda to address these kinds of issues with empirical data. This is again critically important given that we know there is significant inter- and intra-regional variability throughout the Holocene based on historically contingent social and environmental factors (Ulm 2013), and the ‘continental narrative’ is more complex when we delve into high resolution analyses of the local and regional archaeological record.

The final point I want to make here is about the relevance and impact of what we do as archaeologists. We do this job because we love it and we can see the intrinsic benefits of understanding the past, but how do we articulate that and position our research in a way that creates a tangible benefit? Drawing together the issues that have been touched upon briefly above, one area in which we have the potential to have a real impact is in conservation biology and biodiversity. Climate change, habitat degradation and biodiversity loss are key global issues (Almond et al. 2022), and without a doubt Australia is facing serious and accelerating environmental degradation. Unfortunately, apart from certain focal areas, Australia suffers from a lack of detailed and robust baseline faunal, ecological and environmental data. Archaeologists have the potential to contribute to addressing this issue through regionally focused, inter-disciplinary research that contributes to education, outreach and management policy (as recently advocated by Lane 2021 and Rick 2023). Although there are significant challenges, we have seen recent examples incorporating Australian data (Reeder-Myers et al. 2022). By working in partnership with First Nations peoples to unite Traditional Ecological Knowledge with archaeological and environmental science data, we would be in a strong position to effect change in this area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.