Touching grindstones in archaeological and cultural heritage practice: materiality, affect and emotion in settler-colonial Australia

Abstract

In this article I explore affective and emotional responses to the material properties of Aboriginal grindstones by giving two examples, one from Narungga Country on Guuranda/Yorke Peninsula, South Australia and the other from Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Country in the Strzelecki Desert. I draw on theoretical ontologies in New Materialism, as well as affect and emotion studies, which place emphasis on constitutive, affective relationships between humans and objects in the world. I explore how the handling of ground stone objects is a distinctively affective and often emotional practice for Aboriginal peoples, Australian rural settler-descendants and archaeologists, one which can summon powerful responses but one which is often governed by legacies of sociopolitical and cross-cultural power relations. Further, I highlight how the identification and recording of grindstones is an extremely visceral, tactile and emotional endeavour that relies heavily on the interplay between the material properties of the implement and the sensory responses of the finder. Despite this significant facet of our work, scientific orthodoxies in archaeology and cultural heritage management often stifle analytical attention to the intimacy and sensitivity that operates at its practical interface. Developments in critical heritage studies point towards affective futures for cultural heritage and archaeological research, providing greater scope for practitioners to express the actualities of fieldwork in ways that are increasingly aligned with field experiences and participant realities.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• emotion
• materiality
• grindstones
• Indigenous archaeology
• Indigenous cultural heritage management
• critical heritage studies
• settler-colonialism

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to Narungga human rights activist, Uncle Tauto Sansbury, who fought tirelessly for Aboriginal rights in South Australia for many decades and who sadly passed away in Oct 2019, after a long battle with illness.

I would like to acknowledge the Narungga Nations Aboriginal Corporation, as well as the Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Native Title Group (along with Sean Freeman of Australian Heritage Services), for both groups’ continued support and cultural guidance during research and heritage work in their Country over many years. I thank Dr Catherine Frieman, Dr Steve Brown, Dr Kelly Wiltshire, Dr Chris Wilson, Dr Ursula Frederick, Professor Tracy Ireland and Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney for their valuable comments and constructive advice on earlier drafts of this paper. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive critique. Aspects of this paper have been taken from my PhD research, which was started at Monash University and then completed at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Monash University provided ethics approval at the start of the research process, and then the UWA Human Research Ethics Office granted research approval to the transferred project on 28 February 2014 (RA/4/1/6674). The research was supported in part by the University of Western Australia Ronald and Catherine Berndt Foundation and through an Australian Postgraduate Award.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).