Disrupting paradise: Has Australian archaeology lost its way?

Abstract

The opening keynote session at the 2019 Australian Archaeological Association (AAA) annual conference on the Gold Coast was designed to allow reflection on how archaeology has developed in the 50 years since John Mulvaney (1969) published his landmark Prehistory of Australia (Clarkson 2019; David and Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation 2019; Hodgetts and Ross 2019; Jacobs 2019; McDonald 2019). In reflecting on that issue myself, I wonder whether the kind of generalist practitioner that John and others (including his contemporary Isabel McBryde) epitomised, is endangered, or perhaps even extinct? In this paper, which is an expanded version of the spoken comments I offered in response to the AAA keynote presentations (Wallis 2019), I contemplate our current position as Australian archaeological practitioners in the broader context of shrinking research funding, increasing bureaucratisation of universities, an unhealthy attention to metrics as the primary measure of research value, and increasing levels of specialisation, offset against a burgeoning cultural heritage management (CHM) sector. In keeping with the 2019 conference theme, I suggest we require some conscious and deliberate ‘disruption’ of the discourse if we hope to have another productive 50 years.

Keywords:

• history
• Australia
• neoliberalism
• funding
• training
• archaeological science
• cultural heritage management
• metrics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the former AAA President Michael Slack and the 2019 Conference Organising Committee for the invitation to be a discussant in the keynote session at the 2019 Conference, and to Australian Archaeology Editors Annie Ross and Sean Ulm for inviting me to prepare this written version of my keynote discussion for publication in this forum. My intention has not been to deliberately upset valued colleagues, but rather to encourage reflection and explicit debate, and to this end I am grateful to Heather Burke and Alice Gorman with whom I had many discussions over many months about some of the issues raised herein, and also Iain Davidson for his thoughts on a draft of this paper. Mia Dardengo assisted with some components of the background literature review, Ken Mulvaney generously offered insights into elements of the paper regarding his father, and Billy Griffiths generously pointed me in the direction of the opening quotes. Thanks to the Editors and an anonymous referee for their useful insights on various aspects of the paper; any flaws remain, of course, mine alone.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Then typically called ‘prehistory’ departments, though this term fell out of use after a particularly acrimonious debate in which AAA and Australian Archaeology were at the centre, as people developed greater awareness of its inherent problems and derogatory overtones (e.g., Burney 1999:101).

2 Though Davidson (1983) referred to CHM as ‘public archaeology’.

3 An entire research project could be done tracing the career trajectories of graduates from different institutions and the emergence of different opinions around the importance of CHM to archaeological practice, but such review is beyond the scope of this paper. Here I intend to foster explicit reflection and debate.

4 Though the first Indigenous archaeologists under the supervision of John Mulvaney and Isabel McBryde did not graduate from the ANU for another decade or so.

5 Defined as non-traditional bibliometrics sourced from the web, especially social media, proposed as an alternative to traditional citation impact metrics.

6 Note that the ARC does not make public data about unsuccessful grants by discipline codes, so it is not possible to know the success and failure rates of archaeology-specific applications. It is worth noting that the overall numbers of ARC Discovery applications have fallen from more than 4,000 in 2009, 2010, and 2011, to fewer than 3,200 in 2018, 2019, and 2020 (ARC 2020). This means that, although ‘success rates’ look to be rising, this is simply due to fewer grants being submitted with approximately the same numbers of grants being awarded. One interpretation of this, suggested by anecdotal evidence, is that many researchers have ‘given up’ submitting applications due to their low success rate or because changing rules have rendered them ineligible, e.g., when they do not hold at least a 0.2FTE position. Another is that universities themselves have become more selective about which applications they allow to be submitted to the ARC, in part a product of universities becoming more protective about their relative ARC success rates. This general decline in grant submissions appears anecdotally to be negatively affecting female more than male researchers, though hard data to support this are currently unavailable.