Beyond ‘contact’ and shared landscapes in Australian archaeology

Abstract

The concept of ‘contact’ in Australian archaeology used to describe early cross-cultural interactions between Indigenous people and Europeans has become outdated and requires revisiting. In the USA, Silliman and Jordan both moved away from the idea of ‘contact’ as it undermines the power disconnect between the colonised and coloniser. Jordan proposes a two-tiered approach to these cross-cultural encounters: cultural entanglement and colonialism. To demonstrate that ‘contact’ does little to highlight the complex power dynamics of these interactions, Jordan's ‘cultural entanglement’ is employed as a metaphor not a model for understanding ‘contact’ before colonialism. This two tiered framework is used here to discuss the European invasion of the Pianamu cultural landscape on the Cape York Peninsula. Furthermore, the model proposed by Lefebvre outlining social spaces and how they are produced is used, rather than that of shared landscapes, to illustrate the complex power relations in cross-cultural relations. These ideas are explored to contextualise the current decolonising project of the Kuuku I’yu people and, through the use of these concepts, to demonstrate how Indigenous people can reclaim and produce their own social spaces which can include Western thinking. Importantly, the use of these ideas rather than ‘contact’ shows that these complex cross-cultural relations happen within a process of cultural entanglement and colonialism that is not unidirectional or mutually exclusive.

Keywords:

• Contact
• colonialism
• cultural entanglement
• shared landscapes
• decolonising archaeology
• Indigenous governance
• Cape York Peninsula
• cross-cultural power relations
• emancipated spaces

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge that much of this work was completed during David Tutchener’s PhD research which was funded by a FURS Grant from Flinders University and supplemented by a AAA Fieldwork grant for students. We would also like to thank the editors and reviewers of AA for their patience and insightful comments, particularly Dr Annie Ross. David Tutchener would also like to thank Dr Mick Morrison and Professor Heather Burke for their generous supervision during the PhD process, and would also like to thank his family for understanding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, as a result of the proposed Treaty in Victoria, the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent destruction at Juukan Gorge.