From ‘Jane roughed it with the men’ – the last 50 years

About 50 years ago I got involved in Australian archaeology by volunteering at the Western Australian Museum where I was later employed. My major contribution was to help with the excavation and analysis of faunal remains from Devil’s Lair, a limestone cave in southwestern Australia. Devil’s Lair has become an iconic Australian archaeological site, and the circumstances of the excavation are a good reflection of archaeological practices at the time.

The archaeological excavations at Devil’s Lair began after Duncan Merrilees, the Western Australian Museum palaeontologist, discovered a human tooth and a baler shell fragment amongst material excavated by American palaeontologists in the 1950s. A radiocarbon date of about 14,000 BP had been obtained from the site but the deposits extended well below that date. Megafauna had also been found at Devil’s Lair and Merrilees (1968) theorised that Aboriginal people caused the extinction of megafauna through the effects of their use of fire on vegetation. Recognising the potential great antiquity of the site, he was keen to provide evidence in support of his proposal. With the newly appointed curator of archaeology, Charlie Dortch, excavations at Devil’s Lair began in 1970.

The three main research questions of the excavations at Devil’s Lair—the antiquity of human occupation of the continent, the cause of megafauna extinctions and changes in stone technology—have been consistent in archaeological research about Indigenous Australians throughout the last 50 years. Initially this meant that the research concentrated on caves and in other locations where sites preserved datable organic remains and identifiable animal bones and where stratigraphic sequences are finer than in open sites. Isabel McBryde’s, regional study comparing patterns of land use in different environments in northeast New South Wales (e.g. McBryde 1974), was a notable exception.

The first two sentences of an article written in 1976 about the research at Devil’s Lair ‘No picnic: Secrets of Devil’s Lair’ and published in a popular magazine are written in bold to highlight the themes of the article and read:

Jane roughed it with the men to dig deep into the prehistoric cave. Their finds of animal bones and artefacts could tell of people who lived there 40,000 to 50,000 years ago (Schmitt 1976:23).

Three things in these sentences reveal some of the perceptions of Australian Indigenous archaeology in the 1970s. First, that it was a bit odd for women to do archaeological fieldwork; second, that there was an expectation (at least by the archaeologists) that human occupation could extend well beyond the then current earliest known date of c.32,000 years ago from Lake Mungo; and third, there was no overt recognition that the first occupants of Australia were Aboriginal people.

It was a bit odd for women to be involved in archaeological fieldwork in the 1970s. This is not to say that there were none but, before the expansion of the discipline in the 1980s after the introduction of changes in State heritage protection requirements, museums and universities were the main employers of archaeologists. The legacy of the Federal government’s 1922 marriage bar, preventing married women being employed by the public service, no doubt still had an effect for some time after it was overturned in 1966. Although this policy only applied to the Commonwealth public service, State governments often applied the same rules. The example of McCarthy’s employment at the Australian Museum following his marriage to museum anthropologist Elsie Bramell, who had to resign from her position, is well-known (Bowdler and Clune 2000:29). As more positions became available in heritage archaeology, and perhaps influenced by the 1960s and 1970s women’s movement, more women entered the archaeological workforce.

By the end of the 1980s, there were close to equal numbers of men and women members in the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc., but far smaller proportions of women were represented in public service and tertiary institution positions (Beck and Head 1990:Table 1) and far fewer held higher degrees (Beck and Head 1990:Table 2). Today, this has changed with Mate and Ulm’s (2021) most recent survey of the profession recording higher numbers of women than men in all major employment areas—government, university, and private consulting businesses. How this has changed the discipline is difficult to assess. There may be a greater awareness of the activities of different genders when interpreting the past but there is little evidence that women cover a different range of issues in their research than men. It could be argued that, when working with Traditional Owners, the presence of both male and female archaeologists ensures that a wider variety of Indigenous views can be incorporated.

On the second issue, as it turned out, occupation at Devil’s Lair did prove to date from over 40,000 years ago. Improvements in radiocarbon techniques, their calibration, and lower costs as well as the development of new dating techniques have more than doubled the time of Indigenous people’s arrival than was known in the 1970s. As most of the new techniques do not require the preservation of organic remains, excavations of sites outside of caves and rockshelters have become more common. In the 1970s, even though the radiocarbon laboratories used were usually within universities, it was rare for the dating researchers to be included as authors on the subsequent archaeological papers. Today these researchers are frequently involved in the fieldwork and as authors on the resulting publications. Indeed, it is now common for publications to have great lists of authors as more and more specialists from the sciences in multiple areas relevant to archaeological research, such as the identification of charcoal, pollen, phytoliths, and macrobotanical remains (in the 1970s the latter were often discarded after weighing), bone isotopes, DNA etc. While these changes have undoubtedly improved the quality of information available from sites, the inevitable downside of the associated highly technical language makes publications increasingly impenetrable for people outside these disciplines to understand. The emphasis on science to interpret the history of people also has the effect of removing the people from the story.

Of course, it is essential that we use all available techniques but it is increasingly critical that we make our work palatable to the public, especially to First Nations people on whose land we work. This might be done by making use of a more narrative style in more of our publications. The power of the narrative style is evident from the dramatic influence that Bruce Pascoe’s (2014) Dark Emu has had on Australians’ views of First Nations people’s history. It has been read by far more people than the standard Australian archaeology texts and it has raised old debates about land management that were a feature of the historical approaches of the 1970s, such as fire stick farming, yam planting, seasonal movements and villages.

Finally, in the initial stages of investigations at Devil’s Lair, there was no thought about the fact that we were digging into the deep history of Noongar people. Our awakening came around the time of Ros Langford’s influential paper, delivered on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community, at the Australian Archaeological Association conference in 1982 (Langford 1983). This awareness, First Nations peoples’ activism and government heritage policy changes in the 1980s, in addition to the development of the Australian Archaeological Association’s Code of Ethics in 1991, resulted in changes in archaeology practices. First Nations people now routinely partner with archaeologists during fieldwork and are paid for their contribution to that work. They are more frequently involved in the development of the research or, in the case of heritage archaeology, in the scope of the archaeological work and decisions about the fate of sites and cultural materials. However, formal recognition of the contribution of Indigenous knowledge to the work by naming Indigenous people as authors on publications has lagged somewhat—although it is increasing. As their contributions usually provide accounts of their own lives, about images and markings represented in rockshelters and other surfaces, the use of stone artefacts and ceremonial structures, they can provide the missing narrative. It is unlikely that on all topics we will ever have a common explanation but there is no reason why alternative relevant Traditional Owners’ interpretations should not be presented in multi-authored, mainstream archaeological publications. We should be able to acknowledge and respect the different ways of producing the past.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.