Australian archaeology at the cross-roads: The next 50 years

Australian archaeology sits on the crest of a wave, poised to generate new energies, directions and turbulences. It has quickly morphed from a nascent discipline scaffolding early-stage understandings of Indigenous and settler lifeways, to increasingly embrace theoretical and methodological complexities which stand to both amplify and silence new knowledges. Indigenous voices and worldviews are increasingly articulated with the gap in participation and co-design incrementally being closed at the same time. Like any threshold in the development of a discipline and its practitioners, there are visionaries, pragmatists and surely predators. Competing hegemonies are lining up like apostles and the sanctity of ‘hygiene’ and ‘objective science’ is being espoused in the field, the laboratory and in statistical congress. At the very time that big data and pan-continental narratives are being meaningfully interrogated, the echoes of gatling guns strafing the foundational roots of the discipline can be heard, almost as a historic belch. Are we really at the cross-roads of generalist and particularistic viewpoints; essentialist versus decolonising dialogues; tangible versus enmeshed value-making, with archaeologists acting with overt agency rather than as simply transcribers? Whatever the current tensions, there is little doubt that 50 years is a long time in any discipline and particularly so in Australian archaeology. Where do I see the challenges, opportunities and new agendas sitting for the next 50 years and why might these considerations matter? Here I will address general issues as these relate to the archaeology of the deserts of Australia and capacity-building. I see these themes as representative of two of the yawning gaps that need to be systematically addressed in the future of the discipline.

Most bioregions of Australia, and particularly the arid zone, lack high quality regional data sets with chronological scaffolding. These gaps in geographic and chronological coverage are no better illustrated than the massive Great Sandy Desert of northwest Australia encompassing some 285,000 km². Incredibly, there are no dated sequences within this vast and important expanse, located between the tropics and temperate zones of the south, other than the desert-edge sites of Riwi and Parnkupirti. The assemblages from both sites suggest that ancient and rich records await documentation, and this must be seen as a priority in future research planning.

Desert sites dating back to 50–45 ka have now been documented from the coast, through the inland Pilbara and into the Western Desert. These sites all come from different and representative locations in Desert Country (Figure 1). At least four rockshelters in the Pilbara ranges have now yielded ages older than 45 ka. In the wider arid zone of Australia only three other sites fall into this early age bracket, being located in the southern Kimberley, the northern Flinders Ranges and the Willandra Lakes of western NSW. Given there are now more than 10 desert sites dated to 50–45 ka, it is generally accepted that the landfall and settlement of Greater Australia, far to the north of these deserts, must have occurred long beforehand (Bradshaw et al. 2023). The time is ripe for continental-wide occupation models to envision an earlier timing for the Aboriginal settlement of Australian deserts and to explore the mechanisms, and rates, by which people could have successfully dispersed through them. New marine core data and Australasian climate archives indicate that optimal conditions for the settlement of northern Australia occurred towards the end of marine isotope stage (MIS) 4 (71–60 ka). This is a time when sea levels had dropped by 100 m and northern Australia would have been wetter. Large lakes of the north, such as Lake Gregory, became more permanent at this time with reconstructions showing that Lake Gregory was 10 times larger than today, likely supporting fish, shellfish, crustaceans and water birds.

Figure 1. Intensive grinding station overlain by cultural deposits near the Ashburton River, Western Australia.

The apparently early and successful settlement of over 4 million km² of deserts in Australia represents one of the great narratives in global history, which can only serve to recast models of human adaptation, sitting alongside the scale of maritime settlement of Sahul even earlier. Clearly, new questions and research agendas must be established and built upon for arid Australia. We must actively support advances in modelling desert settlement, landscape archaeology, human biogeography, remote sensing, symbolic archaeology, and heritage practice. Long-standing questions about human responses to extreme environments need to be systematically (re)addressed, including demography during times of drought; information transfer; use of new technologies; reliance on plants for food and subsistence; and coastal aggregation and settlement patterns. These themes engage with the contemporary challenges of water security, extreme weather events, food security and human mobility. This new work must enmesh new archaeological insights with Traditional Owner origin narratives and their worldviews, creating new cultural legacies for host communities, resulting in informed management strategies and new national imaginings.

It is very likely that colonising groups had the capacity to penetrate interior deserts, and particularly so during earlier and wetter periods. Understanding the tempo of expansion through the deserts depends on fine-tuning the date of original landfall, and the size of founding groups now thought to be up to 1,550 people (Bradshaw et al. 2019). Research should move on from the scale of refugia and human biogeography to focus more on variations in foraging habitats and social and economic strategies across different desert bioregions (Law et al. 2021; Veth et al. 2022). While this new research will focus on Australia, inevitably it will produce important findings and synergies for understanding the use and occupation of other arid regions previously thought to have formed significant ‘barriers’ to the initial peopling of Eurasia and Europe out of Africa in MIS 4, and following the Last Glacial Maximum in Central and South America.

By using innovative methods and new analytical approaches the question of whether desert settlement occurred before 50 ka and during pluvial times can be addressed. Of course, pursuing old sites should not dominate the agenda, and those sites and records from other time periods in the deserts should be studied to understand social dynamics from the late Pleistocene, Last Glacial Maximum, Holocene and ENSO periods, through to contact. Curiously the places of last contact between Aboriginal people and settlers (e.g. from the 1960s to 1980s) have yet to receive detailed archaeological work designed to tease out the various agencies of these colliding groups.

Centring Indigenous knowledges and science, and their intersections with disciplinary advances, must feed into a new era of collaborative policymaking and management of land and sea estates. Such a synergy is heralded in the newly funded and James Cook University-led Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (CIEHF). In short, this Centre aims to bring Indigenous and environmental histories to the forefront of land and sea management. Beginning in 2024 and running until 2031, it represents a new era of significant investment in co-designed research being run by Indigenous research leaders for the benefit of the wider community. The Centre will develop new ways to bring Indigenous and environmental histories to the forefront of land and sea management. By looking back 1000 years and forward 100 years, it aims to develop new integrated approaches to Caring for Country.

A collaboration of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers has been brought together having deep expertise in Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous science, archaeology, history, ecology, palaeoecology, mathematics, modelling, remote sensing, and genomics. CIEHF Deputy Director and ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Lynette Russell from Monash University, has noted that ‘the Centre would transform the way the humanities, arts and social sciences disciplines and science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines engage with Indigenous knowledges into the future’.

A significant aim of the Centre is to support the growth of Indigenous research capacity through training and mentoring programs. There are 90 fully funded PhD and Masters scholarships available in the Centre, with the majority identified for Indigenous candidates. The funds will also support at least 40 new postdoctoral research positions over the life of the Centre. Such major consortiums will place archaeology in a pivotal position going into the next 50 years of knowledge production, policy making and public education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.