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archaeology used to describe early cross-cultural interactions between Indigenous people and Europeans has become outdated and requires revisiting.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.