Current Research in Australia and New Zealand: An Overview

Abstract

This issue of Historical Archaeology grew out of a session organized by Alasdair Brooks for the 2005 Annual Meeting for The Society for Historical Archaeology. Delivered in York, England, the papers highlighted research with diverse theoretical perspectives and of broad geographic scope. Participants explored a variety of cultural landscapes and the myriad forms of material culture through which Australian Aboriginals, British colonists, convicts, working class women and children, Chinese miners, Asian divers, and others enacted economic strategies; established, maintained, or contested hierarchical social identities; and created mun dane, sacred, and commemorative places. With the exception of Edward Gonzalez Tennant's contribution on mining in New Zealand, this volume focuses primarily on Australia. After the Dutch seaman Abel Tasman in 1642, early landfalls in the region were followed by British annexation in 1840, before which most trading, missionary, and whaling vessels embarked from Sydney. While perhaps less relevant in today's socio-political relationships between the two settler nation states, New Zealand was essentially, for a period in the early 1800s, an Australian colony. Indeed, the histories of these two nations shared similar structural roots?exploration and contact, colonization, the development of extractive industries, British annexation, and nationhood? yet these processes resulted in two very different places. Perhaps future comparative work will explore this relationship more completely. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, a handful of British settlements dotted the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. These colonial outposts served as centers of exchange for the hinterland, where resources were extracted and communities sustained. Among the most geographically isolated settlements of the British Empire, they were nevertheless linked by oceanic trade routes with global reach to British and other European ports in Asia (including Hong Kong and the Indian subcontinent), to the southern tip of Africa, and to Europe. Exchange was not completely controlled by the British. American whalers, for example, frequented the Southern Ocean from the early 1800s, and Chinese migrants populated the late-19th-century goldfields along with many other ethnic groups. The papers in this volume combine evidence from documents, landscapes, extant buildings, archaeological sites, and artifacts to explore colonialism and contact; the creation of identity; the impact of gender, ethnicity, and status on the material record; and the role of consumerism?all important themes in today's historical archaeology. Together, they demonstrate that Australasia provides fertile ground for exploring the increasingly global nature of the modern world. The publication of these studies represents another milestone for Australasian historical archaeology, comprising the second volume of Historical Archaeology dedicated to research from this region, the first having been published in 2003. We recommend those papers and the insightful introduction to that volume (Lawrence and Karskens 2003) to readers; however, rather than revisit their discussion here, we will reflect on Australasian historical archaeology as revealed through the papers in this second collection.