Everything You’ve Been Told About the History of Australian Archaeology is Wrong!

Matthew Spriggs

doi:10.5334/bha-626

Abstract

This paper challenges the oft-repeated conventional story of the beginning of ‘modern’ Australian archaeology, seen as the era of the professional archaeologist that succeeded an undisciplined phase of indiscriminate collecting of skulls and stone artefacts by ‘amateurs’ who, on the whole, believed that Indigenous Australians had arrived on the continent so recently that any excavation of archaeological sites would be pointless. Cambridge-trained John Mulvaney’s excavations at Fromm’s Landing on the Murray River in South Australia commencing in January 1956 have been seen most recently as marking the decisive break, one between ‘good’, professional and ethical archaeology and the earlier ‘bad’ amateur period of mere antiquarianism, ignoring the concerns of and trampling upon the rights of Indigenous Australians in the spirit of triumphant colonialism. This contrast is inaccurate, overdrawn, and ignores the positive contribution of many earlier conscientious scholars; labelling all of them as ‘amateurs’ confuses rather than enlightens the history of Australian archaeology.

Highlights

Succeeding scholars of the history of the discipline have very largely followed Mulvaney’s lead.2 For instance, Murray and White wrote: From 1911 to 1959 archaeology was entirely in the hands of untrained amateurs
A comprehensive history of Australian archaeology–it is so much more–but it is the clearest statement of the conventional narrative available and is more often referred to by somewhat lazy archaeologists than the sources on which it is based
By this means we can learn something of his reactions and adjustments to his particular geographical circumstances; and, in short, endeavour to reconstruct a picture of his ways of living (1946: 445). We would call this a cultural ecology approach; it is certainly a long way from the ‘byways of antiquarianism and the haphazard fringes of lunacy’ (Mulvaney 1971b: 229) said to be typical of the pre-1956 period. These pre1950s research programs–and other examples could have been chosen– contradict a key aspect of the myth exemplified by the following statement from Griffiths (2017: 107; general references removed): The methods pioneered at Fromm’s Landing which combined environmental data about river levels with archaeological information, history and ethnography, have become standard research methodology in Australian archaeology [...] It marked the dawn of a new phase of archaeological research in Australia: ‘an approach,’ McBryde wrote (1964: 5) wrote, based on controlled stratigraphic excavation and systematic survey work, rather than random digging and collecting.’