The Archaeology Of Contact In Settler Societies

This work provides a global approach to the study of contact archaeology in settler societies.

Publisher Description

This volume provides an important new synthesis of archaeological work carried out in Australia on the post-contact period. It draws on dozens of case studies from a wide geographical and temporal span to explore the daily life of Australians in settings such as convict stations, goldfields, whalers' camps, farms, pastoral estates and urban neighbourhoods. The different conditions experienced by various groups of people are described in detail, including rich and poor, convicts and their superiors, Aboriginal people, women, children, and migrant groups. The social themes of gender, class, ethnicity, status and identity inform every chapter, demonstrating that these are vital parts of human experience, and cannot be separated from archaeologies of industry, urbanization and culture contact. The book engages with a wide range of contemporary discussions and debates within Australian history and the international discipline of historical archaeology. The colonization of Australia was part of the international expansion of European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The material discussed here is thus fundamentally part of the global processes of colonization and the creation of settler societies, the industrial revolution, the development of mass consumer culture, and the emergence of national identities. Drawing out these themes and integrating them with the analysis of archaeological materials highlights the vital relevance of archaeology in modern society.

" ...Often new, probing and rich examinations of the takeover of a continent by white Anglos and the long-term impact ...the book is replete with detailed and meticulously sourced information on the scope, scale and persistence of the cruelty and violence involved - actual and structural - over a 200-year period...there is a great deal in this excellent volume that demands grounds for deep reflection on how Australia came to be what it is." * Patterns of Prejudice "The value of this stimulating collection of historical essays is that it points to both the usefulness of a transnational framework for analysing race thinking and the necessity for close attention to the historical specificity of particular moments and places." * Australian Book Review "[This volume] is an outstanding collection, a challenging conversation between differing viewpoints where discussion is ongoing and cooperative." * Australian Historical Studies Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon.This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. A. Dirk Moses teaches European History and comparative genocide Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is editing another volume in this series entitled Genocide and Colonialism.

This work explores the archaeologies of daily living left by the indigenous and other displaced peoples impacted by European colonial expansion over the last 600 years. Case studies from North America, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland significantly revise conventional historical narratives of those interactions, their presumed impacts, and their ongoing relevance for the material, social, economic, and political lives and identities of contemporary indigenous and other peoples.

Entanglement theory posits that the interrelationship of humans and objects is a delimiting characteristic of human history and culture. This edited volume of original studies by leading archaeological theorists applies this concept to a broad range of topics, including archaeological science, heritage, and theory itself. In the theoretical explications and ten case studies, the editors and contributing authors: • build on the intersections between science, humanities and ecology to provide a more fine-grained, multi-scalar treatment emanating from the long-term perspective that characterizes archaeological research; • bring to light the subtle and unacknowledged paths that configure historical circumstances and bind human intentionality; • examine the constructions of personhood, the rigidity of path dependencies, the unpredictable connections between humans and objects and the intricate paths of past events in varied geographic and historical contexts that channel future actions. This broad focus is inclusive of early complex developments in Asia and Europe, imperial and state strategies in the Andes and Mesoamerica, continuities of postcolonialism in North America, and the unforeseen and complex consequences that derive from archaeological practices. This volume will appeal to archaeologists and their advanced students.

The original papers collected in this pioneering volume address the historical archaeology of Aboriginal Australia and its application in researching the shared history of Aboriginal and settler Australians. The authors draw on case studies from across the continent to show how archaeology can illuminate the continuum of responses by indigenous Australians to European settlement and colonization. Taking an innovative approach to the relationship between archaeological theory and contemporary Australian history, the book also examines the role of archaeology in current debates over Aboriginal land rights and the role of 'post-contact' archaeology in cultural heritage management. An introduction by the series editors places the Australian material in the context of indigenous archaeological studies worldwide. The volume will be of interest to academic and public archaeologists, indigenous people, anthropologists, historians, and heritage managers who deal with indigenous communities.

This book presents research into the urban archaeology of 19th-century Australia. It focuses on the detailed archaeology of 20 cesspits in The Rocks area of Sydney and the Commonwealth Block site in Melbourne. It also includes discussions of a significant site in Sydney – First Government House. The book is anchored around a detailed comparison of contents of 20 cesspits created during the 19th century, and examines patterns of similarity and dissimilarity, presenting analyses that work towards an integration of historical and archaeological data and perspectives. The book also outlines a transnational framework of comparison that assists in the larger context related to building a truly global archaeology of the modern city. This framework is directly related a multi-scalar approach to urban archaeology. Historical archaeologists have been advocating the need to explore the archaeology of the modern city using several different scales or frames of reference. The most popular (and most basic) of these has been the household. However, it has also been acknowledged that interpreting the archaeology of households beyond the notion that every household and associated archaeological assemblage is unique requires archaeologists and historians to compare and contrast, and to establish patterns. These comparisons frequently occur at the level of the area or district in the same city, where archaeologists seek to derive patterns that might be explained as being the result of status, class, ethnicity, or ideology. Other less frequent comparisons occur at larger scales, for example between cities or countries, acknowledging that the archaeology of the modern western city is also the archaeology of modern global forces of production, consumption, trade, immigration and ideology formation. This book makes a contribution to that general literature