History and prehistory: Essential dichotomy or arbitrary separation?
Clayton Fredericksen
Last year I was CO-applicanton a request for funding to
carry out archaeological research at an early contact site in
northern Australia. In due course I received the assessors'
comments and, as might be expected in today's competitive
environment, the application was supported by some and not so
enthusiastically received by others. A comment by one of the
more critical assessors stood out. This particular assessor
wrote that although I had expertise in prehistoric archaeology,
in his or her opinion I lacked sufficient experience in
Australian historical archaeology to ensure that the project
would be competently executed. My CO-applicants,a professor
of history and an historical geographer, expressed more than a
little surprise at this statement, with one exclaiming words to
the effect that he had always thought that "archaeology is
archaeology, irrespective of the time period under
investigation". To archaeologists this may seem a little naive
but it does succinctly highlight a fundamental issue facing the
discipline in Australia; exactly what is 'historical'archaeology
and does it possess a sufficiently robust identity to justify its
separation as a distinct branch of archaeology.
An archaeological identity crisis
In a recent paper Graharn Connah ( 1998), developing upon
an earlier theme (Connah 1983),raises the spectre of a crisis in
Australian historical archaeology. The dilemma identified by
Connah takes the form of an academic marginalisation of
historical archaeology (Connah 1998:4), resulting from the
failure of historical archaeology to completely integrate itself
into the mainstream of Australian archaeology. In Connah's
view the explanation for this lies largely with the reluctance of
historical archaeologists, most of whom work in the field of
heritage management, to publish and help build a strong
academic identity and scholarly theory of practice.
This criticism has, unsurprisingly, not gone unchallenged
by archaeological consultants (Mackay and Karskens 1999).
Nevertheless it cannot be denied that Connah's statement
represents the continuation of two decades of critical reflection
on the direction of the theory and practice of Australian
historical archaeology. This extended discourse has focused on
the search for a conceptual structure to frame historical
archaeology, and make the discipline relevant to the wider
public (Birmingham and Jeans 1983; Connah 1983; Bairstow
1984; Murray 1985; Murray and Allen 1986; Stuart 1992; Jack
1993; Egloff 1994). It would appear that something is tugging
at the collective consciousness of Australian historical
archaeology. Critical reflection of this kind is certainly not
unique to Australia. In the United States which, like Australia,
saw European colonisation (or invasion) abruptly
superimposing 'history' over a long period of earlier human
occupation, similar issues have been discussed and debated
since at least the 1960s (Fontana 1965; Schuyler 1970; Deetz
1988), and probably longer (Fish 1977(1910)).
This raises the question of why historical archaeologists
should be so preoccupied with examining the rationale for their
School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management, Northern
Temtory University, Darwin, NT 0909, Australia
field of study. Prehistoric archaeologists do not appear to share
a similar concern, although there is no dearth of discussion of
'archaeological theory'. The unique difficulty that historical
archaeologists face, as Lewis Binford stated almost 25 years
ago (Binford 1983(1977)), is that they have to deal with
'history'. History is generally acknowledged as the time
encompassed by the use of written records, thought to fall
within the last 5000 years or so of human occupation of the
planet (Clark 1977:79ff). Egyptology, Classical Archaeology,
Colonial Archaeology and the numerous other disparate faces
of historical archaeology eclectically focus on portions of this
expanse of time (Andrtn 1998:6). The thing that unifies this
archaeology is that it pertains to a period contrasting the
antecedent non-literate period of human time that we, logically
enough, call 'prehistory'(incidentally, a term that was first
coined only in the mid-19th century - Daniel and Renfiew
1988:l). Whether this bipartite division of time into
overarching historical and prehistoric periods is a usehl way to
order archaeology as a cogent discipline is something that
needs to be seriously examined. This is especially the case in
the context of the archaeology of post-colonial nations such as
Australia, where the historical period has been grafted by
colonial conquest onto a much longer period of 'prehistoric'
human occupation.
The relativity of history
For much of the New World, large parts of Africa and
island Southeast Asia, and the whole of Australasia written
script appeared only within the last 500 years. This technology
was transported with the spread of various literate European
cultures, beginning in the 15th century with the Portuguese and
Spanish and ending with the British colonisation of Australasia
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Clearly in regions
such as Australia the timing and reasons for the spread of
writing (read 'history') were entirely dissimilar to the
appearance of written script in China or Mesoarnerica. This
has prompted some American scholars (e.g. Schuyler 1970:84;
Deetz 1991:1; Leone 1995; Orser 1996:86) to adopt a more
restricted perspective of historical archaeology. They regard
the European global diaspora of the 15th-19th centuries as
providing the temporal baseline for a universal historical
archaeology. The focus of this historical archaeology is the
spread of Europeans, and their attendant capitalism (or protocapitalist) and colonialist worldview (Orser 1996). This
definition allows archaeologists to investigate the processes of
cultural change on a global scale, and consequently brings the
intellectual scope of historical archaeology closer to that of
prehistoric archaeology. However it also serves to reinforce the
disjuncture between history and prehistory as the shift fiom
prehistory can be tied down to a specific year (and day); history
began in the Americas in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus,
and prehistory ended in the Highlands of New Guinea in 1933
when Taylor, Spinks and the Leahy brothers initiated first
European contact with people of that region (Gorecki and
Gillieson 19895). The problem in demarcating the onset of
history in this way is that first contact with European culture
did not necessarily herald the initiation of indigenous cultures
into Charles Orser's (19%) 'modem world'. Willem Jansz and
Australian Archaeology, Number 50, 2000
Fredericksen
his crew made the first recorded contact between Europeans
and Aboriginal people in 1606, but this event is of negligible
significance in terms of the human occupation of Australia.
The really major impact came in 1788 when the British made
a decision to establish a permanent colony in the southern part
of the continent.
This raises the issue of how prehistory articulates with
history. In Australia the 182 years between the voyage of Jansz
and the arrival of the First Fleet witnessed numerous visits by
Dutch, French and English ships. This period of infrequent but
regular visitation provides an inconvenient hiatus between
prehistory and history in the Australian cultural sequence. This
cannot be prehistory, yet it does not quite fit into the historical
period. The problem of what happens between culturechronological units is a perennial one in all archaeology. Once
archaeologists have neatly divided their cultural sequences into
periods, phases or stages they then have to account for the
transformation from one period to another. Invariably this
results in the creation of intermediary periods of cultural
change. In both American (Fontana l965:62) and Australian
(Mulvaney 1969: Chapter I) archaeology this has seen the
formulation of a 'protohistoric' period.
Protohistory
encompasses all those temporal aspects of the cultural
sequence which for one reason or another do not fit
comfortably into either prehistory or history. Australian
examples include not only pre-1788 European landings but
also 18th century Macassan voyages to the Kimberley coast
and Amhemland.
In Australia protohistory is characterised by chronological
disconformity. This period lasted only a few decades after
1788 in Tasmania and southern Australia, where Aboriginal
groups were relatively quickly subjugated and either dislocated
or ultimately incorporated into the new economic system. In
other parts of Australia integration into the capitalist world
system took place only in the late 19th century (Mulvaney
1989), and as recently as the first half of the 20th century in
isolated regions of the north and interior. We therefore have a
situation where indigenous Australians entered the historic
period in the late 18th or early 19th centuries in the southern
part of the continent, while in the west, north and interior they
lingered in protohistory for up to another century.
Furthermore, taking an archaeological perspective in which the
historylprehistory transition is gauged by the presence of
European artefacts among indigenous material culture
(Fontana 1965), it could be argued that in some regions
prehistoric Aboriginal culture existed into the 20th century.
Within the continent we could therefore envisage the
synchronic existence of historic, protohistoric and prehistoric
'periods'. T h e only justification for the recognition of a
protohistoric in this schema is that it provides a buffer between
history and prehistory. Without the history/prehistory divide
the protohistoric would immediately assume redundancy.
An inclusive archaeology?
Archaeologists see human cultures proceeding through
phases of change. Although simple evolutionary models are no
longer in vogue, archaeologists still rely on this system of
segregating time to order their data stratigraphically and
chronologically, and to derive models of culture change from
patterns revealed by that ordering. Nevertheless this procedure
has also hindered archaeology by creating a situation in which
the culture/chronologicaI units we call 'history' and
'prehistory' have become enshrined in archaeological thought.
The concretising effect of repetitively analysing data in terms
Australian .-lrchaeolog~..Number 50, 2000
of these two overarching units has seen archaeology reinforce
the requirement for a bipartite division of the cultural
sequence. One unfortunate outcome is that archaeologists have
had to deny that indigenous cultures possessed an accessible
history before European contact, as by default indigenous
groups resided in the prehistoric period. In Australia, as I have
discussed above, the prehistoric or protohistoric continued to
exist long after European settlement, thereby relegating
Aboriginal culture to an earlier period of human history.
Naturally enough this has offended many indigenous peoples
and caused unease among archaeologists, forcing some to
defend their use of the terms 'history' and 'prehistory'
(Andren, 1 998:6; Mulvaney and Kamminga 1 999:xvii).
Similarly, the editors of Australian Archaeology have recently
suggested that the word 'prehistory' be replaced altogether,
owing to its possible "derogatory connotations" (Smith
1998:iii). This soul-searching over terminology begs the
question of why we need to retain the two-part division of the
cultural sequence in the first place.
Interestingly, Australian prehistorians have always bridged
the threshold between history and prehistory by making use of
ethnographic and ethnohistorical sources to aid interpretation
of pre-European Aboriginal material culture. Although this
has the potential to overcome the constraints imposed by a
chronologically segregated archaeology, much ethnohistorical
data have been uncritically used to 'model' prehistoric
societies, or to provide analogies for prehistoric lifeways (for a
critique see Murray 1992). Little effort has been made to
explore the connections and transformations in material
culture, economy and settlement patterns across the full
temporal sweep of Aboriginal occupation.
An unfortunate consequence of this use of historical
information as a convenient 'data quarry' (McBryde 1979) has
been the valorization of the timelessness of Aboriginal culture,
and a literally ahistorical interpretation of the past. For their
part, archaeologists engaged in researching the historical
period have until recently tended to focus on European
endeavours and downplay interaction between colonists and
indigenous people, as Harry Allen (1988:83) has discussed.
This is exemplified by one of the first attempts at an
interpretive framework for Australian historical archaeology
(Birmingham and Jeans l983), which promoted a colonisation
model that left little room for working toward an understanding
of the relationships between indigenous people and new
settlers (Egloff 1994:l). Having said that, the 1990s did
witness a move to giving Aboriginal culture a prominent place
in historical archaeological studies (e.g. Birmingham 1992,
note that fieldwork was carried out in 1969-71; Murray 1993;
Wilson 1997). Nevertheless, as perusal of Australia's journal
of historical archaeology, Australasian
Historical
.-lrchaeology,will show, the overwhelming majority of papers
published in the last decade relate exclusively to the material
remains of European or Chinese occupation. The indigenous
voice is largely ignored in these studies.
Archaeology has effectively bound itself into an
epistemological straightjacket. The intellectual quandry in
which historical archaeologists have found themselves is the
inevitable outcome of the artificial division of time into an
'history'and a 'prehistory'. In Australia this bipartite division
of the sequence is neither chronologically robust nor culturally
meaningful. The insertion of a protohistoric period does
nothing to mollifj this situation. Archaeology needs to move
away from a division of the discipline into the
prehistoriciAborigina1 and historidother.
95
History and prehistor-v: Essential dichotomy or arbitrary separation?
Kent Lightfoot (1995) has critically examined a similar
segregatiori in North American archaeology and found that
the historylprehistory divide has led to a disjuncture in the
way prehistoric and historical archaeologists interpret early
contact Native American sites. He has called for an approach
that focuses on the study of spatial contexts across the entire
span of human occupation (Lightfoot 1995:207). A number
of commentators have made similar observations for the
Australian situation. Denis Byrne (1996), in a particularly
insightful paper, has called for what he calls a 'post-national'
archaeology. This archaeology would focus not so much on
explicating a chronologically deep Aboriginal heritage, but
on incorporating into our knowledge of prehistory the study
of the exchange of ideas and commodities between
Aboriginal and other cultures after 1788 (Byme 1996:102).
This, Byrne considers, would firmly locate Aboriginal culture
in the historical past. Tim Murray (1992) is another who has
critically examined how archaeologists have articulated
history with prehistory, concluding that the past might best be
seen as a series of continuities and discontinuities linked by
an Aboriginal narrative (1992: 19).
These calls for a more inclusive archaeology stem from
a recognition that Australian archaeology is inexorably
linked with anthropoIogy. Archaeology is ultimately
concerned with discovering how cultures function and
change rather than with idiography. In this respect history
should be viewed as the servant of anthropology. This is
not to deny the importance of historical particularism or
historical analysis (stressed so forcefully by N6el Hume
1969:7ff), but the object of archaeology should be to
connect historical narratives to provide an explanatory
culture history.
Archaeologists are limiting their
endeavours by restricting research to the mutually
exclusive compartments we call history and prehistory.
Graham Connah, in his 1998 paper, expresses a similar
sentiment:
Because of my own background and experience [in the
archaeology of Australia and Africa] I cannot accept the
notion that historical archaeology and prehistoric
archaeology are different species, incapable of breeding.
Working for so long on the archaeology of later African
societies, I am no longer willing to draw a line across
human time and call one part 'prehistoric' and another
'historical'. (Connah 19985)
Archaeology has now reached a point where it is
perhaps now appropriate to do away with the 'line across
human time' and allow scholars to reconfigure their
research questions and methodologies to study the totality
of the past human experience in Australia.
Conclusions
Historical archaeology has been in a state of crisis since
its inception. It is in post-colonial nations such as
Australia that this dilemma of identity has come to the fore
and made archaeologists confront the reality that the 19th
century European segregation of time into prehistoric and
historical periods does not cater for an inclusive study of
the past. Replacing the word 'prehistory' with terms such
as 'Aboriginal historyT or 'pre-invasion history' will not
rectifL this inherent tension. Rather, what is required is an
acknowledgement that archaeology involves the study of
the entire human cultural record and that, given an
adequate theory of practice, we can use our discipline to
address issues of cultural continuity and change over the
full sweep of time. This is the challenge for both
prehistoric and historical archaeology in Australia. Only
when this has been achieved will my historian colleague's
assertion that "archaeology is archaeology" be justified.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1999
Northern Territory History Colloquium and a seminar at Northern
Territory University in the same year. I thank members of both
audiences for their feedback.
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