Book Reviews
This book adds both a significant case study and a well-argued
test of a theoretical model to the growing body of book-length
treatments of colonisation and culture contact in eighteenthnineteenth century Australia. It should be essential reading for
Australian historical archaeologists. Because many of the themes
that it deals with are global in scope, it will also find a much
wider readership.
References
Allen, J. 2008 Port Essington: The Historical Archaeology of a North Australian
Nineteenth-Century Military Outpost. Studies in Australasian Historical
Archaeology 1. Sydney: University of Sydney Press.
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF AUSTRALIA
SINCE 1788
Susan Lawrence & Peter Davies
Springer, New York, 2010, xix+421pp, ISBN 9781441974846
Reviewed by Iain Stuart
JCIS Consultants, PO Box 2397, Burwood North, NSW 2134,
Australia
Australian
histor ical
archaeology may be deficient
in a number of areas, but
it has never been short of
reviews and overviews. An
Archaeology of Australia since
1788 by Lawrence and Davies
is significant for a number of
reasons. It is an attempt to
summarise the achievements
of historical archaeology
in Australia; namely what
historical archaeology has
added to the corpus of Australian history. The book can be
seen as a response to Egloff ’s well-documented concern that
Australian historical archaeology may become irrelevant if
it does not engage with relevant issues in Australian history
(AA39:1-9). An Archaeology of Australia since 1788 – although
not an explicit reply to Egloff – does demonstrate important
contributions made by various historical archaeological
projects to the understanding of Australia’s history.
The authors are of the third generation of historical
archaeologists in Australia. Moreover, the authors were not
educated and based in Sydney. Indeed, their professional
education in historical archaeology occurred as the hegemony
of the subject by the University of Sydney was being replaced
by teaching centres such as those at La Trobe University and
Flinders University. Thus, this view of historical archaeology in
Australia is one from a different place and different generation to
the norm. This is a welcome change in viewpoint.
Lawrence and Davies are not young punks intent on critical
destruction of the edifice of historical archaeology in Australia.
Rather, they are concerned in reporting what has been learned
over 30 or 40 years of work. Accordingly, this is a work that
ranges widely across the whole breadth of issues in Australian
history. The authors admit that some material has been left out
simply due to space and they also regret the omission of some
New Zealand work of relevance to Australia.
The bringing together of diverse material from across
Australia is a tremendous achievement and the authors are to
be congratulated for doing this successfully. However, their
achievement is more than simply bringing information together;
they have provided a synthesis of material that is very useful
for those working in the field and for students learning about
historical archaeology. This is an important benchmarking of
historical archaeology in Australia.
The authors have divided the work into specific topics that
reflect prominent issues in Australian history and attempt a
broad-ranging discussion covering a wide geographic area and
differences of approach. They also choose to emphasise social
themes such as gender, status, ethnicity and identity, reflecting
the authors’ roots in post-processual archaeology. The principle
topics which form individual chapters in the book include:
Convict Origins; Aboriginal Dispossession and Survival;
Shipwrecks and Maritime Trade; Sealing, Whaling and Maritime
Industries; Pastoralism and Agriculture; Gold Rushes and
Precious Metals; Manufacturing and Processing; Migration and
Ethnicity; An Urbanised Nation; Australians at Home; Death;
and the Twentieth Century and Beyond.
Although each chapter is an entity in itself, the chapters are
organised so that each generally leads to the next topic. For
this review, rather than attempt a blow-by-blow analysis of
each chapter, two chapters were selected at random for more
detailed discussion in order to convey a sense of how the authors
approach each topic.
The chapter on ‘Manufacturing and Processing’ begins with
a brief overview of the topic noting it is part of the field of
‘industrial archaeology’ and mentioning Casella’s recent review
of the topic as well as brief mention of various studies. From this
overview Lawrence and Davies identify the themes of continuity
and change, technological transfer, landscape and social context
as being an important framework for understanding the
archaeology of manufacturing and processing in Australia. It is
unclear to the reviewer why other themes – such as the nature
of capital formation or transport (which have been discussed
by economic historians) – are not also of relevance to the
archaeologist studying this broad topic?
The chapter continues to discuss some of the archaeological
research that illustrates the approaches that Lawrence and Davies
highlight as being important. Studies of water mills, for example,
discuss the themes of continuity and change, technological
transfer and landscape. Similarly, the review of archaeological
research on timber mills reflects studies on tramways and on mill
sites such as Henry’s No 1 Mill (the subject of Davies’ doctoral
work). Other archaeological work on brickworks, potteries and
lime-making is also discussed.
The discussion on ‘Coal, Iron and Steel’ could have been
omitted. The coal studies discussed are concerned with marginal
aspects of the industry and not the major coal producing areas or
periods. For ‘Iron Production’ only Cremin and Jack’s excellent
work is discussed, but the large-scale excavation of the iron
works at Mittagong in 2005 has been overlooked. Similarly, the
industrial archaeology of steel is discussed only in the context of
Sandford’s works at Lithgow (again Cremin and Jack) as this is
the only archaeological study of an Australian steel works.
Number 72, June 2011
59
Book Reviews
There is also a notable omission from this chapter in the form
of extensive research by avocational archaeologists associated
with the Light Railways Research Association in the areas of
timber milling and its technology, as well as coal mining and
iron and steel works. All this work is accessible as the researchers
have an enviable record of publication. It is unclear why such a
body of research is not discussed.
The second chapter to be looked at is that covering
archaeological research on urban Australia. Again, the chapter
opens with a general overview of the field noting the major
discussions on the topic. The chapter moves to a discussion of
archaeological deposits and formation processes, and then looks
at broader analysis of neighbourhoods and cities. The section on
site formation processes and their influence on the archaeological
evidence in urban environments is a good summary of the
archaeological research and would form a useful reading in itself
for students learning about formation processes and stratigraphy.
The bigger picture is one of neighbourhoods, slums and
class and is mostly based on the two projects ‘Little Lon’ and
Cumberland/Gloucester Street and the work of well-known
researchers Murray, Mayne and Karskens. The fruitful dialogue
between historians and archaeologists is notable in the area of
urban archaeology, despite the disdainful rejection of the idea by
Melbourne’s elite historians (on film), when it was first proposed.
From slums the discussion moves towards notions of class
and of gentility and respectability developed by Linda Young
and explored in archaeological work in Melbourne, Sydney
and Adelaide.
This chapter is marked by a more coherent subject matter
than the broad brush of industrial archaeology, and it is more
successful in summarising the arguments and explaining the
archaeological research than the chapter on manufacturing and
processing in the previous example. It seems that in reporting
on the historical archaeological work, Lawrence and Davies
have been at the mercy of their subject matter. A neat coherent
topic like urban archaeology is much easier to report on than
the sprawling research on industrial archaeology which is not so
easily synthesised and the chapters reflect this problem. There is,
of course, the perennial problem of the ‘gray literature’ not being
accessible, although projects in Victoria and in New South Wales
are making the material more widely available so that authors
following in the footsteps of Lawrence and Davies should have
even more material to consider.
Lawrence and Davies seem unwilling to comment on areas
that might be fruitfully explored or developed in the future.
There is also a lack of reflective comment on the overall topics
and studies. While it can be understood why this is so, the aim of
the book was not to set agendas but report on work undertaken;
there seems something missing by not making such comments.
Overall An Archaeology of Australia since 1788 succeeds in
presenting the broad-range of Australian historical archaeology
and its contribution to understanding Australia’s past. The
authors are to be congratulated in undertaking such a task and
setting the scene for the next decade of growth in the field. This
is a work that all serious historical archaeologists need, especially
those formulating research designs for projects whether they be
salvage archaeology or research archaeology.
At the conclusion of this review a comment needs to be made
about the price of this work. An online search reveals that the
60
price in Australia ranges from AUD172 to AUD337, the highest
price being that of Angus and Robertson, which is almost double
the lowest price at Abbeys or the Co-Op Bookstore (if you are a
member). Overseas the best price is GBP81.00 plus postage. For a
book that deserves to be read by a lot of people, and presumably
a book that the publishers feel should be bought by a lot of
people, this price point surely is madness.
HANDBOOK OF LANDSCAPE
ARCHAEOLOGY
Bruno David & Julian Thomas (eds)
World Archaeological Congress Research Handbooks in
Archaeology Series, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2008,
719pp, ISBN 978-1-59874-294-7
Reviewed by David S. Whitley
ASM Affiliates Inc., 24160 Woodbine Ct., Tehachapi, CA 93561,
USA
Regional approaches have a
long and important place in
archaeological research. Interest
in trade and diffusion were early
if not traditional disciplinary
concerns, with settlement
pattern studies (distributions
of sites across the terrain)
gaining prominence in the
mid-twentieth century. By the
late 1960s the emphasis had
shifted to settlement systems
(the geographical organisation
of societies, including their relationship to the natural
environment) and, shortly thereafter, to spatial archaeology.
Following in the footprints of urban geographers, this involved
the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to
analyse distributions of sites, artefacts and traits. Despite its
early promise, archaeologists soon discovered that inferring
social processes from geographical patterns alone is very difficult,
if not impossible: to cite one significant example, migration
and diffusion appear the same from the perspective of the
geographical and temporal distributional patterns they create.
Yet regional analytical research did not abate, with landscape
archaeology emerging as the catch-phrase in the 1980s, and it
has gained increasing traction since that time. The concept of
‘landscape’ again derives from geography, in particular the earlier
work of Carl Sauer and his students on cultural landscapes.
This was not terrain, geomorphology, geology, or even the
distribution of human behaviour and social processes across
these phenomena, so much as the way that the natural world
was humanly modified and conceptualised.
What is an archaeologist to make of landscape archaeology
in light of our longstanding disciplinary interests in a regional
perspective, matched against the shifting empirical, theoretical
and analytical approaches that have been taken to satisfy this
concern? Bruno David and Julian Thomas provide a useful
guide to this problem in an excellent volume that covers the
range of approaches that are or have been deployed to study
Number 72, June 2011