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"Australia and New-Guinea"
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Freedom, only freedom : the prison writings of Behrouz Boochani
Over six years of imprisonment on Australia's offshore migrant detention centre, the Kurdish Iranian journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani bore personal witness to the suffering and degradation inflicted on him and his fellow refugees, culminating eventually in his prize-winning book, No Friend but the Mountains, which was painstakingly typed out in text messages while he was incarcerated. In the articles, essays, and poems he wrote while detained, he emerged as both a tenacious campaigner and activist, as well as a deeply humane voice which speaks for the indignity and plight of the many thousands of detained migrants across the world. In this book, his collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugee rights, politics, and literature. Together, they provide a moving, creative, and challenging account of not only one writer's harrowing experience and inspiring resilience, but the wider structures of violence which hold thousands of human beings in a state of misery in migrant camps throughout the western hemisphere and beyond.
BOOK
Early Agriculture and Plant Domestication in New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia
A multidimensional conceptual framework is advanced that characterizes early agriculture as a subset of human-environment interactions. Three cross-articulating dimensions of human-environment interaction are considered that accommodate the varied expressions of early agriculture in different parts of the world: spatial scales, transformative mechanisms, and temporalities of associated phenomena. These ideas are applied and exemplified at two different scales of resolution—contextual and comparative—in terms of early agricultural development in the highlands of New Guinea and the dispersal of domesticates from New Guinea into Island Southeast Asia.
Journal Article
In Pursuit of Mobile Prey: Martu Hunting Strategies and Archaeofaunal Interpretation
By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body size, assuming it to be positively correlated with return rate. To examine this hypothesis, we analyze the results of 1,347 adult foraging bouts and 649 focal follows of contemporary Martu foragers in Australia's Western Desert. The data show that prey mobility is highly correlated with prey body size and is inversely related to pursuit success—meaning that prey body size is often an inappropriate proxy measure of prey rank. This has broad implications for future studies that rely on taxonomic measures of prey abundance to examine prehistoric human ecology, including but not limited to economic intensification, socioeconomic complexity, resource sustainability, and overexploitation.
Journal Article
Lapita sites in the Central Province of mainland Papua New Guinea
For over forty years, archaeologists working along Papua New Guinea's southern coastline have sought evidence for early ceramics and its relationship with Lapita wares of Island Melanesia. Failing to find any such evidence of pottery more than 2000 bp, and largely based on the excavation of eight early pottery-bearing sites during the late 1960s into the early 1970s, synchronous colonization some 2000 bp along 500km of the south Papuan coastline by post-Lapita ceramic manufacturers has been posited. This paper presents conclusive evidence for the presence of Lapita ceramics along the Papuan south coast between c. 2500 and 2900 cal. bp, thereby indicating that current models of colonization by ceramicists for the region need to be rethought. We conclude with a brief reflection as to why these Lapita horizons were missed by previous researchers.
Journal Article
The social construction of caves and rockshelters: Chauvet Cave (France) and Nawarla Gabarnmang (Australia)
Caves and rockshelters are a key component of the archaeological record but are often regarded as natural places conveniently exploited by human communities. Archaeomorphological study shows however that they are not inert spaces but have frequently been modified by human action, sometimes in ways that imply a strong symbolic significance. In this paper the concept of ‘aménagement’, the re-shaping of a material space or of elements within it, is applied to Chauvet Cave in France and Nawarla Gabarnmang rockshelter in Australia. Deep within Chauvet Cave, fallen blocks were moved into position to augment the natural structure known as The Cactus, while at Nawarla Gabarnmang, blocks were removed from the ceiling and supporting pillars removed and discarded down the talus slope. These are hence not ‘natural’ places, but modified and socially constructed.
Journal Article
The Colonization of Australia and Its Adjacent Islands and the Evolution of Modern Cognition
The first colonization of the Greater Australian continent, known as Sahul, indicated that humans had modern cognitive ability. Such modern human abilities probably emerged earlier in Africa. I will argue that the only way we can identify what constitutes modern human behavior is to look at the record in Australia—the first place colonized only by modern humans. I place this argument within recent theorizing about cognitive evolution.
Journal Article
Saltwater People: spiritscapes, maritime rituals and the archaeology of Australian indigenous seascapes
Anthropological research reveals that the scale and complexity of Australian indigenous seascapes correlate with the scale and complexity of spiritual engagements with the sea and use of its resources. Marine specialists see and represent themselves as Saltwater People - an identification spiritually embedded within seascapes rich in cosmological meaning. For Aboriginal people, this embeddedness is underwritten by a Dreaming cosmology that formalizes seascapes as spiritscapes engaged through ritual performance. Such maritime rituals occur on the water, on tidal flats or on dry land. Rituals are the social mechanism by which Saltwater Peoples (Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders) spiritually manage and control their seas and ultimately orchestrate their seascapes. As such, an archaeology of seascapes is more than an archaeology of marine subsistence and procurement technology; it must also be an archaeology of spiritscapes and rituals that mediate human spiritual relationships with the sea. Because ritual sites often have a material expression, it is possible to investigate such sites archaeologically. This scope opens the possibility of investigating long-term developments in people's spiritual attachments to the sea and how seascapes were cosmologically constructed in a broad range of cultural settings. A new hypothesis associating spiritual control of extreme tidal regimes with previously enigmatic marine stone arrangements from central Queensland illustrates the potential value of the spiritscape approach to seascapes.
Journal Article
An Archaeological Review of Western New Guinea
Western New Guinea constitutes a frontier zone physically, politically, culturally and conceptually between Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Despite this pivotal position, archaeological information for the region is scarce due to limited investigations, limited publication and the multilingual nature of publications. Consequently, little archaeological information about western New Guinea has percolated into the mainstream literature. This paper aims to fill this gap and provides a detailed review of archaeological research, including rock art, published in Dutch, English, French, German and Indonesian. The resultant findings are discussed in terms of continuities and discontinuities with Papua New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia.
Journal Article