Sorry in advance! this is much too long but it has been good for my mind!
But hopefully NO ARCHAEOLOGIST HAS BEEN UPSET BY THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED IN THIS POST!
Basically says:
1. A wealth of reading and experience exists on community archaeology in Australia
2. Its the way to go and can be developed in so many directions and why not in Europe too (i.e. archaeologist led not leading the community as long as they are led where they want to go (* Note the WAC disaster the year they were fooled by the BJP fascists in India!)
3. Invite Indigenous archaeologists to Interpret European sites to gain interesting hypothesises (as basically done at Wood and Stone Henge)
4. Should be used in places such as India where today?s poor camp on the ruins their ancestors ruled
5. The ideas first developed in the US around the whole concept of contact and frontier archaeology should be also tried out for every epoch and especially include Upper Palaeolithic Europe (e.g. The Romans didn't beat the ancient Britt?s it was measles that won!)
Good idea to develop ideas on how community archaeology can be used to empower local and Indigenous people.
However, first there is a wealth of existing work on community archaeology from all over the world (but especially USA, Canada and Australia) to read up on.
Well all-Indigenous archaeology in Australia now is always community archaeology in the sense that Indigenous people have to approve of any research (and some non-Indigenous archaeology too, great outcry in Adelaide when a European Grave Yard was excavated, after all the deceased relatives still lived nearby!).
But with Indigenous archaeology I would be very surprised if anywhere in Australia any archaeological work was taking place on Aboriginal lands without the community and Elders agreement, consultation and appropriate employment of Aboriginal people. And even where it?s difficult to find the rightful 'owners' efforts are strenuously made. Sometimes one might hear of tales of 'cowboys' or mistakes but this is very rare nowadays.
(* if these sentiments confuse people in view of my earlier postings I'm sorry but its quite a complex subject and hard to explain by email and people should remember I was mostly talking about student attitudes and the effects of institutionalised racism on people who compared to others would be less racist then none social scientists i.e. the effects on ordinary clever people of being brought up in WA, but I hope this point is left alone).....
And everyone (even those who are not so keen really) has to be keen on the concept of community archaeology, in fact more or less everyone is, because it is now quite rightly impossible to practice archaeology or anthropology without community and Elder permission.
Rio Tinto (and please no one interpret my praise here for an acceptance of or support for mining and I know they have killed thousands [the crash we are currently in will close many within two years, so say the Prophet Cassandra!] who used to have a terrible reputation in Australia now supports Aboriginal land rights [the reality of land rights does not stop mining or farming] and usually uses appropriate archaeological services, with proper consultation and appropriate Aboriginal employment during archaeological surveys and often throws in a sports centre or something. Of course, its peanuts to them and could be simply seen as bribery but then in the past the people got nothing and it was significant that the Chairman of Rio Tinto Australia vocally attacked John Howard for his failure to support land-rights, a pragmatic clever Capitalist!
Of course, this does mean that Aboriginal communities often face a Kiekegaardian 'teleological suppression of the ethical' when they have to choose between their sacred site and the money for a hospital and jobs, but then again archaeologist should all be familiar with such a position since 'all archaeology is destruction'....
So nowadays an pragmatic desperate Aboriginal community may side with developers against environmentalists when it comes to a new road or even a mine.
Then again recently a Uranium mine was able to con a community for a million dollars, which whatever the moral and ecological arguments was a much too low bribe...... (dispute still continuing)
But in a typical survey in WA the archaeology consultants will often be paid by the mining company but employed by the Aboriginal community or communities concerned (hence easing our archaeological consciences? a bit!).
These surveys typically might be walking the route of a proposed road, railway line, pipeline or mine etc. The archaeologists will act in consultation with various elders and they will be paid for their services and will also employ and train Aboriginal people to look for artefacts, grinding patches, scared trees, lizard traps, art sites etc, etc. Anthropologist will also work with the communities further to find from oral histories the locations of sacred sites etc.
Although of course there can sometimes be conflict often a satisfactory outcome can be achieved by just twitching a pipe-line a little away from an artefact rich area or sometimes artefacts might be removed analysed and then returned to the community.
And female archaeologists can no more go to male only sites as males can go to female sites.
Unfortunately there are less female sites remembered than male ones hence there are still more jobs for male archaeologists than women......
But for many of these various Aboriginal cultural groups despite the damage of all these years, these cultures are not only prehistoric cultures but modern, constantly changing (but in some ways with strong consistent traditions) cultures which just happen to stretch back into the precontact period.
So community archaeology is a fact of life in Australia.
Of course, this differs from the past when artefacts, sacred objects and human remains were pillaged by even some of the most 'progressive' archaeologists and anthropologists.
But even in the 1940's farsighted people such as the Berndts never touched or took anything they were not allowed to touch or take.
And of course the degree of Indigenous versus 'Scientific' control over the research is a hot topic here as it is in the US, Canada, New Zealand, etc, etc.
And the winning over Aboriginal people to become anthropologists and archaeologists is a slow process (because of earlier desecration) but it is occurring more and more.
(One day I love for a team of Indigenous archaeologists to arrive in Europe to start exploring European sites. Not to claim that they would 'know' anymore but simply to redress the balance a bit! And anyway if the whole wood to stone death thing gets theorised at Stone and Wood Henge on the basis of an archaeologists mate from Madagascar why not? I mean it surely doesn't take a genius to recognise similar carvings on cup and groove stones beside streams in the Yorkshire dales and soaks in Australia!! But the question would be why the similarity? .... cognitive? or cousins!!!!?]
But the horror of past colonial archaeology is the reason why there is very little actual digging now in Australia.
[And of course because as in the UK archaeologist would now prefer not to excavate where possible]
But gradually some excavations are taking place but only with the express wish and usually invitation of the community. For example at ANU I saw a talk by Ian Moffit who described how an Aboriginal community upset that human remains were eroding from sand dunes got Ian and his team to find the graves with geophysics, allowed an appropriate degree of scientific investigation and then reburied their ancestors.
And Riwi excavated by Jane Balme of course was the same, totally in consultation with the local Aboriginal people.
I'd actually bet anyone, that all the recent pioneering archaeological work would have been done by people that for many years have wanted the government to apologise and have marched on the sorry day marches over Sydney bridge etc.
And I have seen with my own eyes how quickly Aboriginal people who often experience racism every day note when a non-Indigenous archaeologist is only acting and not sincere in their words and actions (No names or even a hint, people can/may change).
Easy to see too as a psychiatric nurse who has worked in a gaol, body language, face etc its how 'mind readers trick people' and clever cops like Morse get their huntches, actually of course comes from our hunter-gather ancestry 'gut-feeling').
But obviously nothing like this (excavations etc) would ever happen unless the archaeologists concerned have the knowledge, respect, long-term contacts and trust of the appropriate Aboriginal people.
[But of course, all this is only scraping the surface of complexity, just look at all the conflicts and debate over the Dampier Archipelago, where the Burrup Peninsula is the largest collection of petroglyphs in the world:
http://www.burrup.org.au/
and especially
///////[Please sign the Petition to save the Dampier rock art, go to
http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/dampier/web/index.html
and click on "Petition"
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INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF ROCK ART ORGANISATIONS
IFRAO is a federation of 43 national and regional organisations promoting the study and protection of rock art throughout the world. IFRAO facilitates international co-operation, and initiates and pursues common policies and projects in the discipline.]///////
So good practice in Australian Indigenous archaeology has to be community archaeology which is why I argued the same thing in India with regards to the low caste communities who live on the remains of Vaishalii and are most likely their direct ancestors. Thus, community archaeology can give back pride to down trodden peoples but we must be careful that it is not used like Hitlers archaeological supporters used it as with Kossinna.
So in Australia (well i'm familiar with the laws of WA) if human bones are found on a building site, first the police determine its not a recent murder (or stray holiday maker who met a spider!) then where possible an appropriate elder is consulted before the archaeologists do anything (of course where whole cultural groups have been wiped out this can prove difficult but usually there are still ancestors somewhere). Usually this will involve some kind of smoking ceremony and there would be many non-Indigenous aware people who would never dream of entering a male/female or spiritually dangerous area.
Privately many social scientists have experienced enough strange weird things not to want to even unwittingly break known or even forgotten Law.
Some quite prominent archaeologists are courageously honest about their experience but as 'scientists' it?s obviously a bit of a difficult area!!!!!
My reverse cultural shock came when excavation a pre-Christian grave yard in Yorkshire and was horrified to see my ancestors bones just put into boxes and plastic with no ceremony to be mostly uselessly stored in a Museum (ahh the difference between the 'primitive' 'civilised' world! [sic]).
This was doubly upseting to me because as a nurse I have laid out quite a few dead bodies with appropriate respect and as far as I can see whether you are dead for 5 minutes or 5000 years the dead are the dead are the dead and should be treated with respect and care.
Not only did I find it truly upseting but I had to invent my own ceremony and apologise to the land and spirits for my desecration (I explained that a bloody great motorway was coming through). That year me and an American archaeologist (not known to me) expressed such 'sentimental' views at the TAG conference in Glasgow and were opposed by someone who said we were imposing our present day feelings on the past (but of course so was he!).
We should have said "so what, you play with the bones if you wish and see if we care if your legs suddenly break!", but we said something less to the point......
But isn't it interesting, 'Christians' get reburied 'Pagans' get treated like artefacts.
But just because all archaeology is community archaeology it does not mean that the whole concept isn't expanding.
A few years ago it was kind of pioneering but now its part of the landscape.
But there is a bit of a difference between community archaeology where the community leads and community archaeology which is simply based on consent.
This is a good article:
Community-Based Archaeology in Australia
Shelley Greer, Rodney Harrison, Susan McIntyre-Tamwoy
World Archaeology, Vol. 34, No. 2, Community Archaeology (Oct., 2002), pp. 265-287
And there are many such articles.
I can't at the moment remember who was doing the real pioneering community based work in the Victoria Mallee a few years ago but she really was an incredible pioneer and well known here.
But a community based approach as a principle actually under pinning all Indigenous archaeology will often flow through into colonial sites where for example people?s ancestors might be Aboriginal, Japanese, Chinese, Irish and English (such as Cossack or Broome).
[As an aside: In fact the divide from one to the other often does not really exist with archaeology of the frontier a very interesting area. As a matter of fact I found the concepts I learnt from Australia very useful when I dug in the UK. Because frontiers are not static. For example, the frontier in Australia began with Cook {actually probably earlier if you count Indonesians, pirates and possible Chinese.. But let?s not get too complicated, let?s just talk about the 'British/White Australian colonial frontier!} and continued until the mid 1960s. But artefacts, traders/pioneers/criminals and especially diseases (and later grog) moved far ahead of the 'frontier' at break-neck speed.
Simarlarly, I dug at Melton near Hull (soon to be published I think)which was is on the North bank of the Humber and the site included the period when the Romans (Bahh spit, what did they ever do for us... ?brought the grog, sound familiar?)stayed on the southern side for 70 years. So it seems obvious that for 70 years there must have been a mixing and meshing of cultures with not just Roman traders, run-aways, escaped slaves, but smugglers, cultural habbits and various groups and individuals mixing in with (dare I call them so) the Indigenous 'Parissi'. ?Tribes? and bits of tribes joining other tribes etc, etc?.
But I would take this much further and suggest that people that see discrete cultures existing in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, perhaps unchanging for 30,000 years and identify 'clines' of ethno-linguistic [used to be called 'race'!] change (d'erricco et al 2006) from personal ornamentation (shell beads) ought to study more deeply the 'ethno-linguistic reality in our world now.
For just as I treat people the same if dead 5 minutes or 5000 years (well emotionally and respectfully I mean) I think since at least 50,000 years ago people were people and are people.
Last, point I want to one day use community archaeology as a form of therapy (explained in earlier posting) and if any poor sap is still reading this! By all means take the idea and use it.......
Arthus
