Coastal Themes: An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland : An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland

Abstract

terra australis 24Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present.Since the beginning of the series, the basic colour on the spine and cover has distinguished the regional distribution of topics as follows: ochre for Australia, green for New Guinea, red for South-East Asia and blue for the Pacific Islands. From 2001, issues with a gold spine will include conference proceedings, edited papers and monographs which in topic or desired format do not fit easily within the original arrangements. All volumes are numbered within the same series. List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3 994.01Copyright of the text remains with the contributors/authors, 2006. This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. THE RESEARCH DOCUMENTED here represents the first systematic archaeological work in this area of the southeast Queensland coast and was undertaken as a major part of a larger, multicomponent project concerning archaeology and cultural heritage in the traditional country of Gooreng Gooreng speaking people. Sean's task was to build upon the results of exploratory site survey and excavation to address two key concerns. The first was the relationship of patterns of cultural change in his study area to those described elsewhere in southeast Queensland. The second was to ensure that any such comparisons were taphonomically well-founded, particularly with regard to the analytical integrity of the shell middens upon which he and other coastal researchers in Australia rely so heavily. Sean took to this task with a vengeance, closely surveying a large area of landscape and excavating an array of site types to provide himself with a solid sample of the archaeological variation thus revealed. Though most were not archaeologically rich, these sites provided substantial grist for Sean's taphonomic mill, prompting him to adapt conjoining techniques to work on bivalve shellfish -a simple but clever innovation -as well as to undertake much more sophisticated work on local variation in correction factors for the radiocarbon dating of marine shell. In the end, he was able to distil the three-phase cul...

Darumbal voyaging: intensifying use of central Queensland's Shoalwater Bay islands over the past 5000 years

“…Whether or not such climatic changes similarly impacted exploitation of marine resources along the adjacent mainland coast of Shoalwater Bay, resulting in a similar occupational hiatus at sites, particularly midden deposits, variously between 1000 and 3000 years ago, is a question for future archaeological research. The possibility that mainland sites register such a hiatus is consistent with Ulm's (: 250) documentation of a period of “ephemeral low intensity occupation” between 2000 and 1000 years ago within midden sites of the southern Curtis Coast, located 100 km south of the Keppel Islands.…”

Shell Middens, Cultural Chronologies, and Coastal Settlement on the Rhode River Sub‐Estuary of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, USA

“…Our study complements recent radiocarbon studies by coastal archaeologists in other regions. From the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest (Taylor et al., ) to St. Catherine's Island, Georgia (Thomas, , Thomas et al., ), the southern Curtis Coast of Queensland, Australia (see Ulm, ), the South African Coast (Bateman et al., ; Jerardino, ), coastal Pakistan (Biagi et al., ), the California Channel Islands (Erlandson et al., ), and beyond these studies are a crucial step in understanding past coastal lifeways and settlement strategies and helping define more targeted future research. Despite the growing trend, additional research is needed in other coastal areas as we continue to race against the effects of sea‐level rise and marine erosion.…”

“…A key component of understanding human land use and settlement in coastal regions is comprehensive radiocarbon ( 14 C) dating of archaeological sites to establish a chronology of human occupation. This approach allows documentation of potential spatial and temporal gaps in the archaeological record and evaluation of the relationship between temporal changes and broader environmental and cultural developments (Erlandson & Moss, ; Ulm, ; Thomas, ; Rick et al., ; Taylor et al., ). Because of the dynamic nature of coastal regions and the threats of marine erosion and sea‐level rise on the global archaeological record, radiocarbon dating in coastal and other aquatic regions is also an effective management tool that can help document the antiquity of threatened cultural resources and help better define and prioritize sampling of threatened sites (see Erlandson & Moss, ).…”

Hunter‐gatherer response to late Holocene climatic variability in northern and central Australia

“…A decline in the archaeological record, generally indicative of population decline or abandonment, is hard to explain during a period of greater La Niña conditions (and thereby greater resource availability) when ethnographic accounts indicate that hunter‐gatherers would have utilised a wider range of areas and resources, thereby increasing archaeological signatures. However, limited archaeological studies for these time periods do suggest hiatuses in hearth construction (Holdaway et al , 2002), shell mound building (Faulkner, 2008) and changing discard of artefactual material (McNiven, 1992; Ulm, 2006b), in inner New South Wales, western Arnhem Land and southeast Queensland, respectively, between ca. AD 800 and 1300.…”