Damper and fish, tea and sugar: post-contact changes in resource use and residence on Groote Eylandt

Abstract

-A number of the archaeological sites located and studied on Groote Eylandt were occupied during the very recent past covering the time of contact with Macassans and missionaries. Historical sources relating to the early period of the Church Missionary Society Mission from the 1920s to the 1950s are used in this paper to examine the material record and processes of cross-cultural interaction and change, rather than to recreate a generalised ethnographic past located at some unspecifi ed point in the late Holocene.