Towards a history of Melanesian archaeological practices

Abstract

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the study of history.-Cicero, Orator, 120 10 Archaeologies of Island Melanesia terra australis 51 This paper will not delve into the history of the wider theoretical frameworks that we use to organise our data, the subject being too vast to cover here, but it will illustrate the point made above about the availability of particular scientific practices and techniques. It will provide a few select case studies concerning when particular techniques were first available, when they were first deployed in Pacific archaeology more generally and when in the archaeology of the Melanesian region in particular. Certain kinds of evidence-based discussions were not possible until particular technical advances in practice in archaeological science were deployed; some questions simply could not be asked. Radiocarbon dating is the obvious place to start the discussion, and then the lead is given by the three themes for the volume identified by the editors. I will draw illustrations from each of these in turn, before using this history to evaluate the networked or isolated status of archaeology in our region at particular times. The themes lend themselves to the examination of particular facets of our discipline. The first, 'Landscapes and complexities', requires an engagement with settlement patterns and landscape archaeology. The second, 'Exchange and contacts', relies on characterisation and provenance studies of such artefacts as stone adzes, pottery and obsidian flakes. I will use this as my primary 'case study' and cover the topic in most detail. The final theme, 'Practices', involves such topics as manufacturing sequences, environmental reconstruction and funerary (bio)archaeology. Has there been a slow unfolding of knowledge or were there particular, perhaps serendipitous, moments that have shaped the course of archaeological investigation? The radiocarbon revolution One such defining moment was surely the invention of radiocarbon dating by Willard Libby and colleagues in the late 1940s, becoming potentially available to archaeologists throughout the world around 1949-50. It was very quickly deployed by Pacific archaeologists, with Bishop Museum archaeologist Kenneth Emory getting the first date back from a Polynesian archaeological site in 1950, the Kuli'ou'ou rock shelter on O'ahu, Hawaii. It was published originally on 21 September 1951 in the second date list from Libby's laboratory at the University of Chicago, along with two Australian archaeological samples collected by Edmund Gill from Victorian middens (Libby 1951). Melanesia was not far behind with Edward Winslow Gifford publishing multiple dates from two significant Fijian sites he had excavated in 1947 and judiciously kept the charcoal from (Gifford 1952, 1955, as anticipated in his earlier monograph [1951:203]), and then from his 1952 New Caledonia excavations, including at the site of Lap...

Everything You’ve Been Told About the History of Australian Archaeology is Wrong!

“…As noted by Spriggs (2019), understanding the timing of availability and use of particular archaeological science practices and techniques expands our ways of organising disciplinary history in a way that allows us 'to understand what it was possible to know at any particular moment about a region's past' (2019: 21). It provides a useful addition to histories based on theoretical 'schools,' discussion of professionalisation of the discipline, or dating the deployment of stratigraphic excavation techniques.…”