AustLit

'IThis paper explores the potential for Australian archaeology to comprehend the hidden complexities and constructed historical dimensions of the archaeological record of Indigenous Australians. These constructed historical dimensions go to the core issue of how we not only write, but more fundamentally conceive of, the archaeological history of Indigenous Australians over the past 50,000 years. This concern leads me to ask the following question — Are there properties of archaeological sites that provide clues as to how Indigenous Australians in the ancient past both conceived of, and constructed notions of, historical and trans-generational time? I believe these properties do exist but in ways that require us to reconceptualise the archaeological record, move out of our comfort zone and enter worlds of object materiality, agency, and temporality very different to what we are familiar with in the West. Armed with the right theoretical frameworks, I also believe that archaeologists have the capacity to glimpse these properties and so bring us a little closer to understanding how unfamiliar peoples of the unfamiliar past lived their lives and historically constructed their world. In essence, my approach calls for archaeologists to re-envisage many archaeological sites as deliberately historicised places and the intentionalised result of cumulative depositional practices that explicitly referenced past practices to structure future practices. I will spend the rest of this paper attempting to justify these beliefs by focusing on the ritualisation of life in relation to one particular type of everyday occupation site type dominated by shellfish food remains and known by archaeologists as shell middens. While in most cases, Australian Indigenous shell middens appear as layers of shell eroding from coastal sediments, across many parts of northern tropical Australia shell midden mounds are found which can be over 10 metres in height and contain thousands of tonnes of shells. Peter Hiscock notes that incremental accumulation of these mounds was regulated by seemingly enigmatic ‘cultural rules’ of shell discard. My paper will more broadly conceptualise the ritualised and embedded historicity of these cultural rules in the context of midden mounds of Torres Strait in far northeast Australia and what I call ‘ritualised middening practices’. (Introduction)