Q1. Stanner's assessment of the Dreaming is the aboriginal idea of a communal afterlife, which is eternal and ongoing. Human beings have 'souls,' as do every other living creature; these lifeforms help to create a complicated system that leads back to the Totemic Spirit Beings that exist within the Dreaming, forming the Creation. I believe that it can most certainly be described as a dualism, due to the fact that the Dreaming exists both before and after the individual life; it inhabits both flesh and spirit, and blends the physical and spiritual worlds together.
Peterson, N. 1976. ‘The Natural and Cultural Areas of Aboriginal Australia’. In N. Peterson (ed) Tribes and Boundaries in Australia. Social Anthropology Series No 10. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Pp - Canberra 1976.
Q2. According to Lourandos (1983), intensification is defined as social changes controlling the economic changes of a society. This principle states that, even without external forces, a change can indeed happen. In context to the aboriginal people, it has been used to explain how, being apart from the rest of society, large social and economic changes could still occur without environmental factors coming into play. About 4,000 years ago, archaeological sites saw more and more usage and greater expansion, due to changes in technology and an increase in population. Intensification saw the hunter-gatherers divide their labor through mere social factors.
Q3. In the Dreaming, the physical landscape was created by ancestral beings who inhabited these places with their spirit. Location is often determined by the presence and significance of whatever spirit may reside there. This creates a unique spatial relationship between country and community, where the relationship between physical place and spiritual presence is very tightly connected. A dialogue is then established between aboriginals and the spirit world, collaborating in the building of the world around them. Due to the intense connection that aboriginals feel with the places they inhabit, and their understanding of the cosmology behind it, that makes it much more imperative for them to maintain as many of their lands as possible, e.g. the Katherine area (Myers, 2000).
Myers, F.R. 2000. ‘Ways of Placemaking’. In K. Flint & H. Morphy (eds). Culture, Landscape & the Environment.
Q4. Macassans were sailors from Indonesia, who often sailed to the northern coast of Australia to hunt sea cucumber for sale in Chinese markets. During these journeys, they left indelible impressions on the aboriginal peoples. They would often trade goods with aboriginals and put them to work as hard labor. They would often have an amicable relationship together, but alcohol and weapons would sometimes lead to confrontations. Rock and bark paintings are evidence of their prior engagements with the Macassans, as well as the various lingual appropriations that took place over time; a pidgin language started to also become par for the course among aboriginal speech.
Clarke, A. 2000. ‘The “Moormans Trowsers”: Macassan and Aboriginal Interactions and the Changing Fabricof Indigenous Social Life’. In S. O'Connor and P. Veth (eds.), East of Wallace's Line: Studies of Past and Present Maritime Cultures of the Indo-Pacific Region. Pp. 315-35. Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema. (Modern QuaternaryResearch in Southeast Asia).
Q5.
The Holocene started when the Peistocene era ended (approximately 10,000 years ago) and continues to this day. It encompasses the entirety of human history; in it, the first settlements were created in the Middle East and Australia. In the case of aboriginals, they settled along the coasts of southeastern Australia and in the arid zones. The previous era saw the last ice age, where temperature dropped substantially, but some global warming took effect once the Holocene began.
Barker, B. 1999. ‘Coastal occupation in the Holocene: Environment, resource use and resource continuity.’ In J.Hall & I.J. McNiven (eds). Australian Coastal Archaeology. Canberra: ANH Publications, Dept of Archaeology & Natural History, RSPAS, The Australian National University.
Q6. Many aboriginal conception beliefs center around the idea of the spirit child, where impregnation comes as the result of child spirits inhabiting a human woman. In these instances, the child does not necessarily belong to the parents; the child is the embodiment 'of some totemic-territorial aspect of what is often called the 'Dreaming', the order constituted by the activities of ancestral creative figures' (Merlan, p. 474). This creates a slightly looser grasp of paternity than normal cultures, though they do still care for their children.
Merlan, F. 1986. ‘Australian Aboriginal conception beliefs revisited’. Man (n.s.) 21(3): 474-93.
Q7.
Barker presents quite a bit of evidence to state that archaeological record changes in the Whitsunday Islands were due to social factors. The establishment of many new sites in the islands, including the Nara Inlet Art Site, as well as significantly higher rates of discard for all artifact types except for stone, which decreased in discarding, allowed for a much different proportion of found artifacts than normal. Also, marine resources stayed fairly continuous throughout the Holocene, despite the environmental changes that were documented at that time.
Barker, B. 1999. ‘Coastal occupation in the Holocene: Environment, resource use and resource continuity.’ In J.Hall & I.J. McNiven (eds). Australian Coastal Archaeology. Canberra: ANH Publications, Dept of Archaeology & Natural History, RSPAS, The Australian National University.
Q8. The mortuary rituals of the Warlpiri made social ties stronger and allowed for social continuation. These rituals, called 'sorry business' or 'sorry,' are usually very short, and they are performed right after someone dies. More traditional funerals are held later, but those are only attended by the family of the deceased. Sorry businesses are a way for the entire settlement to attend and say goodbye to a Warlpiri, stopping all work and ritual to compel everyone to attend the sorry. This creates a much stronger tie of community, as every single person mourns who is lost.
Musharbash, Yasmine 2008. '"Sorry business is Yapa way": Warlpiri mortuary rituals as embodied practice'. In Burbank, V. et. al. (eds). Dealing with Death: Funerals and Mourning in Aboriginal Australia. London: Ashgate, pp. 21-36
Q9.
The debate stemming from the Mungo and Kow Swamp finds stems from what it may imply about the origins of the indigenous people of Australia. While the crania of the peoples found in the Kow Swamp area were large and substantial, these features were not present in the Mungo finds. One pervading theory spoke to the idea of two distinct populations existing in concert in the Pleistocene; the Kow Swamp group being "robust" and the Mungo group being "gracile" (Hiscock, 2008).
Hiscock, P. 2008. Archaeology of Ancient Australia. Oxon: Routledge. [Ch 2. ‘The Colonization of Australia’, pp 20-44.]
Q10. The Bradshaws are paintings that were found in the northwestern portion of the continent, in Kimberley. One theory, presented by Graham Walsh (1994), states that the Bradshaw paintings were non-Aboriginal in origin, though McNiven & Russell (1997) state that these interpretations "echo 19th-century scholarship and deep-seated colonialist perceptions of Aboriginal people and their rights to native title" (p. 801). They theorize, instead, that the Bradshaw paintings are 'pre-Aboriginal, and that these paintings were created before European influence and contact. This allows for a semblance of knowledge of art within the Aboriginal people, which is something often shied from in modern scholarship.
McNiven, I J and L Russell 1997. ‘Strange paintings’ and ‘mystery races’: Kimberley rock art, diffusionism & colonialist constructions of Australia’s aboriginal past’. Antiquity 71: 801-809.
Q11. In terms of the role of women in Aboriginal society, Hamilton states that there are indeed rampant sexual inequalities within these societies, and there is a substantial power differential that is divided by gender lines. While there are some individual women who have become greater social actors within their communities, allotting them greater power, authority and status, that is not evidence of a categorical change in power and rights for women all across aboriginal societies. Social circles often are separated between men and women, making 'each sex powerful to itself but premised on the ability of one to dominate the other by force when their interests are in irreconcilable conflict' (Hamilton 1981, p. 69).
Hamilton, A. 1981. ‘A complex strategical situation: gender and power in Aboriginal Australia’. In N.Grieve, & P. Grimshaw (ed) Australian Women: Feminist Perspectives. Pp. 69-85. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Q12. According to Greer and Henry (1996), heritage is an incredibly important part of the archaeological toolbook; it creates a collective canon of information within a culture that can be learned and appropriated. This allows for the learning of data about new places, traditions and objects that have been lost to time. Just because something is physically gone does not mean that it falls out of the common heritage, making it important to investigate the old stories of these things that no longer exist. Heritage is actively produced when change occurs, permitting humans to hold on to something long after it is gone; archaeologists can use this to find new islands that had been totally submerged, for example.
Greer, S. and R. Henry, 1996. The Politics of Heritage: the case of the Kuranda Skyrail. In Finlayson, J. and A. Jackson-Nakano (eds). Heritage and Native Title: anthropological and legal perspectives. Pp. 16-25. Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Q13. The Yolngu have two moieties into which they divide their societies (two skins); these skin systems are used in many aboriginal groups to help subdivide people into subgroupings, typically based around blood relations. The Pintupi, on the other hand, have eight skin groups, dividing these skin groups again by male and female. The male skin names start with 'Tj,' and the female skin names with "N," helping to separate same-sex siblings. Patrimoieties and Matromoieties are father and mother skin groups, helping to create a further divide between generations. The Pintupi system is far more complex than the Yolngu's.
Morphy, H. 1997. ‘Death, exchange and the reproduction of Yolngu society’. In F. Merlan et al. (eds.) Scholar and Sceptic: Australian Aboriginal Studies in Honour of L.R. Hiatt. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, pp. 123-150.
Q14. Colonialism, in its many forms, often employs violence as a means to appropriate land from those who have lesser technological ability to fight back. This often plays into masculine ideas of property, ego and power, which can lead to tremendous conflicts resulting in bloodshed. Those colonising through force can use intimidation to get those results, leading to Aboriginals and settlers coming to blows. Eventually, hybrid social identities began to form as the settlers and Aboriginals started to live together which created forced silences in the Aboriginals, who did not mention or think about how they came to meet the settlers.
Harrison, R. 2002. ‘Archaeology and the colonial encounter: Kimberley spearpoints, cultural identity and masculinity in the north of Australia’. Journal of Social Archaeology 2(3):352-377.
Q15. The idea of authenticity stems back to traditional ideas of ensuring that Aboriginal art, culture and accomplishments actually belong to them, and is not in some way attributed to colonial encounters. Whether or not a region of a rainforest area belongs to them is steeped in vague, often nebulous notions of property or authenticity that are difficult to prove in a common law context. There is a great desire to prove authenticity on indigenous peoples, ostensibly to take whatever land cannot be definitively proven as 'belonging' to them.
Harrison, R. 2000. ‘Challenging the ‘authenticity’ of antiquity: contact archaeology and Native Title in Australia’. In I. Lilley (ed.) Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in the Postcolonial World. Oceania Monograph 50.Pp. 35-53. Sydney: University of Sydney.
Q16. Aboriginals often engaged in hostile encounters to attempts at colonisation; the British colonisation of Australia could be interpreted as an invasion, and as such the aboriginals wished to fight for their land. The Australian Frontier Wars were evidence of this willingness to lay down lives to defeat those who would dispossess them of their homes and property. As such, they would attack white people in as many opportunities as possible. This violence and total war committed against the British to avoid colonisation belies the myth of a peaceful settlement of Australia.
Keen, I. 2003. Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Chapter 1 Introduction, pp 1-17]
Q17. The benefit of archaeology is unearthing structures, tools, and objects of importance to the aboriginal people who came before; this, in addition to their stories and heritage, helps instill a more concrete sense of history in those who study these cultures. Ritual as a form of human action, however, brings these customs to light in a modern context, leaving that up to anthropology to understand how those rituals fit in the context of the whole of aboriginal society. While archaeology can help shed some light on how rituals were performed in the past, anthropology can showcase how it is performed today. This can provide a sense of continuity between these rituals.
McNiven I. J. 2004. ‘Saltwater People: spiritscapes, maritime rituals & the archaeology of Australian Indigenous seascapes’. World Archaeology 35(3): 329-349.
Q18. In New Guinea and Australia, the concept of hunter-gatherers has differed substantially. In New Guinea, by the time of colonial encounters, farming communities had been developed already, with domesticated pigs that they killed as needed for food. However, in Australia, the aboriginals were strictly hunter-gatherers; their only domesticated animals were dogs, which were used to help hunt other, larger animals. They are said to have harnesses comparable levels of energy, but through different means; reasons include a rather unstable population density for aboriginal Australia than in New Guinea, which allowed for a sustainable farming settlement.
Lourandos, H. 2008. ‘Constructing “Hunter-Gatherers”, constructing “Prehistory”’. Australian Archaeology 67: 69-78
Q19. As time went on, and settlers also claimed the same areas that aboriginals did, notions of authenticity began to become a little blurred. This cross-cultural exchange through contact has led to shared authenticity being acknowledged in some territories between settlers and aboriginals. These places are valued very highly by aboriginals, and so authenticity may sway in their favor, particularly as they wish to value the places where these cross-cultural exchanges took place. When a place has value to the community (i.e. sheds light on the communities culture or sense of identity), then authenticity is favored to them.
McIntyre-Tamwoy, S. 2002. ‘Places people value: social significance & cultural exchange in post-invasion Australia’. In R. Harrison & C. Williamson (eds). After Captain Cook. The archaeology of the recent Indigenous past in Australia. Sydney University Archaeological Methods Series 8: Sydney.
Q20. Aboriginal art being displayed in international exhibitions helps to create a sense of heritage and authenticity for the aboriginals. By claiming ownership of this art and displaying it in other countries, it allows a firm artistic presence to be established on the part of the aborigines, as they appropriate this art in a more definitive manner. The ownership of this art helps to solidify them further as a legitimate society, one that can and should be respected among the cultures of the world.
Morphy, H. 1995. ‘Aboriginal art in a global context’. In D. Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. Pp. 211-39. London: Routledge.
