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Local Trajectories? A View from Down Under

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Archaeological Human Remains

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Archaeology ((BRIEFSARCHAE))

Abstract

Biological anthropology in Australia is a relatively small discipline, and practitioners have usually applied theories developed in the metropolitan capitals to the Australian data, or else supplied data to overseas theorists to use in their theories. This situation has its parallels with Australian archaeology. At times, the two disciplines have been closely related, but the development of a fully fledged Australian bioarchaeology in the 1970s/1980s was fundamentally influenced by the repatriation of human remains and the debates at the time. In a continent of hunter-gatherers, biological anthropologists and archaeologists have always worked with an essentially scanty physical record. Post-repatriation, bioarchaeologists have grappled with how to undertake fieldwork and develop research questions in collaboration with indigenous communities. Research has been stymied by a lack of data, but new approaches and new questions have developed. What remains different about Australian bioarchaeology has always been the question of scale. In the past, the scale was continental wide and temporally dealt only with the Pleistocene and the Holocene. Now the discipline grapples with highly local, small sets of human remains. A central issue is how to link these new data sets with theoretical questions. It is argued here that a small discipline and a scanty physical record have produced a local trajectory that is distinctly different from the simple transfer and application of imported methods and theories.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Colin Pardoe, Denise Donlon, Helen Cekalovic and Kate Dommett who have written accounts of Australian bioanthropology and forensic anthropology, as well as Warwick Anderson who has researched the early anthropologists/anatomists. Harry Allen and Simon Holdaway have offered valuable comments on Australian archaeology, and this chapter has been fundamentally changed by that discussion. Thanks also go to Barra and Maria for the invitation to contribute this chapter.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Judith Littleton

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  1. Judith Littleton
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Correspondence to Judith Littleton .

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  1. Department of Archaeology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Barra O’Donnabhain

  2. Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    María Cecilia Lozada

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Littleton, J. (2014). Local Trajectories? A View from Down Under. In: O’Donnabhain, B., Lozada, M. (eds) Archaeological Human Remains. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06370-6_4

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