This week and next I’m back in Weipa (NE Australia) working on a research project with Alngith People — Traditional Owners of the western Weipa Peninsula — as well as Dr Kathryn Allen (Monash University), to collect cores from Aboriginal scarred trees in the region. The work we’re doing involves applying dendrochronology, dendroecology and radiocarbon dating techniques to date Aboriginal scarred trees, understand growth rates on a particular species of tree and to collect new data about environmental change in the region over the past few centuries.

I try to keep a close eye on new papers, books and so on relevant to Australian Indigenous archaeology and collate much of this information in Zotero. I thought it might be worth irregularly posting a list of new materials that I’ve noticed. If there’s some interest, I’ll turn this into an open Zotero group. This is by no means comprehensive, just a list of the items that I stumble across and that might be of interest to others.

I sometimes wonder whether archaeology as a discipline in Australia has been bought. When I began working towards a degree in archaeology in the mid 1990s it was a common view that there were no jobs and that most of my fellow students and I were unlikely to find any form of employment as archaeologists. Ten years later, the Australian economy expanded in part through mining and there was a boom in demand for archaeology graduates and experienced archaeologists to work in heritage management.

I’ve finally found time to go in and update my research profile. It’s a little terrifying that I’m working across so many different projects. Some are nearing completion, others are very new. The reality is that I only actually work on one project in any week and I have considerable assistance from three kind and helpful research assistants who are doing masters research projects with me (thanks Claire, Amy and Chantal!

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“495” caption=“Ring of Fire / Johnny Ainsworth”][/caption] Welcome everyone to the 115th Four Stone Hearth Blogging carnival! (my apologies for the Johnny Cash reference). For the uninitiated, the Four Stone Hearth is: a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focussing primarily on four lines of research: archaeology socio-cultural anthropology bio-physical anthropology linguistic anthropology The Hearth is an important institution among anthropology bloggers, and dates back to somewhere around the early Holocene (2006) when anthro blogging began to get serious.

Yesterday, Agata Mrva-Montoya (@agatamontoya) at the University of Sydney forwarded me a wonderful resource for those who have an interest in accessing ‘grey literature’ resulting from archaeological work in New South Wales: the New South Wales Archaeology On-Line website that has been set up by the USyD library and the Archaeology of Sydney Research Group. [caption id=“attachment_596” align=“aligncenter” width=“340” caption=“New South Wales Archaeology On-LIne”][/caption] “Grey Literature” are the unpublished material - typically reports - that are produced during research or heritage management work.

I have agreed to present a half day workshop in my Department here at Flinders University on what I am calling ‘Digital Archaeology’. It’s aimed graduate students in our archaeology and cultural heritage programs who want to know more about how digital/web technologies are radically changing how we go about doing archaeology. It’s a little similar to what some in the USA seem to call cultural heritage informatics, but that’s not a term that is in very wide use here in Australia at this stage.