Bulletin

Issue: June 2006

News

Dig locally, think global

Archaeologists and historians combine to write the history of the modern world.

Relics of our colonial past: An aerial view
of Victoria’s largest archaeological
excavation, Casselden Place, Lonsdale St,
Melbourne, in 2002. The historic dig
involved La Trobe University, Heritage
Victoria, heritage consultants and
the site owners.

Historical archaeology is a comparatively new field, introduced in the USA less than four decades ago.

Yet, according to Tim Murray, La Trobe University Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of Historical and European Studies, it is particularly relevant to Australia because it relates largely to the transmission of cultures and ideas from the 'Old World' to the 'New'.

Such is its growing importance that Professor Murray was recently the first archaeologist invited by the University of Cambridge to present its 2006 Smuts Commonwealth Lecture Series.

He gave the four lectures on aspects of historical archaeology which he describes as 'a large and complex field that has grown swiftly in North America, South Africa and Australia'.

Professor Murray says the late Jim Deetz in his book, In Small Things Forgotten, defined historical archaeology as 'the spread of European culture throughout the world since the 15th century and its impact on indigenous peoples'.

Given its genesis as the archaeology of European colonisation of North America, historical archaeology has always sought to deal with two major concerns.

The first is how to contribute to disciplines such as history and anthropology - and to persuade their practitioners that the archaeology of the modern world has something significant to offer.

The second is how to articulate local, regional, national and global scales in interpretation and analysis.

Historical archaeology, says Profesor Murray, has always been concerned with the transnational - the great flows of people, material culture, technology and capital that left Europe for the peripheries and have been washing back and forth ever since.

His lectures focused on issues including settler-indigenous relations, establishment of colonies, transfer of agricultural, manufacturing and managerial technologies, movements of people and material culture, and development of cities in the modern world. They explored both national and transnational issues.

Professor Murray says over the past 40 years historical archaeologists have sought to contribute to a broader understanding of how new societies were created from old, either emigrant or indigenous societies, and how class, ethnicity and gender have played themselves out in the nations created out of imperialism and colonialism.

'The pace and intensity of interaction between people scattered all over the globe rapidly increased during that time, and the pace and intensity of social and cultural change matched this.

'These have been the centuries of mass production and mass consumption and of the increasing industrialisation of all aspects of life. They have been understood as having the potential to create a global social and cultural uniformity that might crush the identities of those societies and cultures which lose the capacity to generate and sustain distinctive identities.

'In the last decade or so, these have become highly sensitive matters as people contemplate the consequences of global markets and their local impacts.

'Equally sensitive are the challenges societies face from movements of people - be they economic refugees, asylum seekers, or 'illegals' - and from flows of culture, both to and from the countries of the West and within the West itself.'

The lectures will be published under the title of Transnational Archaeologies.