Historical archaeology in Australia began in the 1960s. The excavation of the site of Port Essington, a British military encampment in the Northern Territory by Jim Allen—then a doctoral student at the Australian National University— was one of its major early successes. Allen sought to understand the site within wider historical and archaeological contexts and argued that the Port Essington settlement was not just a failed attempt at colonization but also a successful, if short-term, display of British military presence in the region that achieved a number of strategic imperial goals.
In 1969 Jim Allen wrote the first doctoral dissertation on historical archaeology in Australia on the site of Port Essington in the Northern Territory. Within the next few years a number of other European settler sites had been excavated for doctorate studies, for student training purposes, or as salvage projects.
It was the beginning of a whole new kind of archaeology on the continent of Australia—one that dealt with the recent past, with European colonization and settlement, and with contact between the settlers and local indigenous people. As in North America, the archaeology of Australia’s recent past provided alternative social and local histories to those written by mainstream historians, demonstrating the value of this perspective to younger nations whose European past may have been short, but whose need to come to terms with it and value it was just as strong as it was with older nations. Perhaps these factors also coincided with the graduation of the first generation of professional archaeologists from Australian universities and the growth in interest in recording and preserving evidence of the colonial past, which, as was the case with much of the natural environment, came under threat from urban and suburban development in the 1970s.
Although the Australian Society of Historical Archaeology was founded in 1971, it was not until 1983 that the field had grown to the point that the first issue of its journal was published, and it listed a bibliography of more than 450 entries on historical archeology in Australia.
See also Historical Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg (1928-Present); Excavation of Jamestown (1934-1957); Excavation of Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons (19411951); Historical Archaeology First Taught at University (1960); Publication of A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America (1970); Publication of In Small Things Forgotten (1977); Discovery of the African Burial Ground (1991); Excavation of New York City’s “Five Points” (1991).
Further Reading
Allen, J. 1969. Archaeology and history of Port Essington. Ph. D. diss., Australian National University, Canberra.
Allen, J. 1973. The archaeology of nineteenth-century British imperialism: An Australian case study. World Archaeology 5: 44-60.
Lawrence, S. Australia, Historical. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: History and discoveries, ed. T. Murray, 114-121. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
World History
