The topic has also evolved in the published scholarship. For example, the focus of historian Russel Ward’s 1977 A Nation for a Continent (the title snipped from a Federation campaign speech by Edmund Barton) was neatly flipped by environmental historian Libby Robin’s 2007 book How a Continent Created a Nation. Robin advanced the transdisciplinary dialogue between science and history that is central to Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm’s new book, The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent. As the subtitle indicates, though, the central focus here is on culture rather than the environment.

The book’s immense temporal and spatial reach is organised by chapters focused on journeying, food gathering, landscape management and social organisation. In each, the authors synthesise archaeological evidence, computer modelling and the Indigenous knowledge and cultural memory encoded in song and story to document human flourishing in diverse and changing landscapes.

Like the television series of the same name, which screened in 2023, The First Inventors begins with the peopling of the Australian continent around 65,000 years ago. The Australian landmass, a third larger than today, was part of the Sahul region that included New Guinea and eventually Tasmania. Crossing between Timor and the Kimberley coast, one of the first settlement routes, required watercraft and navigation techniques suitable for over-the-horizon voyaging. This was, the authors contend, the longest sea journey yet undertaken by humans. Several centuries of two-way journeys suggest purposeful rather than accidental settlement, and left an archaeological record that the authors believe provides the first evidence of modern human behaviour.

Much of that evidence was submerged by a sea level rise, eventually reaching some 130 metres following the last glacial maximum around 21,000 years ago. The first humans settled along coastal fringes like those of Timor and Sulawesi, but movement inland — the speed and spread of which has long been underestimated, according to new modelling — required adaptation to hotter, drier environments, and to country that had evolved to burn.

Across the continent, developments in aquaculture, astronomy and pharmaceuticals came through observation, experimentation and evaluation, the hallmarks of science. Archaeological evidence shows the development of hafted axes suited to the dominant eucalypt hardwoods. Maps were encoded in song and story to guide navigation and help locate food and water sources. Fire was repurposed for landscape management, with cool season burns facilitating hunting while preserving local ecologies.

Present-day dating techniques, computer modelling and simulation have produced new evidence of occupation and adaptation that frequently overlays and supports traditional knowledge embedded in stories, songs and cultural memory. “We come to these ancient oral accounts with a healthy scepticism, as well as a deep regard for Indigenous knowledge of Country,” conclude the authors, “and we are persuaded of their veracity by the sheer volume and variety of narratives, both across the continent and within specific stories.”

Describing the earliest Indigenous occupants as inventors might seem implausible to some. The authors tackle this head on, subverting a romantic trope of the inventor as a solitary genius to argue for understanding “invention” at landscape scale, adapted and nurtured across countless generations.

The myth of European exploration and discovery, too, is debunked in the book’s discussion of the songlines and long-distance navigation trails, some stretching across the continent, that facilitated food gathering and cultural diplomacy. European explorers frequently relied on Indigenous guides or followed established tracks, as do many present-day roads. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson completed their celebrated crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by trailing a short distance behind an advance Indigenous party.

Yet a colonial mindset lingers. The material evidence of early settlement and trade located by underwater archaeology is unrecognised and unprotected by maritime heritage legislation. Australia is not party to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Australia’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Act of 2018, the authors assert, prioritises the protection of shipwrecks and submerged aircraft. Conversely, the nomination of the Budj Bim cultural landscape in southwest Victoria, with its network of kooyang (eel) traps, was Australia’s first community-nominated accession to UNESCO’s world heritage list. The chapter featuring Budj Bim shows the capacity of new remote sensing technologies to accurately map the extent and sophistication of Gunditjmara aquaculture in this region.

More encouragingly, settler-colonial perceptions of fire as an alien force and deadly threat is giving way to an appreciation of cultural burning as a strategy for wildfire management.

The First Inventors does feature one figure who might more conventionally be identified as an inventor: Ngarrandjeri man David Unaipon. A chapter recounts the well-known story of Unaipon’s modified design of a sheep-shearing comb, which revolutionised productivity in the wool industry but yielded no financial benefit for its developer. But readers may be less familiar with the oppressive regulation of Unaipon’s daily life. Most of the chapter’s attention, though, is given to his design of a helicopter that applied the aerofoil principle of a boomerang. The final part of the TV series featured a delightful proof-of-concept trial of the design.

Of the three authors, Larissa Behrendt’s name is likely to be most familiar to non-academic audiences, although many may be unaware of the breadth of her activity across academia, fiction, screen and media, and in advisory roles. Larissa wrote and directed The First Inventors series.

Billy Griffiths, a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, enlivened the history of archaeology in Australia in his award-winning Deep Time Dreaming. The accessible, character-driven style of that book is emulated in The First Inventors.

Sean Ulm is a professor of archaeology at James Cook University whose substantial body of work focuses on the relationship of cultural and environmental change in archaeological and paleo-environmental eras. Deep knowledge of the country and longstanding relationships with Indigenous people and disciplinary colleagues come to fruition in this project.

The book, which has appeared after the documentary’s screening, provides space to expand and defend claims and arguments, grounding the project in an impressively wide scholarship. It is also candid about the limits of the archaeological record. Much of the technical innovation described in the text involved the use of fibres, which have limited chances of surviving as material evidence. Beware, say the authors, of conflating the archaeological record with what was once considered important, and which might influence later judgements of cultural advancement. The durability of stone gave rise to the trope of a stone-age people, and to anthropologist A.P. Elkin’s marginally less crude assessment that Indigenous people were parasites, dependent on what nature produced.

But the tendency to essentialise — to fall back on descriptions of timelessness and cultural uniformity — persists. Kevin Rudd’s 2007 apology, note the authors, referred to an “ancient culture.” The demand to prove the existence of native title rests on a static concept of continuity. Perhaps the strongest message of this book is its debunking of a primitivist notion that Indigenous people lived in simple harmony with their natural environment. They were — we all are — living with complex, changing and constructed environments. Successfully navigating the future, argue the authors, will need Indigenous knowledge and Western science working together. •

The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent
By Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm | Allen & Unwin | $36.99 | 320 pages

The post Shaping a continent appeared first on Inside Story.

Mike Smith (1955–2022), a great Australian archaeologist, died in Canberra on Sunday 16 October. As his family announced, “he put down his tools and hung up his hat.” A week before his death he was walking his beloved dog, writing a scientific paper, riding his recliner-bike around Lake Burley Griffin, converting cabbage from his garden into kimchi and no doubt cooking his famed custard tarts. He was a warm, witty, courteous and deeply learned scholar and scientist whose research and fieldwork changed the way Australians understand the recent and deep past of their continent. His book, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, published in 2013, is a powerful and enduring encapsulation of his life’s work; my review, first published in 2013, appears below.
— Tom Griffiths

Crouched in the red sand, handling a stone artefact with an arc of blue desert sky above him, Mike Smith is at home. This connoisseur of deserts, who revolutionised our understanding of the human history of Central Australia, has a discerning eye for the distinctive character of Australia’s Red Centre. His new book, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, published in March by Cambridge University Press, is the most important exploration of Australia’s ancient human history since John Mulvaney’s The Prehistory of Australia was published forty-four years ago.

“The discoverers, explorers and colonists of the three million square miles which are Australia,” Mulvaney wrote in his revolutionary opening sentence, “were its Aborigines.” He was writing at the end of the 1960s, a decade that he called “the deluge,” “the golden years,” “the Dreamtime” of Australian archaeology. Australians had finally confirmed that they lived on a continent with a truly ancient human history and suddenly found themselves gazing into a dizzying abyss of time.

Settler Australia has a history of ambivalence about intimations of Aboriginal antiquity and adaptability. Colonists were reluctant to acknowledge the depth of belonging of a people whose continent they had usurped. This means that any broad understanding of the human antiquity of Australia is a relatively recent and dramatic event that rested on the twin revolutions of professional archaeology and radiocarbon dating, both of which emerged in local practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Since that time, archaeological dates for human occupation in Australia have deepened from 13,000 years before the present (secured by Mulvaney at Kenniff Cave in Queensland in 1962) to over 30,000 years at Lake Mungo by 1970, to over 40,000 years at several sites by the 1980s, and then a likely 50–55,000 years determined by Rhys Jones, Mike Smith and Bert Roberts at Malakunanja II in Arnhem Land in 1989. “No segment of the history of Homo sapiens,” wrote Mulvaney, “had been so escalated since Darwin took time off the Mosaic standard.” It turned out that “the timeless land” was actually replete with time – and dynamic with human history.

Mike Smith’s career unfolded during this period when settler Australia was coming to grips with the deep Aboriginal past – and one of the archaeological revelations of the mid to late 1980s came from his own excavation at Puritjarra in western Central Australia. Smith had arrived in Australia from Blackpool, England, in 1961, aged six, the son of “ten pound” British migrants. For a few months during his primary school years, his father’s work took young Mike to remote Ceduna, the last major settlement before the Nullarbor Plain, with a population that was mainly Greek and Aboriginal. In this town of sand and cinder-block houses, Mike remembers collecting lizards and playing in rusty cars. He began to develop a taste for arid Australia: “the smell of the country, that light, the sense of openness and adventure.” Although he knows Australia as few do, Smith has never lost his British accent and has been known to treat it humorously as a “speech impediment.”

In late primary school he made a conscious decision to pursue a career in archaeology. He had corresponded with staff at the South Australian Museum about his reptiles, and by the age of fifteen he was asking to join a museum dig at Roonka on the Lower Murray and then one led by Hungarian émigré Alexander Gallus at Koonalda Cave in the Nullarbor. Carrying buckets at dig sites enabled him to meet the well-known archaeologist Rhys Jones, “a very inspirational man” who was happy to “talk to a kid.” By the time Mike came to the Australian National University in 1974 to study archaeology with John Mulvaney, he already had substantial field experience and was “hooked on Australian work.” In an interview for the National Library of Australia last year, he recalled the excitement of this period: “There were new discoveries every six months or so. And this combined with my own personal exploration of the continent. I was interested in geography; I was interested in the structure of a continent. And archaeology was my means of travel as much as anything else.”

Soon after finishing a masters degree, he got a job as field archaeologist at the Northern Territory Museum in Darwin where his “amazing brief” was “to engage in the field survey and excavation of Aboriginal and Macassan sites in the Northern Territory.” By the beginning of 1982 he was keen to move his base to Alice Springs, for the Red Centre had got in his blood. Ceduna had played a part in seducing him to aridity, but so too had visits to the South Australian Museum, where he gazed, fascinated, at “those older museum displays of Arrernte ceremonial costumes: the big, conical, feather-down headdresses with the feathers glued on with blood.” They seemed to depict a society that was not just exotic but totally alien, and yet the setting was his own continental backyard, that great alluring heart of desert that was part of the geographical imagination of South Australians. He glimpsed the mysterious world captured in Songs of Central Australia by the anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow, and in the writings of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. He realised that “there was a rich, exotic Aboriginal cultural and political system out there. Central Australia is where I wanted to be.”

Smith wanted to test the generally accepted belief that Central Australia had been occupied by people only after the end of the last Ice Age. He needed a site that would make full use of his stratigraphic skills and surgical precision, a site that would be a “palimpsest of different deserts,” of past climates, geomorphic processes and cultural systems. He searched for years. The desk he inherited in Alice Springs had a pile of slips of paper in a drawer, one of which noted the existence of a large cave near Mount Winter in the Cleland Hills. Nothing more than that, but it was a vital clue. “But it took a lot of time to work out quite how to get out there and also where to go,” he recalls. Finally, with the help of historian Dick Kimber and rock art scholar Grahame Walsh, Smith was able to get to the remote Cleland Hills.

It was 3 August 1986 and they had just one morning to search sixteen kilometres of the range for the great hollow of a cave. Kimber walked south and Smith walked north. Mike walked and walked, and finally came round a corner of the outcrop, and then he saw something. “I could see these shadows at the base of an escarpment and it looked like it could be something quite big,” he wrote later. “So I walked over and there was this absolutely huge rock shelter, I mean enormous! A big opera shell structure. I have not seen anything like it since; it is absolutely the most remarkable site. I knew that was the site, it matched the description. It was the site that would warm any archaeologist’s heart. I knew this was a site that would give me a good sequence.”

“A short time later I met Mike,” Dick Kimber recorded. “He was elated. He had found the cave.” Smith had found Puritjarra, the site that would occupy much of his archaeological attention for the next quarter-century.

After Lake Mungo, Puritjarra is the single most important archaeological site in the Australian desert – not simply because of its intrinsic values, but also because of the time invested in its analysis. Thanks to Mike’s enduring commitment, it is one of the most carefully documented and dated sites in Australia. Puritjarra deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years, a period at least as long as modern humans have occupied Western Europe. Modern Australians began at last to realise that they were the inheritors of a human saga of global significance, a drama in which people survived Ice Age droughts in the central Australian deserts and managed to sustain civilisation in the face of massive climate change. Puritjarra is a place that Australians should revere.

Smith’s new book, which was launched at the National Museum of Australia in March, tells the story of Puritjarra – but also of all Australia’s arid lands. It explains and analyses the social and environmental history of the largest area of desert in the southern hemisphere. In reality, inland Australia is made up of a variety of deserts with great natural diversity – it is a vast region of drylands, dune fields, stony plains, ephemeral rivers, salt lakes and desert uplands, all quite different from the deserts of southern Africa, South America or North Africa. Smith’s book is a product of his life-long commitment to understanding this unique region. He has worked on an outback sheep station as a roustabout, hiked and driven the country as a field archaeologist, walked with a string of camels through remote country west of Lake Mackay and in the Simpson Desert, and dug carefully into desert sands. He sees himself as “holding the region up to the light like a gemstone, turning it around and watching its personality refracted in different ways.” This is a scientific work that is also literature.

There have been many outstanding studies in Australian archaeology in the half century since Mulvaney’s book; in fact, I feel we are blessed, as Australians, to have so many gifted archaeologists to guide us in our quest to understand the deep past of this continent. But Mike Smith’s book is notable for its careful absorption, acknowledgement and encapsulation of all the scholarship that precedes it. Through his synthesis, which is built on the foundation stone of his own original archaeological research, he makes us see Australian human history anew.

Smith was a student of Mulvaney and, like him, is a cultural historian as well as an archaeologist. Both these men see archaeology, with its palaeo-environmental data and its science of stratigraphy, as ultimately a humanities discipline. Although Smith established some of our oldest dates of human occupation, he believes that the best way to demolish the “timeless” metaphor that stalks ancient Australia is to piece together a complex, contoured history of social and environmental change from the first arrival of people in Australia to the present. A nuanced narrative of change through millennia ultimately conveys depth better than dates. In The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, Smith works from the ancient past forwards and from the ethnographic and historical present backwards, and he produces a rich history of Australian humanity.

As well as connecting Australians to the human exodus from Africa, he proposes an Australian history of constant social change such that, for example, “much of the fabric of desert tradition” encountered by Europeans might be no older than 4000 years. It turns out that the classic ethnographies of a “timeless” people actually described desert societies that had survived, and been transformed by, an environmental roller-coaster and were undergoing accelerating cultural change. The deep past is shown to echo powerfully in the contemporary cross-cultural history of people, politics and possession.

In 1996, reflecting on the Australian time revolution, archaeologist Denis Byrne wrote a brilliant essay called “Deep Nation” for the journal Aboriginal History, in which he meditated on what it means for a settler nation to embrace as its own the past of a culture it once rejected as a savage anachronism. Byrne analysed how the discourse of depth – which is such an appropriate and seductive metaphor – has sometimes inadvertently led to archaeology’s disconnection from the living Aboriginal present and to an essentialism of a timeless, traditional Aboriginal past. Byrne argued that, “if archaeology were to cease concerning itself with the nation’s desire for depth, it might rise, as it were, to the surface.” By “surface,” he meant that relatively horizontal (post-1788) terrain “where duration is measured in terms of generations rather than millennia.” Such practice would cease to locate real Aboriginality in the pre-colonial past, and would refuse the obsession with cultural purity. Writing almost two decades ago, Byrne did not foresee, perhaps, how quickly this apparent binary might be transcended, and how effectively the depths and the surface might be united in one remarkable vision.

Mike Smith’s career and oeuvre help us to think through these challenging and exciting dilemmas of our time. He sees himself as part of the generation of archaeologists who picked up the baton from John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones and completed the basic archaeological exploration of the continent: “in terms of finding the corners of the room, that was a job that my generation finished, completed.” He is also part of the first generation of Australian-trained archaeologists. And he feels privileged to have been among the last to have travelled and worked with Aboriginal people who grew up in the bush without major contact with Europeans. His reflective practice offers us an enabling window onto archaeology in the period of escalating human timescales and resurgent Aboriginal politics.

Known affectionately at the National Museum as Dr Deep Time – a man so enamoured of stratigraphy that he got a gravedigger’s certificate through TAFE to learn the ins and outs of timber shoring – Mike has also sifted the surface sands of his beloved deserts with meticulous historical care. In an earlier book, Peopling the Cleland Hills (2005), he gives us a remarkable modern history of a frontier, drawn from documents, memories and conversations-in-place. And he finishes The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts with a cultural history of the last millennium. He believes it is important to retain a feeling for the contemporary cultural landscape that swirls around the sites he studies, and so in Peopling the Cleland Hills he uses Puritjarra as a place from which to view the modern social exchange and disruption generated across Kukatja country by the European invasion.

Although his focus in that book is the last century-and-a-half, there are tens of thousands of years of history implied in his gaze. Rather than following large-scale events themselves, pursuing them off-stage, as it were, Smith keeps us grounded in place and we see them flicker past or we feel the ripple of their distant impact. There is a kind of Aboriginal patience in this earthed archaeological view – in this Ice Age inheritance, this steady, embedded watchfulness over particular country. We can sense in that book, more explicitly than in any of Smith’s other work, how intimately and even spiritually he has come to identify with the desert and its modern people. This is surely a source of the powerful poetic vision that illuminates his science.

The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts fits within a grand tradition of Australian desert literature of which Mike Smith is keenly conscious: Ernest Giles, Baldwin Spencer, Frank Gillen, J.W. Gregory, C.T. Madigan, T.G.H. Strehlow, H.H. Finlayson and Francis Ratcliffe, to name a few. A lineage of desert authors and titles is invoked in this study and every issue is elucidated through an intellectual history of its origins and evolution. You only have to talk with Mike Smith for a few minutes to know his magic with words, phrases and metaphors. It is no surprise that his book glows with poetry – I mean the poetics of hard-won hard facts beautifully presented, the poetics of disciplinary insight and logic, and the poetics of lucid prose.

Recently Smith donated his “Desert Collection” of books to the library of the National Museum of Australia. There they are shelved separately in a beautiful room. And Smith’s book now slips into the left-hand end of the top shelf. It is there at the very apex of a spine of ideas and words, a sweet acknowledgement of the donor. But the book is also, symbolically, the sum of that collection, for it is a culmination of it, a distillation of all that has gone before – and more.

Smith has written The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts for several audiences: for the world archaeological community, for his fellow Australians, and especially for the people who welcome him in their desert country. He has worked with three generations of the Multa and Tjukadai families responsible for the Cleland Hills. In his 2012 National Library interview, Mike had this to say to his Aboriginal friends: “This is a rich history. It is something that sits next to the Dreaming. It doesn’t displace it, it doesn’t replace it, but it’s a rich history here, it’s something to be proud of… It’s been my privilege to work on this history, but in a sense it has also been my gift.”

The American archaeologist Richard Gould, whose important work at the Puntutjarpa rock shelter in the Western Desert in the late 1960s is described in Smith’s book, is quoted on the back cover of The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, declaring it “a ‘must’ for anyone seriously interested in Australian cultural history.” He’s right. And note that Gould does not use the words “archaeology” or “prehistory” or “Aboriginal.” I think there is a kind of coming of age of a settler nation in being able to say that this is, quite simply, a landmark work in Australian cultural history.

Mike Smith begins and ends the book with the Arrernte ceremonies performed for Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in the summer of 1896, those “exotic” rituals which first fascinated him as a boy visiting the South Australian Museum. He calls the ceremonies “a watershed event in anthropological literature, a profound intellectual exchange between elite members of two very different societies.” He explains at the end of the book that he has tried to approach the 1896 ceremony from the other side, “reconstructing the long history that shaped the world of the Arrernte elders sitting across the ceremonial ground” from the observing Europeans. This is the other side of the frontier in a whole new sense. In 1981, Henry Reynolds wrote a revelatory book about the often-violent encounter between Aborigines and settlers on Australia’s grasslands, and he used that metaphor as his title. Here the archaeologist Mike Smith, with rigorous science and inspired humanism, imagines the other side of the frontier not just in space, but in deep time too. •

The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts
By Mike Smith | Cambridge University Press | $37.95 | 400 pages

The post A landmark work of Australian history appeared first on Inside Story.

Peter Sutton writes:

“Did Australian anthropology retreat to an ivory tower during its ‘postmodern turn’ in the 1980s,” asks Stephen Bennetts in Australian Book Review, “and lose the ability to engage a broader audience in the way Dark Emu, for all its flaws, has clearly done so powerfully? Perhaps.”

And perhaps not. Too many exceptions come to mind. We discuss them in Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, but you could start with Philip Clarke’s Where the Ancestors Walked, which should have sold a lot more than its 5000 copies since 2003.

Bill Gammage claims in Inside Story that Pascoe’s academic critics are people in disciplines where “jargon and theory are eminent,” and whose remedy for being alarmed by Pascoe’s disinformation “is to talk to each other.” Not in our case. We have written our assessment of Dark Emu for a broad public. As far as possible, we are theory-free. Our publishers had to reprint three times in the first month and the total run has now reached 15,000. Jargon only gets that kind of audience in Paris. Gammage has got the wrong targets in mind.

A lot of editors commissioning reviews of Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? in the last few months make the false assumption that professional historians are the most relevant and best-qualified scholars to assess not only Pascoe’s book itself but also our forensic assessment of it. It follows from that bit of bad guesswork that it is documentary historians who are the scholarly masters of pre-conquest Australian food production, fertility rituals, lexicons, toolkits, ecological knowledge, shelter construction, apparel and residential patterns, and the analysis of archaeological evidence and dating methods.

A few historians, like Geoffrey Blainey and Gammage, have made the effort to study the old cultures as they were in the early contact phase, by consulting some of the vast literature in which field anthropologists have reported to a wider world what they have learned from Indigenous mentors of standing and knowledge. Pascoe largely ignores these sources.

The topics tackled by Pascoe in Dark Emu were not predominantly those that have long been the province of documentary historians of Aboriginal Australia. Regardless, Pascoe is often curiously described as a “historian.” His topics are ancient cultural, technological and ecological practices within the Aboriginal world, not records of frontier and later dealings with the colonisers. Who, then, is the methodological cuckoo in the nest?

Gammage says both Pascoe and Sutton “leave out words that don’t suit.” The context here is explorer Mitchell’s 1839 descriptions of grasslands. Gammage supplies an extension to our quotations, but they add nothing of substance to the question here: does a plain on which the grass has been pulled out demonstrate anything more than that the women had extracted the grass stems to collect the seeds? Why is Mitchell’s description of such a grass plain “suggestive of farming” as Gammage claims?

Having not read our book except for what he calls cherrypicking, Gammage would not have known that it has a later quotation from Mitchell. These words certainly don’t suit either Pascoe or Gammage. In 1848, the experienced explorer, having lived in Australia since 1827, refers to “the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncultivated earth to forsake it for the tilled ground. They prefer the land unbroken and free from the earliest curse pronounced against the first banished and first created man.” Adam and Eve, banished from Eden, were forever condemned to a life of agriculture.

Gammage prefers white explorers as sources because, he says, “they were there.” But so also were the hundreds of senior Aboriginal mentors of dozens of anthropologists and quite some archaeologists of the last hundred years. There were also the anthropologists who lived among the free people beyond the frontier: Ursula McConnel, Lauriston Sharp, Norman Tindale, Donald Thomson and others. We discuss their respectful and rich records in our book.

Gammage’s claim that our responses given at an ANU–Canberra Times Meet the Author event were “infused with possibles and alternatives” is false. Dr Walshe’s caveats over site dating were the normal scientific cautions, unlike the reckless claims made by Pascoe in Dark Emu and since. The evidence is in the recording of that event.

Bill Gammage has had high scholarly standards but has not applied them to Pascoe. Why? Is academic tolerance of bad Aboriginal history, bad anthropology and bad archaeology okay if the author identifies as Aboriginal? Universities are in enough trouble as it is. •

Keryn Walshe writes:

In being so charmingly simple, Bill Gammage’s response to the debate about our book fails to identify science as playing a highly critical role when assessing a “history and polemic” such as Dark Emu. No reviewer to date has commented on Dark Emu’s unhinged use of scientific findings.

As an archaeologist, I prefer to work from archaeological evidence. Interrogating the data is a basic scientific principle that Bruce Pascoe didn’t apply when he was piling up Dark Emu’s evidence for farming and village life. Its absence is a significant omission, as is the omission of key parts of citations from explorers’ journals. Claims of food preservation and storage, agricultural implements and villages of stone houses are no small matters.

Dark Emu’s archaeological evidence lies entirely in the extraordinary size and number of “stone houses,” the unheard-of practice of smoking eels inside gum trees, and discoveries of agricultural implements in collections. Apparently, all of this was deliberately hidden from “us” across some 150 years.

There is no credible scientific evidence that eels were smoked at Lake Condah, and this fact removes all possibility of sedentism. This has serious implications for arguing a population of 700 or, more radically, 10,000. “Stone houses,” as a term, distracts the imagination from the reality of a low, small circle of stone over which foliage was arranged in order to form a temporary shelter. Their frequency of habitation remains unclear, and some of these perimeters of stone may have acted as no more than a windbreak during peak eel season.

Interestingly, there has been no reviewer response to Dark Emu’s inclusion of cylcons (or silcons) as agricultural implements. After comprehensive research identifying their primary role in men’s ceremonial practices was published eighty years ago, all were eventually removed from public display in Australia’s collecting institutions. Excluding these 3000 or so ceremonial objects from the clump of agricultural implements leaves just thirteen heavy stone objects (aka “Bogan picks”). Dark Emu avoids offering a time length for the practice of Indigenous agriculture in this country, but does vaguely wave a hand at a piece of ground stone from the Cuddie Springs megafauna site, which is proposed to be some 32,000 years old. Momentarily ignoring the fact that the thirteen implements selected for agriculture are absolutely not, that is not much to show for those thousands of years of laborious activity.

Gammage steps away from Pascoe’s ill-founded claim of 120,000 years for Indigenous occupation of Australia, to settle for the more popular 65,000 years. As no explanation is given, Gammage may as well stay with 120,000, as both figures have been hotly debated at the scientific level. Far more scientifically reliable is 50,000 years of occupation.

Historians may well demand accuracy when drawing from archival material, but it seems that when drawing from science, uncritical reading is perfectly acceptable. •

The post The trouble with history appeared first on Inside Story.

Childe was born in 1892, at a time when dreams that Australia would be a workers’ paradise, free of the poverty and invidious class distinctions of the Old World, were shattering in Australia’s first great depression. Strikes by maritime workers, shearers and miners were all defeated, and from these reversals came labour-based parties resolved to marry industrial action and parliamentary representation.

By the time Childe came of political age at the University of Sydney in the years before the first world war, Australia’s labour parties were well established in all the states and the new Commonwealth had a Labor government, led by the Scottish miner Andrew Fisher. Also well established was Labor’s distinctive mode of organisational discipline, developed to ensure that Labor’s parliamentarians remained true to the workers’ interests when they acquired a middle-class role and salary. The Labor MP represented the Labor movement, and should he forget this and choose to follow conscience or individual conviction rather than the will of caucus, he would be expelled.

During Childe’s time as a student, NSW Labor premier Jim McGowan, himself a good unionist, used the power of the state to break a strike of militant gas workers. Childe’s sympathies were with the strikers rather than the Labor leaders. At Oxford during the first world war his radical convictions strengthened; he was opposed to the war and to conscription. As a visitor to Britain he was exempt from military service, but many of his friends were jailed for their conscientious objections. He joined the Oxford University Fabian Society, where he mixed with other idealistic young radicals, including Douglas and Margaret Cole and a budding communist, Rajani Palme Dutt, with whom he set up a Socialist Society.

Despite his outstanding results at Oxford, and despite having published a scholarly article on Minyan ware in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Childe’s radical reputation prevented him from getting continuing academic employment when he returned to Australia in 1917. He was placed under surveillance by Australia’s military intelligence agency, on advice from MI5, and lost a position as a university college tutor because of his anti-war sympathies. Eventually he found employment as private secretary to John Storey, the Labor opposition leader in New South Wales.

It was a difficult time for the Australian labour movement. The party had split over conscription during the war, and Labor prime minister Billy Hughes had taken his supporters into a new Nationalist government. This not only exposed different views about state power and personal liberty; it also reflected Labor’s difficulties in holding its parliamentarians to party policies, the inevitability of “rats” like Hughes, and the inherent limitations of the parliamentary road to socialism. With the opportunity to study these dilemmas from the inside, Childe increasingly doubted that a Labor government would ever introduce bold legislation to achieve social equality.

He returned to Britain in October 1921 to take up a research position in the office of the NSW agent-general, but when the Labor government fell six months later he lost his job. In Australia, he had established himself as a labour intellectual — lecturing, writing, advising, debating. With time on his hands in London he completed the manuscript of How Labour Governs, picked up part-time political work and rekindled his interest in archaeology, where he eventually found secure employment.

Childe published the first of his books on European prehistory, The Dawn of European Civilisation, in 1925. Countering the view that there was no civilisation in Europe before the Bronze Age, he argued that the material remains of these earlier societies showed practical humans making their worlds with labour and enterprise. Following Marx, his was a materialist concept of society and of progress, focusing on the means of production and the movement of practical innovations with migrations of craftspeople.

In fact, Childe was the first scholar to conceptualise the shift of humans from hunters and gathers into settled agriculturists. This Neolithic revolution supported larger settlements of people with more complex socials structures. He went on to write twenty-five more books, the most popular of them, What Happened in History, selling 300,000 copies in fifteen years.

Terry Irving gives us a good sense of Childe the person, a hardworking, driven, rational man who had friends but no intimate personal relations, dressed eccentrically and was sometimes mocked for his plain looks. His friend Jack Lindsay believed he wore a sardonic mask because of his inability to reveal what he really felt. Today we would probably say he was “on the spectrum.” He didn’t return to Australia until his retirement. Then, after receiving honours and visiting old friends, he jumped to his death at Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains in 1957.

Irving takes the mystery surrounding Childe’s death as his starting point. With no suicide note, and at the height of the cold war, friends like Bert and Mary Evatt wondered if he’d been pushed by people who thought he was a spy. Only years later was the mystery solved. Just before Childe took a taxi from the Carrington in Katoomba to the fatal cliff, he had sent a friend in England what was effectively a suicide note, to be opened ten years after his death.

The note was not a conventional account of a personal existential crisis so much as an argument for voluntary euthanasia. “The progress of medical science,” it began, “has burdened society with a horde of parasites — rentiers, pensioners, and other retired persons whom society has to support and even to nurse.” Venerable counsellors “hanging round the fringe of learned societies or university institutions can slow down progress and blast the careers of younger, innovative thinkers.” A sane society, he said, would offer euthanasia as a crowning honour.

In his own case, Childe wrote, his memory was starting to fail and he saw no prospect of settling the problems that interested him most on the available data. When his pension ran out, he would become a burden on society. “I have always intended to cease living before that happens… Life ends best when one is happy and strong.” As Irving writes, Childe wanted his friends to know “that in his chosen way of dying he was defiantly continuing his commitment to progressive and humanist values.”

Irving’s discussion of Childe’s experience of labour politics is densely researched and immensely detailed. It is a reminder of the intensity of the investment radicals once made in working-class politics, both in Childe’s time and again in the 1960s and 1970s when many of those studying labour history were also activists, using the mistakes and achievements of the past to inform present political action.

I wanted more in this book, though, about Childe’s archaeology — his methods and the sites he dug — and why he was so passionate about it. And I also wanted more straightforward accounts of his contribution to the discipline, not just the deep structures of his thinking but what he actually argued. When I finished the book I was still somewhat unsure why Childe was so important to archaeology.

As a labour historian, of course, Irving is more interested in Childe as a labour intellectual. He would likely say that Sally Green has already written the detailed story of Childe as a prehistorian, but The Fatal Lure of Politics is the only biography of Childe I am likely to read, and its subtitle meant that I was hoping to encounter that part of his life as well. •

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The initiative is the work of the self-styled Institute for Digital Archaeology, which promotes the arch as “an international symbol of resistance to extremist groups who seek to obliterate world history and heritage in favour of their own social, religious and cultural narratives.” Which immediately raises the question: is this costly and cumbersome gesture the best way to contribute to the eventual reconstruction of Syria’s ancient monuments?

The reconstructed arch’s first brush with fame came in April 2016 when it was unveiled in Trafalgar Square by no less a self-obsessed luminary than Boris Johnson, who was mayor of London at the time. The Financial Times put the cost of the initial exercise at £2.5 million (around A$4.5 million). For that sum, all the organisers got was a single-opening arch reproduced at one-third the scale of the original.

But the scaling down wasn’t the only shortcut involved in “reproducing” an arch that served as a focal point along Palmyra’s magnificent 1.2 kilometre colonnaded central street. The original arch was not a two-dimensional, single-opening facade, and certainly not a standalone “triumphal arch,” as proclaimed by the Institute for Digital Archaeology. Originally flanked by side passages opening through separate arches, the edge-shaped structure was designed to disguise a fifteen-degree bend in the great colonnaded axis. It was perhaps the most ingenious solution the Roman Empire ever devised to correct an embarrassing civic planning snafu.

Through most of the second century AD, work proceeded slowly on the axis the city had commissioned as the civic feature that most sizeable cities of the eastern regions of the Empire believed they needed. Decades later, with the project approaching the central zone — there to be lined with the most important honorific statues — its planners realised that it would, if not corrected, slice off a large part of the courtyard of the temple of one of Palmyra’s favourite deities, the Arab god Nabu. The solution was to bend its course while disguising the interruption in the majestic rows of columns by devising an arch, each of whose facades were angled according to the section of the road they faced.

Having decided that a scaled-down, trimmed and truncated arch was all they could manage, the arch’s modern proponents fed hundreds of pasted-together pre-conflict tourist snaps into a machine that produces 3D reconstructions. The arch would be reproduced in marble, ignoring the fact that the original was worked, like virtually all of Palmyra’s buildings, in the beautifully subtle honey-coloured limestone of the local Palmyrene quarries. (Marble is not found in Syria.) Extraordinarily, the builders opted for the prestigious stone from the Carrera area of Italy, the material of choice for ostentatious benchtops around the world. As the Carrera stone lacked the quiet subtlety of the Palmyra limestone, it was decided to dye it, though even then the digitally driven carving rather blurred the fine detail of the original, making it look like it had been made out of plasticine.

Islamic State, whose contribution to the destruction of many of Syria’s ancient or Islamic monuments, including the arch, received saturation media coverage, is now largely driven out of Syria. Its destructive path in Palmyra was one of the most notable acts of mindless destruction in the Syrian conflict — though it barely reached the benchmark already established in 2014 by the nihilism of Islamic Front, an al Qaeda offshoot, whose tunnel bombing in Aleppo sucked numerous Islamic monuments into deep moon-like craters.

It is remarkable that outsiders have not focused on how this group received its funding and shipped in the explosives needed for its six-month campaign of destruction across the historic centre of Aleppo. (The answer would need to be sought in the deep pockets of various Gulf interest groups anxious to advance the cause of Wahabi interpretations of Islam.) Islamic Front, of course, had a less slick propaganda arm to advertise its exploits, and by late 2014 the carnage visited on eastern Aleppo’s population was rightly attracting most media attention.

Well-meaning efforts to keep alive concerns about the fate of Syria’s monuments are not to be scorned, of course. But it seems right to raise questions about whether now is the time to spend large sums outside Syria for exercises such as the Palmyra Arch campaign. Reconstruction should be done only when the conditions for reconstruction are right, and should be part of a program that involves the regeneration of Syria’s devastated cities as a whole.

Reconstructions can aid in the creation of employment and use the skills that Syrians have applied over many decades in caring for and restoring their heritage. Before 2011, Syria still had access to most of the quarries that provided the ancient stone. All modern buildings in the centre of its major cities are required by law, for prestige reasons, to use stone for their facades, thus preserving the skilled labour force of centuries that in most other countries around the world is only an exotic throwback.

Decisions on reconstruction in Syria are held up by the sanctions against the Assad government. This shouldn’t mean that Western organisations resort to merely hand-wringing, though, or unnecessarily expensive exercises like the Palmyra reproduction, which risks discouraging interest in the real thing by removing it from its context, and seems a dubious use of funds in any case. It would be better to put the resources aside until reconstruction can be launched as part of a program to assist, even in a modest way, in Syria’s rebuilding. •

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I am here on the trail of the archaeologist Isabel McBryde, who roamed the landscape of northern New South Wales in the 1960s in search of rock art and ceremonial grounds, scarred trees and surface scatters, middens and massacre sites, rock shelters and quarries. “We aim at a complete, systematic and objective record of all archaeological features in an area,” McBryde wrote of her survey team in 1962, “not only the most spectacular.” Her study area extended from the high plateau country of the tablelands, which slopes gently to the black soil plains of the Darling Basin, to the broad rivers of the subtropical coastal valleys in northern New South Wales. Sites on the escarpment, such as Point Lookout, marked the divide between these dramatically different environmental zones. Through her survey, she sought to discern the cultural implications of these varying climates and environments: she yearned to understand the personality of New England.

But as I make my way through the undergrowth on this cool, damp May morning, I am haunted by the words of the great Australian poet Judith Wright, who came here often as a child. She lived on the tablelands and camped at Point Lookout with her father, as he had with his mother. She remembered being mesmerised by the splendour of the cliffs, the mystery of the thickly forested valley and the “the great blue sweep of the view from the Point to the sea.” But she saw a darkness here, too. To the north of Point Lookout, jutting out from the plateau and dropping in sheer cliffs into the thick rainforest below, is a place once known as Darkie Point. Wright’s father told her the story of how it got its name: how, “long ago,” a group of Aboriginal people were driven over those cliffs by white settlers as reprisal for spearing cattle. Their sickening plunge was inscribed with Gothic flair in one of Wright’s early poems, “Nigger’s Leap, New England” (1945). The story was later revealed to be an “abstracted and ahistoricised” account of a documented event.

Through her poetry, and especially in her later histories, Wright sought to confront the violence in Australian settler history and to reimagine it through the eyes of the first Australians. Her words breathed sorrow and compassion into the early encounters between settlers and Indigenous people, evoking the tragedy of the Australian frontier. Her love of the New England highlands was bound to a creeping uneasiness about its past. She lived in “haunted country.” In another early poem, “Bora Ring” (1946), she mourned the passing of a dynamic world:

The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.       

In seeking out such stories, Wright was fighting against what anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described in 1938 as “a mass of solid indifference” in Australian culture to Indigenous Australia. In his 1968 ABC Boyer Lectures, Stanner coined the phrase “the great Australian silence” to describe the phenomenon, which could not be explained by mere “absent-mindedness”:

It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned into habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness on a national scale.

The silence to which he referred was largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century, rather than colonial Australia. And its mist was clearing by the time he spoke those words. Despite a tempestuous and harrowing history, Aboriginal people had survived the invasion, and they were making their voices heard. The fog was lifting from Darkie Point.

When Isabel McBryde came to New England in 1960, she expected to encounter the haunted landscape of Wright’s early poems: a land stripped from its first inhabitants, their culture and tradition “splintered underground.” She had been led to believe that her study would be a “matter of archaeology and the distant past.” But as she searched for traces of Aboriginal culture in the landscape of New England, her views began to change. She found a series of stone arrangements to the southwest of Point Lookout, near the Serpentine River, and recorded the cairns, walls and standing stones that protruded from the steadily encroaching bush. Across the tablelands she found carved trees and surface scatters; she mapped axe quarries on the ridgelines and excavated campsites under towering granite boulders; she recorded ancient middens on the coastal plains and wandered through old bora grounds in the river valleys. She formed relationships with locals, absorbing their intimate knowledge of the history and traditions of the country, and worked with landholders, teachers, historians, field naturalists and Indigenous people.

“The great blue sweep”: the view from Point Lookout towards what used to be called Darkie Point. Billy Griffiths

And as she surveyed this vast region, and imbibed the lore of the land, she stopped thinking of the Aboriginal past as “a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot” and started seeing it as a living heritage, maintained through powerful connections to country, “preserved faithfully by a small community” and “now the focus of a revival of interest in traditional culture and values.”

This quiet revelation, experienced by many researchers throughout the 1960s, would forever alter the course of Australian Aboriginal archaeology. As McBryde reflected in 2004, “It gave a whole new dimension [to the field] and also made new demands” — no longer were academic priorities the only priorities. Archaeologists were compelled to be cultural scholars as well as researchers, and they were faced with a conflict of obligations: “your obligation to investigate and record and your obligation to respect the wishes of the members of the creating culture.” The story of Australian archaeology — and Isabel McBryde’s career — is inextricably entwined with that seismic shift in Australian historical consciousness.

Isabel McBryde is an enigmatic character in Australian archaeology. She is at once conservative and radical, gentle and passionate, modest and visionary. She has quietly, patiently transformed the way we relate to the Aboriginal history of Australia. One of her students, Sharon Sullivan, described her as “a real lady”: “kind,” “courteous” and “thorough,” with a “powerful intellect” and a “steel-edged, or should I say stone-edged view, of what is ‘proper.’” Her conservative demeanour belied her innovative and often subversive ideas and practices, and the significance of her early contributions to Australian archaeology remains understated. If John Mulvaney is the so-called father of Australian archaeology (a term with which he was uncomfortable), then McBryde is undoubtedly its mother.

McBryde had no direct contact with Aboriginal people as a child. She grew up in a seafaring family and moved constantly, living in Fremantle, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne before the age of nine. She was used to her father, a merchant seaman from Scotland, being away at sea, and she took great comfort in his steady stream of letters. She and her older sister were cared for by their mother, who had worked as a secretary before her marriage. Occasionally her mother talked of the Aboriginal people she had known when she lived in Kalgoorlie, but, for the most part, the not-too-distant past was obscured. “Why,” McBryde reflected in her seventies, “didn’t I pick up that dissonance in the reporting of Australian history?” Her experience of growing up in white, middle-class Australia in the 1930s and 40s speaks to the heart of “the great Australian silence” that Stanner described in 1968. Even the most socially aware Australians were subject to the structures that marginalised Indigenous Australians.

McBryde recalled a childhood of writing and reading poetry, practising the violin and “devouring” books on the train as she commuted to school. She developed a fascination with the classical world at an early age, especially ancient Rome, and when she matriculated in 1952, she enrolled in Latin and history at Melbourne University. Like Mulvaney, she envisaged a career in school teaching and, also like Mulvaney, her first glimpse of another career path came under the tutelage of the historian John O’Brien. In his lectures on the classical world, delivered in a precise, even style, he urged his students to query accepted wisdom — to return to the primary sources and develop their own interpretations of the past. It was an empowering approach and it encouraged an inquisitive eye and a broad understanding of the range of historical evidence available. McBryde wrote her honours thesis on the Roman poet Lucan, who raised questions of liberty and power in his epic on civil war before falling foul of his friend, the mad emperor Nero; she pursued similar themes in her master’s thesis on expressions of resistance to the Roman government at the end of the first century. Spurred on by her passion for the ancient world and the encouragement of her teachers, McBryde decided to pursue a career in the academy.

When she graduated in 1957, the possibility of a career in archaeology seemed no more than a dream. As curator Frederick McCarthy put it drily in 1959, archaeology remained “a non-career course” in Australia: there were no jobs in the universities, no funds to finance excavations and no institutional support for the lone researcher. But McBryde had heard of Mulvaney’s work at Fromm’s Landing in South Australia, and as enamoured as she was of the classical world, she could see the importance of his pursuit of Australia’s ancient past. Australian archaeology, she decided, would be “more worthwhile and realistic than classical archaeology.” But the only way to study prehistoric archaeology was to travel abroad, and all the scholarships of the day were designated for “young men.” She would have to pay her own way. She lectured in ancient history at the University of New England for six months in 1958 and then, with the support of her parents, sailed to the United Kingdom.

She found Grahame Clark’s ecological approach, which combined documentary and environmental evidence, “eminently translatable” to the Australian context.

Cambridge University seemed an obvious choice. It had a strong archaeology department under the guidance of Grahame Clark, and postgraduates had the privilege of small classes, fieldwork opportunities and ready access to leading intellectuals. Clark’s interest in world prehistory made Cambridge especially attractive. His desire to fill in the gaps of global knowledge — to gain an outline of the diverse “cultural endowment of mankind” — led him to encourage and facilitate research abroad and to equip his students with the expertise necessary to pioneer a new field. In his office he had a map of the world covered in colourful pins, a physical manifestation of his vision for Cambridge’s international role. Each pin represented an archaeologist from the Cambridge diaspora, from Louis Leakey’s groundbreaking excavations in Kenya and the Rift Valley to Jack Golson’s pioneering efforts in New Zealand. When McBryde arrived in 1958, a lone pin pierced the heart of Melbourne, representing John Mulvaney’s Australian contribution to the “Cambridge archaeological empire.”

The archaeology and anthropology department was located in a gloomy Edwardian building in Downing Street that also housed the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Lectures were held in an uncomfortable theatre alongside cabinets filled with antiquities from all parts of the world. But the department had a “compelling atmosphere” and McBryde found her time there to be “intellectually, very, very stimulating.” These were the heady postwar years and she recalls feeling an exciting sense of possibility about what could be achieved. Many of the major discoveries in European and British prehistory had been made in McBryde’s lifetime. As Golson reflected, “The discipline to which we had apprenticed ourselves was young and the opportunities it offered seemed limitless.” And the value of archaeology at Cambridge was undisputed. Clark described it as being “as necessary to civilised man as bread itself.”

The Cambridge model of archaeology was dominated by the methods and principles of Mortimer Wheeler, who emphasised the importance of systematic, stratified excavation, while other forms of archaeology were considered to be, in McBryde’s words, “the province of the non-digging amateur.” McBryde was initiated into this tradition during excavations at an Iron Age farmstead and two Roman forts on Hadrian’s Wall. But she was also drawn to another strain of archaeological thought. She found Clark’s ecological approach, which combined documentary and environmental evidence, “eminently translatable” to the Australian context. And she was intrigued by the work of O.G.S. Crawford and Cyril Fox, who viewed an entire landscape as an archaeological site: “The history of the part,” Crawford argued, “cannot be divorced entirely from the history of the whole.”

By studying a region, not simply a site, and by focusing on interactions between people and land, Crawford was able to read the English countryside in a new light, finding Roman roads and Celtic fields, barrows and quern quarries, megalithic monuments and medieval castle mounds. “The surface of England is a palimpsest,” he wrote in 1953, “a document that has been written on and erased over and over again; and it is the business of the field archaeologist to decipher it.” His method was to look for patterns in the landscape, to study maps and aerial photography, paying particular attention to topography, and then to walk the country, searching for the cultural in the natural. This was his primary source. Secondary sources, such as local histories or seeking out “the old-time local antiquary” were useful, but walking, he believed, was “preferable to talking.” Cyril Fox took a similar approach. He sought to understand the “personality of Britain”: how the nature of the landscape had affected “the distribution and fates of her inhabitants and her invaders.”

McBryde gained firsthand experience of these geographically oriented methods in the last few months of 1959, when she took a scholarship to work in the British School of Archaeology in Athens. There she studied sites across a whole landscape, asking why they were where they were and what connections they had with other sites, and exploring the relationships between history and landscape. It was a fusion of two of her longest-held passions, classics and geography. It was also her introduction to understanding the sacred and the mythic in landscape.

Isabel McBryde’s return to Australia in 1959, after a year abroad, doubled the number of professionally trained Australian archaeologists. She dived immediately into fieldwork, joining John Mulvaney in excavating rock shelters at Glen Aire, Cape Otway, in January 1960. By that stage, Mulvaney already had a vision of the key questions in Australian archaeology. The best way to approach them, he believed, was though careful, systematic excavation of deep stratified sites: “The cornerstone of prehistory is stratigraphy, and in this pioneering phase of Australian research, precedence must be given to the spade (or preferably the trowel).”

In her new role as lecturer in prehistory and ancient history at the University of New England, McBryde began to articulate a different vision. Echoing Crawford, she argued that regional field surveys, in combination with stratigraphic excavation, should form the backbone of any archaeological program. Her head of department, historian Mick Williams, shared her regional vision and had already established connections with local historical societies and field naturalists. McBryde was the first female lecturer in the Department of History, and she was alone among her colleagues in using material culture as a historical source. When introduced as an “archaeologist,” she was often asked by those outside the university: “What is there for you to do here?” She sensed the same question on the lips of her colleagues.

“Nerve and nous”: Isabel McBryde and University of New England students at Schnapper Point on the north coast of New South Wales. Courtesy of Isabel McBryde

Because of the lack of awareness of Indigenous history, she devoted much of her time to community outreach. She advertised the potential of the field, giving public talks at schools and regional societies across northern New South Wales and introducing concepts such as “antiquity” and “cultural change” to lay understandings of Aboriginal Australia. Through these talks, and in an early film on archaeological techniques, she joined Mulvaney’s attempts to rein in the persistent culture of surface collecting and educate the broader public on the importance of protecting Aboriginal sites: “Occupation sites in Australia (middens, rock shelters and open stations) are not so numerous that we can afford to be prodigal with them, to allow them to be destroyed… to be dug carelessly by treasure-hunters whose sole interest is the collection of curious relics for the family mantelpiece.”

These public meetings also allowed her to conduct valuable research. Unlike Crawford, McBryde prioritised talking alongside walking. She sought out and interviewed members of the local Aboriginal communities on the tablelands and the coastal plains, and fostered interest and involvement among locals with the belief that a conversation over a cup of tea could yield as much historical insight as a week in the field. In the Clarence Valley especially, McBryde formed connections with Bundjalung people who maintained a strong sense of cultural continuity despite the ravages of dispossession. Over time, her views on site protection became more inclusive: “If we argue for conservation of sites, for protective legislation, and acknowledge the very real concerns of the Aboriginal people, then we should also argue for Aboriginal involvement in decisions of site management, on conservation policy and on research.” If the deep past was a living heritage, then engaging with Indigenous communities, and making the insights of archaeology accessible to them, seemed to be fundamental to any research program:

Unless archaeology, in the present, addresses social questions, unless it is “peopled” archaeology, its representations will lack dimensions of meaning as pasts, as history. If it fails to interact with other groups within society, it is not accessible to their poetics, it denies to them aspects of their past.

The landscape of northern New South Wales lent itself to field survey. The thin soils of the tablelands meant that deep, layered sites were few and far between, while the coastal plains were dominated by recent shell middens: the cultural artefacts, in archaeologist Sandra Bowdler’s words, of “the unremitting efforts of woman the gatherer.” But McBryde was also eager to establish a regional chronology and she searched for older, stratified sites, where evidence of human occupation had built up over millennia. On her initial survey in February 1960 she came across a series of overhangs in a low outcrop overlooking the Clarence River at Seelands near Grafton. The sandstone walls bore clusters of cryptic engravings, the roof of the main shelter was stained by smoke and animal bones, shell fragments and debris from tool-making lay scattered on the sloping sandy floor. She returned to Seelands to excavate in August, and again the next year, uncovering a dynamic history of occupation over the past 6000 years. She also continued to survey the surrounding area, finding axe-grinding grooves and rock art nearby, and collecting the stories and stone tools amassed by the landowner, Mr O’Grady, during his time in the area.

In this slow, thorough way she progressed across the coastal plains, excavating middens, recording rock art, and mapping stone working sites at Evans Head, Station Creek and Moonee, before taking the survey onto the tablelands and western slopes, where she dug sites at Bendemeer, Graman and Moore Creek. She could be ambitious about the scope of the study because she intended it to be an open-ended, collaborative departmental program. A year in she took it on as her PhD under the supervision of John Mulvaney and Russel Ward.

Excavation and survey work took place during university vacations and on weekends. McBryde relied on her students and her colleagues (especially Mary Neeley) as field assistants, and marvelled at their intellectual and physical ability: “They could drive trucks, mend fences and dissuade curious bulls from exploring the trenches… All this, of course, provided there was a transistor radio between the sieves and the trenches so no one missed an episode of [American soap opera] ‘Portia faces life.’” McBryde gained a reputation among her students for her warmth and kindness, as well as her “nerve and nous.” She was hands-on and hardworking, with the uncanny ability to emerge from a day in a dusty trench, in Sharon Sullivan’s words, “clean, well-groomed, with lippy in place and radiating energy and goodwill.”

Her field notebooks are similarly immaculate, with detailed observations and ideas executed in impeccable handwriting. She was organised, precise and thorough, and she understood that good food was essential to the success of any fieldwork. She purchased a Rice Bros horse float and refitted it as a mobile field lab with a sink, a stove, a cupboard, a drawing board, water tanks and material to transform it into a darkroom for developing photos. It became known as “the soup kitchen” and she towed it along the small, winding New England roads behind her Land Rover, “Telemachus.” She called on a colleague, Professor Ian Turner, to look up the rations for the British army in Mesopotamia in the first world war, and used that as a catering guide for fieldwork.

Alongside the field survey, McBryde and her students pored over regional historical records, analysed early photographs and trawled through word lists for insights into Aboriginal culture and traditions. She was haunted by the collision of cultures captured in the colonial archive and later wrote about some of the witnesses to this transformative period, such as early anthropologist Mary Bundock and photographers John William Lindt and Thomas Dick. As she reflected in 1978, “It seemed unwise when attempting to reconstruct culture history to ignore the evidence of observers of tribal life at the time of its passing, in the last few decades of its prehistory.” While she found such documentary sources illuminating, she also acknowledged their limitations as a lens through which to view the deep past: “The ethnographic present may always haunt the archaeologist in this continent, both inspiring and constraining interpretation.”

What emerged from her study was a clear, cultural distinction between the societies that lived in the coastal river valleys and those that roamed the tablelands and western slopes over the last 9000 years. The differences in rock art, ethnography and artefact groupings — or “assemblages” — underlined the isolation of the two cultural groups, with the steep escarpment of the plateau and the poor high country of the tablelands acting as a “barrier” between them. It showed that while Australia may be a continent, it is made up of many countries.

Yet despite this barrier, McBryde found some rare raw materials — such as axes made from andesitic greywacke — scattered across the whole region. Along with geologist Ray Binns, she investigated the origin, distribution and composition — or petrology — of these stone axes, and together they unravelled a remarkable map of how people had moved and traded across the landscape over several thousands of years. They were able to trace, for example, greywacke stone axes found in excavations at Graman in northern New South Wales to a large axe quarry 200 kilometres away on Mount Daruka, Moore Creek, where greywacke lies cracked in heaps along the ridgeline in sight of Tamworth. McBryde’s breakthrough was to view these trade routes as more than “purely mechanisms for the distribution of raw rare materials.” By considering the social and ceremonial aspects of the stone axe trade, and the “ritual cycles of exchange,” she could glimpse webs of connections and interactions, past social affinities and mythology. She had found the shadow of a complex system of exchange that was intimately entwined with the symbolic construction of the landscape.

“Nobody,” Mulvaney reflected in 2005, “had previously traced and explained the dynamics and social determinants of exchange networks using science, linguistics, anthropology and ethnohistory.” It was groundbreaking international work, coming alongside Colin Renfrew’s famous study of obsidian networks in the Aegean, and it emphasised the magnitude of the insights that could emerge from the minutiae of local, regional research. McBryde later continued her work with axes at Mount William quarry in Victoria, where she mapped a great network of exchange that saw greenstone axes travelling over 1000 kilometres across southeastern Australia.

The significance of such vast, sprawling “chains of connection” cannot be overstated. “In theory,” Mulvaney mused, “it was possible for a man who had brought pituri from the Mulligan River and ochre from Parachilna to own a Cloncurry axe, a Boulia boomerang and wear shell pendants from Carpentaria and Kimberley.” These exchange networks brought to the fore the intimate knowledge Aboriginal people have of the land and its resources, and the interconnectedness of their societies across the continent. They also provided an archaeological signature for an oral phenomenon: the travels of ancestral beings in the Dreaming, and the epic songs they left in their wake.

By the time McBryde finished her thesis in 1966, archaeological investigations were being carried out in every Australian state and Aboriginal archaeology was being taught as a university subject in Melbourne, Armidale, Sydney and Brisbane. “Miss McBryde’s vigorous one-woman band” was gradually gaining the attention of this growing archaeological community. As Mulvaney announced in 1964, “I feel that the model for us to follow is provided by Miss McBryde’s patient survey and record of all aspects of New England prehistory.”

But although Mulvaney and Jack Golson fostered a strong program of regional research at the ANU, McBryde lamented that most archaeology in Australia continued to be “based on the evidence of a small number of excavated sites, widely separated in both space and time.” Why, we must wonder, did large-scale regional surveys not take on in Australia, considering the insights into land use that McBryde had demonstrated with her work on New England? The changing political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s had a part to play. With the dramatic shift in control that followed the rise of the Aboriginal land rights movement, archaeologists faced new challenges negotiating access to sites on Aboriginal land, let alone surveying large swathes of country.

Gender was also undoubtedly a factor. Although men also mapped landscapes and women led grand stratified excavations, these activities carried gendered assumptions, attitudes and behaviours, which changed the way they were valued. There was little prestige in survey work, while the search for the oldest and most spectacular finds was caught up in the machismo of “cowboy archaeology.” Sylvia Hallam, another pioneer of the regional model, raised this point in 1982 when reviewing Josephine Flood’s survey of the southeastern highlands. “Are only women sufficiently tough, conscientious and foolhardy to collect and analyse such a mass of trivia, and hammer it into meaning and shape?” she wryly asked.

In 1974 McBryde moved to the ANU, where she became increasingly concerned with promoting an inclusive approach to Indigenous heritage. She saw an urgent need to empower Aboriginal people to tell their own stories and to create mechanisms through which they could control their own heritage. Through her roles on the Australian Heritage Commission, the World Heritage Committee and the UNESCO advisory body, she argued for legislation that recognised the significance of whole landscapes, the inseparability of natural and cultural heritage and the intangible values of connections to country. This advocacy has had a profound role in shaping Australian and world heritage conservation practice. McBryde’s proudest achievement, however, is the number of Aboriginal students she has helped become archaeologists.

In 1991 McBryde returned to New England and walked the land as she once had done. She revisited familiar places on the tablelands and across the coastal plains, and met and talked with residents, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. As she moved across the landscape, wandering through rich subtropical valleys and densely forested steep terrain, she was followed by a story. Helpful locals told her of a woman who had come to look at the archaeology in the region long, long ago, “maybe last century.” She gradually identified the woman as herself. Her work had merged in local memory with that of another pioneer: nineteenth-century anthropologist Mary Bundock. She had entered the lore of the land.

McBryde first encountered Bundock’s name in 1968 while trawling through the Australian ethnographic collection at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden: “With intense excitement I began to realise, working through registers and cabinets, that its collection included a comprehensive regional group of artefacts from my own research area of north-eastern New South Wales.” The carefully documented artefacts, donated to the museum between 1885 and 1892, led her to their collector, the little-known Mary Bundock. Information about Bundock’s life was sparse, yet McBryde was intrigued by one surviving fragment of her writing: an eleven-page document titled “Notes on the Richmond River Blacks.”

Bundock’s ethnographic notes bore the stamp of someone who had formed close bonds with the Indigenous community on the upper Richmond River and had a knowledge of the local dialect of Bundjalung. “The Aborigines in her account are people,” McBryde noted, “not exemplars of a stage of human existence long past in the civilised European world.” She also detected in the modest, non-judgemental observations what she described as “an inheritance of concern”: “a response to the challenges of living on the pastoral frontier, of facing the responsibility of being dispossessors.” That same inheritance has shaped McBryde’s life and values; it underwrites the inclusive, social approach to archaeology she has advocated since the 1960s. Her routes across the landscape linger today, sustained in fragments of text and memory, casting light upon the shadows of a haunted country. ●

This is an extract from Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, published this month by Black Inc., and full references are provided there.

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Dating the earliest human occupation at 65,000 years ago is a dramatic step, and it throws up questions that are not easily resolved. But it is not, as one journalist declared last week, “so old it [will] rewrite everything about the continent’s human history”; nor is it, as dozens of reports have asserted in their headlines, “evidence of Aboriginal habitation up to 80,000 years ago.” Such overstatements come from an unhelpful view that older is better; they diminish the site by emphasising numbers and dates rather than the deep and dynamic history they reveal.

The site at the heart of the latest finds, Madjedbebe (formerly Malakunanja II), has been part of archaeological conversations for over forty years. It is no more than a slight overhang: a decorated rock wall leaning out from the Arnhem Land escarpment, the last reach of the plateau before the landscape gives way to wet, scrubby plains. It lies on the lands of the Mirarr people, who were supportive of the archaeological work on their country. Through the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, the Mirarr held the right of veto over all aspects of the work and were involved in the excavation through a process of constant and respectful communication. As David Vadiveloo, a lawyer, film-maker and consultant to the corporation, put it: “the Mirarr did not want this to be a project about them, they wanted this to be a project that was in partnership with them.”

Madjedbebe was first excavated in 1973 during research for the Alligator Rivers Environmental Fact-Finding Study, a wide-ranging report that provided the case for the declaration of Kakadu National Park. Bill William Miyarki guided the young archaeologist Johan Kamminga to the rock shelter and, equipped with a trowel, ash shovel and brush, Kamminga dug a small test pit, to a depth of 268 centimetres, against the rock face. The deposit was rich with stone, shell and bone, and a carbon sample collected above the level of the lowest artefact led him to conclude that “the earliest occupation at [Madjedbebe] is therefore likely to be in excess of 18,000 years.” It was one of a series of Pleistocene sites identified along the Arnhem Land escarpment in the 1960s and 1970s, and there were many, including Rhys Jones, who believed the region might hold the key to dating the arrival of the first Australians.

By the time Madjedbebe was next excavated, in 1989, the time horizon for Australian archaeology had been pushed back to 37,000–40,000 years, but that was where it plateaued. Jones thought it was no coincidence that the oldest dates all clustered around the time when the material required for dating — the radioactive isotope carbon-14 — had almost completely decayed. He suspected that the oldest dates “were so close to the theoretical limits of the radiocarbon methods that maybe the ‘plateau’ was really an illusion.”

In an attempt to break through the radiocarbon barrier, Jones teamed up with geochronologist Bert Roberts and archaeologist Mike Smith to date a few known sites with the relatively new techniques of thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which could date quartz grains from a few hundred years old to several hundred thousand years old. They returned to Madjedbebe and, under the watchful eye of Gagudju elder Big Bill Neidjie, dug a narrow “telephone booth” shaft, four-and-a-half metres straight into the earth.

The findings from the 1989 dig, published in Nature, suggested that people had been living in Australia for 55,000 years, plus or minus 5000. Jones often spoke of a human antiquity in Australia of 60,000 years. He revelled in the fact that this was 20,000 years earlier than any modern human site in Europe: it “really caused people to raise their eyebrows.” The news made headlines around the world and a commendation was passed in the Australian Senate noting, “with interest, the discovery of Dr Rhys Jones of the Australian National University, and his team, of art and artefacts in the Malakunanja II [Madjedbebe] rock shelter in Kakadu that have been dated as at least 60,000 years old.”

Archaeologist Mike Smith draws stratigraphy during the 1989 excavations at Madjedbebe (Malakunanja II), Arnhem Land. Courtesy of Mike Smith

But the archaeological community remained sceptical. Some criticised the work for the use of the relatively new method of luminescence dating; some for the fact that the 1989 dig was never written up with a full site report. Others questioned whether the artefacts at the lowest levels had been pushed down over time by termite activity or “human treadage.” Although another site excavated in the region, Nauwalabila, was published in 1994 with dates 53,000–60,000 years old, both sites were contested and their ages dismissed as outliers.

The rejection of the significantly older dates from Madjedbebe and Nauwalabila reflects archaeologists’ caution about accepting dates that are outside the general pattern of the oldest sites. In 1998, archaeologists Jim Allen and Jim O’Connell reviewed the evidence for early dates in Australia and concluded that “initial occupation dates to about 40,000 radiocarbon years ago.” In 2004, they pushed this date back a few thousand years, writing that “while the continent was probably occupied by 42–45,000 BP [Before Present], earlier arrival dates are not well-supported.” In 2014, they reviewed new claims and again updated their estimate, concluding that “the first humans arrived in Sahul shortly after 50 ka [thousand years ago] — on current evidence not earlier than 47–48 ka.” The incremental shifts from 40,000 to 42,000 to 45,000 to 48,000 led anthropologist William F. Keegan to remark wryly, “Archaeologists seem to face far more complications in making the crossing to Sahul than the people who accomplished this feat about fifty [thousand years ago].”

In 2012 and 2015, a team of archaeologists embarked on new excavations at Madjedbebe with the hope of resolving the lingering questions about the antiquity of the site. I joined the team as camp manager and cook. As well as subjecting the site to rigorous dating tests, my companions conducted a series of tests to verify its structural integrity and better understand the natural processes by which it had formed. By opening a larger area of the site, not just a small shaft, they were also able to gain a more nuanced picture of the archaeology at its deepest levels. The leader of the excavation, Chris Clarkson, was eager to see if he could discern a pattern in the lowest layers that might illuminate the technology of the first colonisers of Australia.

In the new Nature paper, the large interdisciplinary team carefully and systematically address the earlier criticisms of Madjedbebe, present an account of their remarkable technological discoveries and, through an exhaustive dating process, push back the baseline date for human occupation to 65,000 years. It is significant that many who were critics of the 1989 excavation, and who were not involved in the recent study, have spoken publicly of the robustness of the find. “This is the earliest reliable date for human occupation in Australia,” Peter Hiscock, the Tom Austen Brown Professor of Australian Archaeology at the University of Sydney wrote to one reporter: “This is indeed a marvellous step forward in our exploration of the human past in Australia.”

So what do we do with an outlier that refuses to be dismissed? Madjedbebe’s 65,000-year story allows us to calibrate the epic journey of our ancestors, homo sapiens, out of Africa. The colonisation of Australia was no small feat. It required the traverse of a passage of water around one hundred kilometres wide to a land where no hominid had roamed before. Based on the array of technical, symbolic and linguistic capabilities it required, psychologist–archaeologist duo William Noble and Iain Davidson have argued that “archaeologically, this is the earliest evidence of modern human behaviour.” Thus, the endless debates surrounding when modern humans emerged from Africa and spread around the world ultimately come to rest on when people arrived at the southernmost extremity of their migration. Madjedbebe becomes the key date.

The antiquity of the site also thrusts it into the longstanding debate over the fate of the giant marsupials and reptiles known as the “megafauna,” which, according to a large-scale dating effort in 2001, died out in a continental extinction around 46,000 years ago. Talking to the media this week, Clarkson was emphatic: “It puts to bed the whole idea that humans wiped them out. We’re talking 20,000 to 25,000 years of coexistence.”

But it is important to stress that the history uncovered at Madjedbebe enriches, rather than eclipses, archaeological understandings of other regions. The new, older date doesn’t necessarily destabilise the strong pattern of settlement that has been established by archaeologists across Australia from 50,000 years ago; rather, it reveals how little we know about the 15,000 years that preceded it. Around 65,000 years ago, the first Australians were probably swept to the Sahul Rise: a low-lying, fan-like formation of skeletal limestone, riddled with tidal channels. The landing site, along with many signs of early occupation, now lies submerged on the Arafura Sea shelf. It is only though the lowest layers at Madjedbebe, at the margins of this vast inundated region, that we can glimpse the earliest chapter of Australia’s human history. “It’s not exactly Atlantis,” Mike Smith and Chris Clarkson remarked to me, “but it’s pretty bloody close.”

The full implications of the latest findings from Madjedbebe will take time to absorb. But let us not be dazzled by old dates — nor become numb to their power. Madjedbebe’s 65,000-year story adds to a remarkable Indigenous history of transformation, resilience and diversity. •

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In November last year, a repatriation group of Indigenous representatives took the first step towards Mungo Man’s return. The 40,000-year-old human remains, along with the more fragmentary remains of some ninety other individuals from the Willandra Lakes area, were transferred from the Australian National University to the interim storage of the National Museum of Australia. After years of frustration, the traditional owners of the Willandra Lakes area – the Mutthi Mutthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantji tribal groups – reluctantly decreed that unless appropriate keeping arrangements were made by the end of 2017, they will dispose of all Willandra remains, with the possibility of complete reburial. The possibility that the remains of Mungo Man may not be laid in a formal place – an underground sacred crypt with above-ground recognition of the dead, perhaps, in memory of deceased Elders and of those thousands who fought in defence of their lands – should stir the nation’s conscience.

Mungo Man is acknowledged worldwide as the centrepiece of our evidence of ancient Australia. He has featured in documentaries, novels, histories and scientific papers, and he has given us an insight into life in ancient Australia through paleopathology, DNA analyses, and studies of isotopic bone and teeth structures. Moreover, the ritual nature of his burial has changed our understanding of the time-depth and complexity of Aboriginal culture. The body was coated (or heavily sprinkled) with rare ceremonial ochre – the blood-red symbol of life – which had been imported from distant sources. His grave was associated with a nearby hearth, from which smoke might have drifted over the assembled mourners on the lakeshore. The discovery stands without equal on the global stage. Politicians who frequently claim occupancy with members “of the world’s oldest continuing cultures” are denying a keeping place to the very person who provided the historical substance of that claim. The Australian nation awaits his return home.

In Mungo Man, the interaction of climate and people come together. The cultural implications of his burial reflect complex relationships with his environment. The central function of ochre, the association with fire, and the careful details of the grave emplacement combine to define a community with connections to the land they loved. Such evidence resonates with Aboriginal connections to country today. There is great dignity here in that people–land relationship. Exemplified today in the Dreaming, song lines and creation stories, it remains of central importance in helping define traditional people’s identity with and connection to the place they call home. White Australians have something important to learn from our Aboriginal cousins.

Stan Grant’s passionate reminder of our shameful treatment of Aboriginal Australians, and subsequent discussions of our national identity have touched new sensitivities in the fraught relationships between Aboriginal and white Australia. Two centuries of failure to acknowledge the magnitude and pain of dispossession have come back to confront us. The neglect of the human remains of Australia’s oldest identity, Mungo Man, adds yet another dark stain to our relationships with the first Australians. We now must seek new opportunities to restore fractured bonds, to help heal at least part of the pain inflicted on the original occupants of this land.

This year marks the centenary year of the Somme and we honour the memory of those who died on the Western Front during the first world war. It is where my father spent two harrowing years navigating duckboards and dodging shell holes in Amiens and Villers-Bretonneux. A century later, the deaths of the tens of thousands of Aboriginal men and women who died in defence of their land await their memorial occasion. The continued absence of facilities in memory of Mungo Man and all he represents pales against the $100 million Villers-Bretonneux Educational Centre Tony Abbott unveiled last year. While the honouring of our war dead is essential, what is sacred in France demands equality at home.

Unless immediate steps are taken to ensure adequate accommodation for sacred items that amplify and help define the meaning of human occupation of this continent, the iconic figure of Mungo Man could be lost forever. We have but eighteen months to ensure safe passage. The repatriation process needs realistic funding and a discretionary commitment to World Heritage management to ensure it takes place. Without state and federal assistance, the Indigenous repatriation group will be forced to rebury the remains of Mungo Man instead of preserving them for future generations in a sacred keeping place.

We are dealing here not just with an assemblage of ancient bones, but with the dignity and cultural richness of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. As a nation, we need to seize this opportunity to release Mungo Man from his custody. The return and celebration of Mungo Man will set us on a course to heal those bleeding wounds Stan Grant so eloquently defined. It is an act of recognition to Indigenous Australians of the nation’s debt to their ancestral history. •

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The most prominent campaign to place ancient Egypt at the centre of world history was led by a distinguished Australian-born scientist who turned to writing popular histories on the eve of the first world war. For a quarter-century from 1911, Grafton Elliot Smith, supported by his protégé W.J. Perry and others, argued the Egyptocentric case to a receptive audience, especially in Britain, despite strong opposition from specialists in Egyptology, archaeology and social anthropology, who dismissed his ideas as illusory.

Sir Grafton Elliot Smith FRS (1871–1937) was an academic anatomist, respected teacher, and expert on the mammalian (and especially primate) brain. He was considered the world’s greatest comparative neurologist, and inspired a generation of researchers in anatomy and physical anthropology. He is also credited with transforming the way anatomy was taught in British universities between the first and second world wars. As a professor of anatomy for twenty-eight years (at Cairo, Manchester and University College London) he was also involved in the description and interpretation of human remains found by archaeologists, including fossil hominids and Egyptian mummies.

Unfortunately Elliot Smith also developed the obsessional personal sideline for which he became well known to the public but is remembered with disfavour by archaeologists and historians. Archaeologist Timothy Champion called it “an embarrassing episode in the history of the discipline”; historian Glyn Daniel asked sharply, “Why does the world tolerate this academic rubbish?”

According to Elliot Smith’s theory, which Daniel named “hyperdiffusionism,” innovations in human history occur only once. If the same phenomena were found in different places and times, this represented a process of transmission from the original source – a diffusion from an advanced culture to a primitive one, however geographically distant the societies might be.

To Elliot Smith, ancient Egypt was the source of a vast range of innovations, including agriculture, metalworking and civilisation itself, of traits such as embalmment and building in stone, and of a distinctive pattern of mythology and belief. Cultural elements found in China, Polynesia and South America could be traced back to Egypt. Once asked by W.J. Perry what he thought was happening in the rest of the world while Egypt was laying the basis of its civilising mission, he replied, “Nothing.” Although the details of who did what, and when, were modified (or bypassed) in Elliot Smith’s different writings, the core belief remained.

In a conference held by the Royal Zoological Society in 1972 to mark the centenary of Elliot Smith’s birth, phrases used about him and his work by the biomedical community included “enormous influence,” “first-class scientist,” “worldwide reputation,” “a great pioneer,” “the simplicity of greatness,” as well as “immensely kind.” Those from archaeology and anthropology were markedly different: “very extreme and rigid,” “extravagant,” “notorious,” “delusion,” “extraordinarily doctrinal,” “bizarre.”

Why did a distinguished scientist developed such extreme ideas? Why did those ideas attract enthusiastic followers despite consistent criticism from archaeologists and anthropologists?

Elliot Smith was born to an Australian mother and a father of British origin in the NSW town of Grafton. He went to school at the elite Sydney Boys High School after his father took up a post as a school principal in Sydney. After studying at the Sydney University medical school and undertaking a year of hospital clinical work, he was appointed a university demonstrator in anatomy. Alongside his doctoral thesis on the brain of the non-placental mammal (for which he received a University Gold Medal) he completed a dozen papers on neurological topics. Awarded a travel scholarship to Britain at the age of twenty-five, he enrolled as a research student at the University of Cambridge and within three years had been elected to a Research Fellowship.

In 1900, Elliot Smith took up a professorship in anatomy at the Government Medical School in Cairo, continuing his research there and in Britain, to which he was able to return in university vacations. According to his Royal Society obituary, Cairo offered “an almost unlimited provision of recent brain material” to the young researcher. By 1907, aged just thirty-six, his reputation in neurological research and the evolution of the mammalian brain was sufficient for him to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. (He would be vice-president six years later.) In 1909 he returned permanently to Britain as professor of anatomy at the University of Manchester.

During his nine years in Egypt, having initially “quite resisted the temptation to dabble in Egyptology,” he found links to his brain studies within archaeological material, and went on to publish pioneering work in the techniques of mummification. His examination of Egyptian skeletal material from a wide range of periods gave him a basis for classifying this material into “racial” groups and suggesting a sequence of population movements.

In Manchester he maintained his studies of the evolution of the mammalian brain and his reports on mummification. During the war, as a member of Britain’s General Medical Council, he collaborated with psychologists in the study of shell shock, co-authoring a monograph on Shell Shock and Its Lessons (1917),which argued for the humane medical recognition and treatment of the condition. Working with psychologists also helped him consider further his specifically biological approach to the brain, and he remained highly critical of Freudian and other trends as applied in psychology. One of his last (co-authored) books was The Neural Basis of Thought.

Moving to University College London in 1919 Elliot Smith secured funding to transform anatomy teaching – in a new anatomy school incorporating ancient Egyptian decorative and architectural elements – while sponsoring, inspiring and continuing research that extended the discipline into human biology and what would later be called palaeoanthropology and physical anthropology. His knighthood in 1934 recognised his transformational role in anatomical teaching and research.

Elliot Smith’s academic rise had been dramatic. As a colleague observed, “In Cambridge he was a neuro-anatomist pure and simple: in Cairo he was forced to be other things.” Archaeologists turned to Elliot Smith as the man on the spot teaching human anatomy. They wanted analysis, reports, and interpretation of the burials coming from current excavations, notably those from George Andrew Reisner’s work at sites in Nubia, which were scheduled to be flooded by the waters of the first Aswan Dam. Elliot Smith was therefore involved for nine years in teaching, in the maintenance of his own research on the brain, and in meeting the demands to apply his skills to remains from ancient Egypt. This he did, although the size of the task was such that he was never able to publish the results of all his studies; there were reported to be 20,000 bodies recovered during the Nubian work alone.

Grafton Elliot Smith (centre) examining a mummy at University College London in 1930 with colleagues H.A. Harris and W.R. Dawson. From Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: A Biographical Record By His Colleagues, edited by Warren R. Dawson (Jonathan Cape, 1938).

As he made detailed observations of the nature and processes of mummification, he began developing views about the races of ancient Egypt. From the late nineteenth century until the 1930s every specialist had his or her own preferred classificatory scheme for present and past races. In Elliot Smith’s model, ancient Egyptians were not black (or Negroid), although there was some admixture in Nubia. He believed he had found a sequence involving population movement of a brown-skinned Mediterranean race, as well as Armenoid and (European) Nordic races. In his general survey books on human evolution he expanded in more detail on his assumptions about racial difference, while emphasising at times that race and culture are not the same and need not correlate.

In his book The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, published in London and New York in 1911, he made a committed argument for the idea of cultural diffusion from Egypt. As his ideas developed (there was a revised edition in 1923) Egypt’s influence went further afield: to India, China, Japan, the Pacific and Australia, and even the Americas. “Ideas and culture do not spread among uncivilized people except by the settlement amongst them of those who practice the new arts and hold the new beliefs,” he wrote. “But these settlers need not be great in numbers.” The transmission took place through ships of Egyptian design, which ventured as far as Madagascar, Mozambique, Burma, Indonesia and Indochina, with influences beyond that into the Pacific.

By the point at which he made this argument, late in the book, his narrative had gone from drawing on his own experience with ancient Egyptian burials to a specific hypothesis: that European prehistoric stone building owed its origins to ancient Egypt – a view still considered possible by others at that time, before radiocarbon dating confirmed otherwise. But then, without presenting substantive evidence, he made a major leap to a broader view of Egypt’s reach throughout the world.

Grafton Elliot Smith’s worldwide diffusion of culture from Egypt. From the second edition of his book, The Migrations of Culture (1929).

Despite changing emphases, looseness of detail and inconsistencies in argument, the essential core of Elliot Smith’s argument remained the same for over a quarter of a century. His views did evolve (or rather deepen in their application and conviction), and there were inevitably discrepancies and contradictions.

Egyptian sea-going vessels were involved, as later were those of Phoenicians, but other “ancient mariners” spread the complex of beliefs, associated practices and material innovations further. Indian and Chinese and American civilisations owed their existence to this diffusion. The innovations originally sourced from Egypt were spread to Australia, to the Pacific Islands and thence to the west coast of South and North America, although there was also cultural transmission from northeast Asia into the Americas.

Elliot Smith soon found support for his approach from individuals, including W.J. Perry and the renowned psychologist and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who would stay his allies. Thus encouraged, the distinguished Manchester anatomy professor and Fellow of the Royal Society took to the hustings. He presented his arguments with increasing conviction (and to substantial criticism) at annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1912 on.

Archaeologists and anthropologists were forced to engage with his ideas, even if they considered Elliott Smith an outsider. To the annoyance of social anthropologists, he was invited to compile the entry on “Anthropology” in the 1921 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which allowed him to present his marginal ideas as if mainstream. Ironically, his move to University College London in 1919 brought him to the very centre of scientific archaeology of Egypt, where W.M. (later Sir) Flinders Petrie was Professor of Egyptian Archaeology from 1892 to 1933. They maintained their distance.

The 1914 meeting of the British Association was held in Elliot Smith’s native country, Australia. He planned to talk of the spread of mummification from Egypt, and before the talk he was shown an embalmed male of the nineteenth century from Darnley Island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and the Australian mainland. This exhibited evidence of posthumous handling, which Elliot Smith immediately linked to Egyptian mummification. His talk announced the newfound evidence for ancient Egypt’s direct influence on the traditions of the Torres Strait. Arguments by the anthropologist who had studied the region, A.C. Haddon, had no impact.

The Torres Strait “mummy” had important effects on Elliot Smith’s thinking. It confirmed his belief in distant influence, for he considered embalming could only have been invented once, and that in ancient Egypt. Every example of embalming practices, from the Mediterranean to East Asia, the Pacific Islands to South America, had therefore spread from an Egyptian source. But there were specific techniques in the Torres Strait body that were only introduced in Egypt after the Twenty-second Dynasty. From this alone, Elliot Smith concluded that the major spread of Egyptian culture that he had been preaching, eastwards to Asia and on to the Pacific and the Americas, had to be dated to after the ninth century BCE.

This weakened an already weak case. It might be difficult to prove or disprove the influence of early pharaonic Egypt on non-literate communities of European prehistory. But the period after the ninth century BCE was an era of widespread literacy and increasingly well-studied documentation from civilisations of Asia and beyond, quite apart from the wealth of material from Egypt itself on administration, commerce and foreign relations. And there are no records of expeditions that could have shipped Egyptian culture to the east. Later, in The Diffusion of Culture (1933), Elliot Smith would compare the fast spread of his Egyptian cultural items with the rapid spread of Islam. But there was a major difference: numerous historical records show what did happen in early Islam; historical records equally show what did not happen in first-millennium BCE Middle East, India and China.

Elliot Smith presented an ambitious programmatic public statement of his revised views in The Migrations of Early Culture, published in 1915and reissued without change in 1929. The subtitle was A study of the significance of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification as evidence of the migrations of peoples and the spread of certain customs and beliefs. The style is pugnacious, unapologetic and highly critical of those who did not accept his views. Yet the evidence presented is minimal and the data only suggestive. A respected scientist like Elliot Smith would never have allowed such statements in the field of brain studies from a student or a colleague, or indeed from himself.

As if in response to the critics he had faced at British Association meetings, Elliot Smith attacked traditional scholarship head-on, with “an appeal to ethnologists to recognise the error of their ways and repent.” He wanted “to force scientific men to recognise and admit that in former ages knowledge and culture spread in much the same way as they are known to be diffused today. The only difference is that the pace of migration has become accelerated.”

The idea of innovation always spreading from “higher” to “lower” cultures could be seen as reflecting Elliot Smith’s own background and career. France’s creation of a Government Medical School in Cairo in 1827 was designed to spread Western medical ideas to Egypt. When the new British administrators took it over in 1893, they sought to improve its teaching with initiatives that included Elliot Smith’s appointment. He would be able to witness the influence and diffusion of external culture during its most influential period in Egypt.

Elliot Smith’s own background was even more dramatic a display of cultural change arriving from outside. The country town of Grafton, where Elliot Smith was born in 1871, had introduced into inland Australia a new culture that was fundamentally British. Forty years earlier this area had been the exclusive territory of nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Bundjalung and Gumbainggir peoples. There can be few examples more extreme than nineteenth-century inland Australia in showing cultural change through external introduction rather than through local development.

The identification of Australia with Britain was most emphatically demonstrated in the Great War, when graziers’ sons from Australia’s rural outback in 1915 volunteered to take on the Ottoman Empire in the Dardanelles in the name of a dispute between Britain and Germany’s ally. When Elliot Smith travelled to England, 17,000 kilometres from his Australian home, he encountered a world in which much was familiar.

All this suggests that Elliot Smith, not alone among “colonials” coming to mother England at the time, was “more British than the British” in his enthusiasm for the imperial model. In the years when Elliot Smith developed and presented his diffusionist paradigm (roughly 1911–34) European empires were at their height, with Britain’s dominions and colonies covering a quarter of the world’s land surface. The world was one of cultural diffusion (and local adaptation of that culture) and the imperial model, in its ideological underpinnings, was one that preached the benefits of enforced modernisation over indigenous development.

There is also the question of personality. The opposition that greeted Elliot Smith’s diffusionist theories from the start would have discouraged many people, especially those who considered themselves within rather than opposed to the world of academic research. The greater the opposition, though, the greater his enthusiasm. In Culture: The Diffusion Controversy (1928) he went as far as adopting the label used to criticise him when he referred to “we of the Diffusionist School.” This must in part reflect his natural personality but also the unbroken success of his career. His meteoric rise in the world of science was not even stayed by war; he continued his teaching and research uninterrupted by the Great War except to add further research on shell shock to his panoply. It seems that few had ever said anything but “yes” to the bright young scientist. And while some British scientists in the early twentieth century might be awed by the stratification of class and background, for him as for many other colonials, family background and perceived class provided neither interest nor inhibition.

Elliot Smith was helped by his forceful personality alongside his “charm and imposing presence.” He was a confident and articulate public speaker, though the neat order he imposed on world history was not reflected in his chaotic office. He was an engaging and readable author and publishers continued to pursue him for survey volumes. Some were on more specific parts of his model and some general surveys, culminating in Human History (1930). The specific claims grew. Opposition to his ideas on human history from the established scholars in archaeology, history and anthropology had no effect in reducing his enthusiasm to advance his ideas: “preaching his gospel,” as he would call it.

Why did Elliot Smith’s views attract such a popular following, especially in Britain, in the interwar years? This was a period of growing scientific research into the human past punctuated by grand discoveries, like Tutankhamen’s tomb (1922–32) and the Royal City of Ur (1922–34). But it was also an era in which people were searching for grand but non-religious theories in a world that had produced the tragedy and illogicality of the Great War, with a growing sense that the era of European empires might not be as permanent or stable as had been assumed.

The ideology of empire may have inspired Elliot Smith’s model of diffusion of culture; it certainly inspired his British readers. The attraction of diffusionism to a reading public is that it suggested all human progress was based on the blessings that derived and spread from an advanced civilisation. Such a perspective appeared to confirm the positive benefits of the colonial model, but also reassured those concerned with the decline of one major colonial empire (that of Germany) and the question of the long-term future of Britain’s largest colony, India, whose original civilisation was, according to Elliot Smith, derived from Egypt.

Alongside the political appeal of a diffusionist model was the attraction of the exotic and mysterious. Prewar confidence in national destiny may have been dented, and prewar certainties in religious faith were certainly changing among many of the “reading classes” in Britain. Fundamentalist Christianity in Britain may have fought a losing battle against science by the end of the nineteenth century, while the interwar years saw an openness to new scientific ideas. With Elliot Smith, here was a scientist whose views were appealing (even if not to those whose scientific field was archaeology or anthropology). They combined apparent rationalism – an explanation of human history outside of teleological religious models – with the frisson of remaining mystery. In the troubled ideological conflicts and social challenges of the 1920s and 1930s in Britain, we can also see the appeal of the rebel scientist, the establishment man who is prepared to take on the rest of the establishment over what he sees as a truth being hidden from view by conventional thinkers.

Reviews in The Times Literary Supplement of Elliot Smith’s earlier popular books on history were respectful and complimentary while not necessarily endorsing his conclusions. But by 1930 a less obsequious tone had entered: its review of Human History was assigned to a contemporary opponent of Elliot Smith’s views whose review concluded that the reader “is bound to welcome so masterly a synthesis, even if his immediate reaction is to try to pull it to pieces.”

The Elliot Smith story is unusual. Most writers who advance a theory from outside the relevant discipline at odds with the current range of scholarly interpretations are dismissed as pseudoscientists and ignored in the literature and scholarly debates. Occasionally an exasperated academic takes a major writer to task. But generally the proponents of these ideas are not seen as part of scholarly discourse. Specialists did find it necessary to take seriously and combat Elliot Smith’s ideas because of his scientific distinction in anatomy, as well as the popular following his ideas achieved. He was “one of us,” to be criticised, rather than a voice from the outer fringes to be ignored.

Towards the end of Elliot Smith’s life, the changing politics of 1930s Europe presented challenges to the confidence with which scientists (including Elliot Smith himself) had incorporated racial models in the narrative of past and present human societies, including those of the ancient world. In 1934 he was among the anatomists and physical anthropologists who began to see and resist what could happen when scholarly discourse and popular Western books about the supposedly lesser races were transformed into political action by Nazi ideologues.

Elliot Smith died in 1937. His heritage was a theory that attributed historical change to the inventions by, and spread from, one ancient society and people: a heliolithic Egyptocentric diffusion that created a world culture and underlay the growth of civilisation. Consider some of his statements in Ancient Egyptians:

Egypt was not only the inventor of civilization, but for several millennia afterwards it continued to be the inspiration of the progressive development of her original heritage to the world… laying the foundations of civilization and… moulding the history of the world… [I]t is idle to refuse the due recognition of the claim made for Egypt of having forged the instruments that raised civilization out of the slough of the Stone Age… Thus Egypt brought her influence to bear… not by the violent imposition of an alien culture… but by raising the members of her own family group of peoples to a higher plane of knowledge and skill by inoculating them with the germs of her own culture.

If we change the timeframe to the late nineteenth century – the decades of Elliot Smith’s youth in Australia – and substitute “the British Empire” for “Egypt,” we are in a territory of more familiar rhetoric. Such claims for the past sound less anomalous in the setting that generated, supported and listened to the extreme diffusionism of Grafton Elliot Smith. •

This is an edited extract from Robin Derricourt’s Antiquity Imagined: The Remarkable Legacy of Egypt and the Ancient Near East, published this month by I.B. Tauris.

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In the thronged reception hall on Ellis Island, we find two sisters; the more purposeful, Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard), urges the younger, frailer Magda (Angela Sarafyan) to control her coughing. They get brutally short shrift from the authorities; Magda is brusquely tested and quarantined, and Ewa, for some unspecified transgression on shipboard, is held to be “a woman of low morals.” Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), an entrepreneur and predator, engineers an ambiguous kind of rescue, involving Ewa in prostitution and in the life of the low-rent music-hall, where the dancing girls know their sustenance is under threat from the advance of moving pictures. Phoenix gives us a classic Victorian cad; but Bruno falls in love, and Ewa into pity, the trap set for all of her kind. Some link the resilience to her Catholicism, but she’s hardly observant, letting a long time go between confessions; the piety, the keeping of her soul, has more to do with the immigrant’s determination to find a human world she can live in, and to that end she withstands one humiliation after another. Nor is there a solution in the love of a good man; the good man in this tale is a frail magician (Jeremy Renner) but his magic is only for the stage; he’s more vulnerable than Ewa herself.

Marion Cotillard gets away with an amazing degree of saintliness. She learnt Polish for the role; she gives her portrait of endurance in that language and in English, with the barest trace of a French accent. With pale clear skin and bruised eyes, she evokes her cinematic inheritance: Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, Ingrid Bergman stumbling up the mountain track in Stromboli. This film, however, breaks out of its generic confines, and finds our positions in the audience. From where we sit, the stubborn, buffeted immigrant is pleading at the gates; the bullies of Ellis Island in 1921 are figures and faces in our present. At their tender mercies, those girls would be off to Nauru, or – even more dishonourably – to Cambodia, in pretty short order.

Outside theatrical circuits, at large in the wider educational networks, some of the best documentaries build audiences over time. Over the past year, reports came through of a particularly engaging project being developed by the Canberra-based producer-director Andrew Pike, a work on the complex Mungo Lady story, where the traditional owners would have their say along with archaeologists and others involved as scientists and landholders. Now Message from Mungo (co-directed with the historian Ann McGrath) has emerged, a dynamic essay that asks for the widest general attention. It brings together black and white, present and distant past, pastoralist and scientist, and radically different kinds of knowledge. It also, subtly but clearly, investigates that difference.

You can find Lake Mungo on the map in the southwest of New South Wales; the dry lakes are shown as fine-ruled areas outlined in blue. The film opens on wide, seemingly unpeopled landscapes, miles of low scrub, emu and kangaroo country, and stretches of furrowed sand, stirred by wind. The processes of erosion exposed an extremely ancient gravesite, and the bones of a slender young woman who was buried there, with evidence of ritual, about 40,000 years ago. In 1968 those remains were removed from the site and taken to Canberra for scientific examination.

Mungo Lady, as she was named, made the site one of great archaeological interest; distinguished academics from across the world came calling, and Australia-centred archaeology gained in international prestige. But meanwhile, Aboriginal people who shared responsibility for that country began to argue, with increasing force, that the bones should be returned; that Mungo Lady was an ancestor to be respected, and that the discovery bore out their repeated affirmation: “we have always been here.”

In the filming by Andrew Pike and cinematographer Scott Wombey, the witnesses become vividly known to us, not least the late imperial elder Alice Kelly. By the time of the film she was dead, but others remember her intense interest in the scientists’ activities and her insistence on gaining understanding; this is taken up today by her daughters and granddaughter Tanya Charles. They are vivid presences, since they’re in charge of the story; there’s no ruling voiceover here, no white authority knowing better. The witnesses guide us through the story, and though archaeologist John Mulvaney opens the tale of the discovery with authority, he’s a participant, not a guide.

This documentary has been very carefully built; the patience needed for its making has become part of its content. If the most important message from Mungo concerns those utterly different concepts of time, deep time, kinship and inheritance (“we’re part of her, and she is part of us,” says one of the witnesses) there’s also the other side of it – our side, if you like. It’s about the white scholar’s process of learning, coming to estimate the scope and depth of philosophic difference. The archaeologist Isabel McBryde reverses the traditional balance of white specialist to Aboriginal informant; she tells how tentative she felt about being present on the day of the handover, and how important it was to be invited by the traditional owners to share that moment, in 1992, when Mungo Lady was returned to her land and her people. McBryde gives a gentle, eloquent description of her journey – running late, driving alone at night through solid dark and stars, to reach the occasion. Unseen but remembered, that purposeful drive now becomes both history and symbol. •

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The cataclysmic eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August AD 79 wiped out Pompeii, Herculaneum and other towns on the Bay of Naples. Yet the event would scarcely have rated a mention in the annals of Roman history had it not been witnessed by a member of the Roman elite, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), whose uncle, the commander of the Roman fleet, sailed across from the naval base at Misenum to inspect the eruption (and died as a result). Pliny the Younger was a prolific letter-writer, and his first-hand account of the eruption has come down to us in two letters he wrote years later at the request of the historian Tacitus.

There the matter would have rested except for the chance find of Roman antiquities in a well at Resina (now known as Ercolano) near Naples at the beginning of the eighteenth century. What began as an accident led to the rediscovery of Herculaneum and then of Pompeii. The excavations of these two Roman towns caused sensation after sensation and still have the capacity to create headline news.

Although The Last Days of Pompeii takes its title from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s immortal 1834 novel, it is not concerned with the finds at Pompeii or the archaeological history of the region. Instead, under the three broad themes of decadence, apocalypse and resurrection, it explores the perennial public fascination with Pompeii and the way artists have used the town as a metaphor for ideas that have little to do with antiquity.

The publication of the book coincides with an exhibition that began at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, has just left the Cleveland Museum of Art and is due to open shortly at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. The exhibition, which looks at Pompeii not as a window to the past but as a mirror of the present, consists of paintings and objects drawn from major art collections around the world. These are finely illustrated in the catalogue section of the book and are prefaced by essays written by a number of distinguished scholars.

Attempts to portray Pompeii as another Sodom and Gomorrah, a decadent city of excess that somehow deserved the disastrous eruption, have taken different forms at different times. An 1827 painting by Joseph Franque, of a mother and her two daughters being enveloped by the fire of the eruption, shows voluptuous, semi-naked creatures decked in jewellery and lacking classical decorum. Their selfishness and greed in lingering to gather up their jewellery has spelt their doom. Francesco Netti’s Gladiator Fight during a Meal at Pompeii (1880) is a frankly shocking scene of an orgiastic banquet taking place while attendants drag off the body of a gladiator who has been killed for the delectation of the diners. In a 1984 interview for Playboy the British actor and writer Joan Collins used the analogy of Pompeii to underline her belief that herpes and AIDS were plagues sent to “teach us all a lesson.”

The ancient setting gave nineteenth-century painters like Théodore Chassériau and Lawrence Alma-Tadema licence to show naked females flaunting their bodies in archaeologically correct Pompeian spaces, and allowed Wilhelm von Gloeden and Guglielmo Plüschow to indulge their taste for young male nudes photographed against an antique backdrop. Sometimes a painting adopts a more moralising tone, like An Exedra by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which shows the sorry state of an exhausted slave while his masters idly take their ease. Sometimes titillation is the subject, such as in Luigi Bazzani’s A Visit to Pompeii, in which two well-dressed young women of the late nineteenth century are shown eyeing a fresco of a naked man.

This ambivalence towards the perceived sexual licence of Pompeii is exemplified by the Secret Cabinet of the Naples Archaeological Museum, a repository for objects from Pompeii that were considered obscene. Access to this chamber, now open to the public, was once strictly limited to men who had undergone the complex procedures required for admission. Women, young people and persons in holy orders were not admitted at all. Murray’s Handbook to South Italy and Naples (1853) sanctimoniously states that because permission was exceedingly difficult to obtain “very few therefore have seen the collection; and those who have, are said to have no desire to repeat their visit.”

The rediscovery of Pompeii coincided with a number of natural disasters, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the eruption of Vesuvius came to be seen as illustrative of the insignificance of human beings when confronted with disasters of such magnitude. Painters such as Jacob More depicted the erupting mountain as a sea of red threatening to overwhelm a handful of small, pitiful fleeing figures. Other saw it as God’s judgement on a heathen people, another Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, by John Martin, c. 1822–26. Oil on canvas, 83.8 x 121.9 cm. Tabley House Collection, University of Manchester/The Bridgeman Art Library

John Martin’s 1822 painting The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (above) is one of a series of apocalyptic visions influenced by dioramas of historical disasters. Extremely popular at the time, these dioramas, or “pyrodramas,” were accompanied by dancing and gladiatorial battles and culminated in the fiery destruction of a set depicting Pompeii. Henri-Frédéric Schopin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1850) (main picture) shows a chaotic scene in which men, women, children, chariots, horses and even a bullock team trample each other in an effort to escape the inferno. The most famous painting of this genre, Karl Bryullov’s enormous painting of 1833, The Last Day of Pompeii, shows an apocalyptic scene with terrified figures fleeing a fiery holocaust that lights up their faces and reveals expressions of fear, greed, hope and heroism. Significantly, an elderly man in the foreground wears a Christian cross as he faces the sea of fire.

James Hamilton’s painting of 1864 on the same theme shows a great column about to topple, a reference to the statue of Augustus, which fell and killed the villainous Arbaces at the end of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. One of the most moving apocalypse paintings is Edward John Poynter’s Faithful unto Death (1865), which shows a solitary Roman legionary lit up by the red glow of the flames, standing ready to meet his end. The young man, under orders not to leave his post but tense with fear as the fireballs rain down behind him, is the embodiment of the ideals of Victorian England.

Perhaps the most curious painting reproduced in this book is Auguste Desperret’s Third Eruption of the Volcano of 1789, painted in 1833. It shows the word “liberté” exploding from the mouth of Vesuvius, which erupted in 1789, thus marking the French Revolution during which Louis XVI was beheaded. Another eruption in 1830 marked the overthrow of Charles X, a younger brother of Louis XVI. Desperret is here looking forward to a third eruption, which would mark the overthrow of King Louis Philippe, who had inspired such great hatred among the lower classes of France and was to be the last king of France.

Some painters chose to depict not the eruption but its aftermath. In 1799 Jakob Philipp Hackert painted Pompeii as a ruin through which humans and animals were wandering, and a painting by Christen Kobke (below), The Forum, Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the Distance (1841), shows only a ruin, devoid of human beings, a city destroyed and deserted. The sky is clear blue, Vesuvius is tranquil and no longer a threat, and the ruins are gradually becoming overgrown.

The Forum, Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the Distance, by Christen Købke, 1841. Oil on canvas, 70.8 x 87.9 cm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 85.PA.43

During the second world war Pompeii suffered extensive bombing, but it was not so much the damage that evoked artistic responses; instead, the horrors of the war modified the way artists viewed the town. As a reaction to the depiction of formal beauty, a sculpture like César’s Seated Nude, Pompeii (1954) showed a dematerialised skeletal form composed of metal castings. In the Seagram murals (1958–59) Mark Rothko used Pompeian red to create an atmosphere in which his wealthy clients would seem to be stifled and buried like the people of Pompeii. Andy Warhol likened the eruption of Vesuvius to the explosion of an atomic bomb, and his depictions – with their frenzied, somewhat erotic quality and Vesuvius’s flesh-coloured cone – were designed to give the impression that they were painted only minutes after the eruption.

WHAT makes Pompeii and Herculaneum unusual archaeological sites is how complete are their buildings, furnishings, wall-paintings and even the food that their inhabitants were about to eat that fateful morning. Despite this abundance of material, though, little is known about the identity of their inhabitants, except for a few names and a few graffiti scratched on walls. This has resulted in an unparalleled attempt to repopulate the city with imaginary characters. The most celebrated attempt was by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose fictional characters became a point of reference for many of the houses in Pompeii – especially the House of the Tragic Poet, which was the residence of the novel’s hero, Glaucus.

Unfortunately, attempts to infuse life back into Pompeii by, for example, staging gladiatorial battles in the amphitheatre, failed, extravaganzas of this type proving more successful when enacted elsewhere. The recreation of the bodies of dead Pompeians from plaster casts also failed to resurrect the town’s inhabitants, but it did spawn a new industry. These white ghostly figures were taken out and set up in dramatic poses, often facing up instead of down, the way they were discovered. They were then photographed in bright light, sometimes against a dramatic backdrop such as Vesuvius, the mountain that killed them. Allan McCollum found these casts – and especially the cast of a chained-up dog writhing in its death throes – unsettling. His work, The Dog from Pompei (1991) consists of multiple casts of the same original to show that no amount of copying can bring the dog back to life.

Another comment on our tendency to use artefacts to engage with history is Michael Huey’s Pompeii (2008). On the face of it, this is simply a large-scale coloured reproduction of a Fourth Style wall-painting from Pompeii. But it is produced by an analog process and based on a modern photograph of a photograph taken in 1870 that shows the reconstruction of the painting based on surviving fragments. Huey’s work is thus so far removed from the original of AD 64 that the ability of photography to convey meaning comes under question.

Photographic images did become an important part of the rediscovery process, however, because archaeology is by its very nature destructive, and photography could provide images of the site before, during and after excavation. In an interesting juxtaposition, the book shows a painting by Edouard Alexandre Sain called Excavations at Pompeii (1865), with graceful barefooted women carrying away the dirt from the excavation in baskets on their heads. On the next page is a photograph called Pompeii – Recent Excavations (1892–94), in which a number of sullen-looking Neapolitan boys, dressed in rags, carry away baskets of dirt under the watchful eye of an overseer armed with a long cane.

Pompeii has of course been recreated in cinema. One of the earliest of these movies, Luigi Maggi’s 1908 film, Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (The Last Days of Pompeii), is based on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel and covers the entire plot, against a series of sumptuous backdrops, in a matter of minutes. Even more sumptuous was Rodolfi’s 1913 version of the same story, which lasted more than a hundred minutes and involved hundreds of extras. Christianity does not feature in either of these films. Instead, the morally superior Romans are shown as being undermined by the Oriental duplicity of Arbaces. The theme of morally superior Romans, which appealed to the fascists, is reinforced in the increasingly longer and more lavish films of the 1920s and 30s. They also showed greater historical authenticity than their American counterparts, although by then Hollywood productions were becoming more successful at the box office. Since then, exhibitions about Pompeii have been more successful than films, and are by now so numerous that they require an appendix nine pages long in the book.

The late 20th century saw a new shift in the way the site can be viewed. Thanks to digital reconstructions we can now fly through Pompeii, peering into houses, listening to the splash of the fountains and seeing carts rumbling by. We can even relive the eruption of AD 79 in the sensational 3D video created in Melbourne for the Pompeii exhibition of 2009. Boulders fly past our heads and roofs collapse in front of our eyes as Vesuvius rumbles ever louder in the background. Computer simulations have also found their way into the sites themselves. There is a Museum of Virtual Archaeology at Herculaneum, and at Pompeii no less a guide than Julius Polybius himself, in the form of a hologram, conducting visitors around his house. But although these technologies have been successful in bringing Pompeii into the modern era, they have also been criticised as creating a Pompeii that suits our modern conceptions of what an ancient Roman city was like.

But this is what this book is all about. Pompeii is a mirror and each generation has superimposed its own values and ideas. It is more than an archaeological site – it has been a reflection of the fears, dreams, aspirations and fantasies of artists and writers, and their audiences, for over 250 years. •

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JUST UNDER two weeks ago, on the morning of Saturday 6 November, custodians beginning their day’s work at Pompeii found that one of the buildings on the site had collapsed overnight. Although it is usually identified by scholars as a schola armaturarum (or meeting hall) for a military association, the building is more commonly referred to as the “House of the Gladiators.” The name seems to stem from a misunderstanding of the frescoes on the façade, which show trophies, and the frescoes inside the hall, which show winged Victories carrying lances and shields.

The House of the Gladiators is on Pompeii’s main shopping street, Via dell’Abbondanza, which was first excavated by Vittorio Spinazzola, the director of the National Museum at Naples and ex officio director of the archaeological site from 1910 to 1923. Much of Spinazzola’s life was devoted to the excavation of this street, whose name – which translates as Street of Abundance – reflects the wealth of houses and shops found along it.

Spinazzola was a meticulous excavator. He carefully restored the façades of the shops and houses, paying particular attention to their upper storeys, windows, doorways, balconies and roofs. After his work on the site stopped in 1923, he spent the rest of his life preparing a monumental publication on the excavations, which he put in the hands of the prestigious publishing house, Enrico Hoepli of Milan. In April 1943, with the book almost complete – 672 pages, 604 illustrations and 26 large lithographs had been printed – Spinazzola died in Milan. In the summer of the same year the publishing house was bombed and every single copy of the book was destroyed, along with all the zinc plates for the illustrations. To make the tragedy complete, the Via dell’Abbondanza, including the House of the Gladiators, suffered serious damage from allied bombing soon after, in August and September 1943.

All seemed to be lost until it was discovered that the original text, illustrations and photographs had been taken to Rome for safety. Suddenly the possibility of publication was revived, but in 1945 the house of Hoepli announced that its losses in the war were so great that it could no longer undertake such a massive project. Eventually, in 1948, the Ministero dell’istruzione pubblica (Ministry of Public Instruction) agreed to publish the work to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the excavations of Pompeii. The result was three massive volumes, which came out in 1953, a fitting tribute to the lifetime of work Spinazzola had devoted to Pompeii.

THE RECENT calamity was thus the third to be suffered by the House of the Gladiators. Although the press was full of reports about the loss of this archaeologically important building, it was already in a poor condition. The fine paintings of military trophies on its door jambs were largely destroyed in 1943, as were many of the beautiful frescoes of winged Victories carrying shields on the inside walls.

The real significance of the collapse lay in the fact that it was the latest in a long list of disasters to have struck Pompeii in recent years, including the 1980 earthquake, which did severe damage throughout the city, and the roof collapse in the House of the Labyrinth, which destroyed one of the most famous frescoed rooms on the site. The Via dell’Abbondanza is particularly prone to disaster because little of the north side of the street has been excavated, apart from the façades of the buildings or one or two rooms, making the buildings highly vulnerable to the massive pressure exerted by the land mass behind. Heavy rains make matters worse, and water infiltration seems to have been the immediate cause of the collapse of the House of the Gladiators.

But the real cause of disasters like this lie much further in the past. Pompeii is arguably both the oldest and largest open-air archaeological site in the world. The excavation began in 1748 and the 250 years of excavation since then has exposed a total of forty-four hectares to the elements all year round. As soon as a building is exposed to the air the damage starts, and further human activity only accelerates the process. In the eighteenth century, for example, houses were frequently excavated twice, the second excavation staged to impress important visitors with “finds” planted so that they could be “discovered” and then given away as gifts. Ironically, the only good thing that can be said about excavations of that era is that important frescoes were cut from the walls and taken to the Royal Collection, thus saving them from the elements. Mercifully, rooms were refilled when nothing of importance was found.

By the early nineteenth century, however, newly excavated buildings were rarely filled in and the houses were mostly left unroofed. Sometimes protective roofs were placed over a well-preserved section of a wall painting, but they often simply directed the rain onto other parts of the painting, damaging and often destroying them. It was not until 1860, when Giuseppe Fiorelli began a fifteen-year period as director of the excavations at Pompeii, that something approaching an era of scientific investigation began at Pompeii. It was he who gave the city its triple numbering system, consisting of region, insula block and individual doorway. (The House of the Gladiators is III.3.6.) He also invented the method of injecting plaster into the cavities left by bodies in the lava. Items and paintings of interest were still routinely removed to the Naples National Archaeological Museum.

Under Fiorelli’s successor, Michele Ruggiero, director from 1875 to 1893, the larger houses were restored as they came to light, keeping their furnishings and decorations intact and restoring their gardens. An example of his work is the House of the Silver Wedding, which was fully restored and re-roofed with decorations and wall-paintings kept as intact as possible. The late nineteenth century was a particularly fertile period of excavation and the large number of wall-paintings found during this period enabled the famous German archaeologist, August Mau, to devise his four Pompeian styles of wall-painting, a system that is still a basis for typing wall-paintings to this day.

Up until the end of Vittorio Spinazzola’s directorship, in 1923, archaeologists had stopped digging at the AD79 level of the city. Spinazzola’s successor was the dynamic but controversial Amedeo Maiuri, whose long tenure at Pompeii lasted from 1924 until 1961. His interest in stratigraphy led him to excavate into the subsoil, exposing earlier phases of the Forum, the Large Theatre and the Basilica. He also energetically explored behind the façades along the Via dell’Abbondanza and uncovered the city walls and adjoining cemeteries. In the period before the second world war he made such notable discoveries as the famous room in the Villa of the Mysteries, thought to depict an initiation into a secret rite. He also excavated the well-preserved House of the Menander. He was responsible for much of the re-roofing of the House of the Vettii and attempted to recreate the atmosphere of houses by leaving utensils in situ and restoring the ceilings. Maiuri survived fascism and the war, although much of Pompeii did not. After the war, chronic underfunding of the excavations led him to sell volcanic material to the company building the Naples–Salerno autostrada in order to obtain materials and workmen; one consequence was that buildings were quickly excavated and then abandoned.

Scholars were becoming alarmed at the rapid deterioration of the exposed remains of Pompeii and the fact that many of the wall decorations had perished without being recorded. The problems are easy to see today. Weeds grow all over the site. Most houses are still unroofed and unprotected from the rain. Rising damp combines with alkaline elements in the mortar to produce a soluble salt that pushes its way through walls, dislodging the plaster. The sun fades the unprotected paintings until they practically disappear. Pigeons nest in the remains, their highly acidic droppings becoming such a problem in neighbouring Herculaneum that hawks were brought in to drive them away. Tourism, too, has become a huge problem, with about 2.5 million visitors to Pompeii and Herculaneum each year. According to Antonio Varone, director of the Pompeii excavations, Pompeii alone received 2.2 million visitors in the first ten months of 2010. Daring thefts, souvenir hunting, graffiti and the earthquake of 1980 have added further to Pompeii’s woes.

IN 1974, noticing the rapid deterioration of the exposed remains of Pompeii, Helmut Kyrieleis of the German Archaeological Institute at Berlin initiated Houses in Pompeii, a project that aimed to record what was still standing before it disappeared entirely. An Australian team, which I co-directed from the University of Melbourne with Jean-Paul Descœudres of the University of Sydney, was invited to join them in 1976. The project involved documenting a carefully selected series of houses that were in good condition when they were first excavated, in some cases almost two centuries ago, but had since deteriorated badly. Walls were cleaned, incrustation removed and plaster analysed to get a clearer idea of what the frescoes really looked like. They were then photographed, parts of them were traced and the walls were studied minutely so that all the details could be recorded.

Other archaeologists worked on the architecture of each house, producing ground plans, sections and elevations as well as detailed drawings of architectural elements, such as mouldings, ornaments and column capitals. The mortar was analysed and detailed studies were made of the structure of each house in order to determine the building phases. Archives, archaeological notebooks, old watercolours and drawings and earlier publications were all consulted to gain the fullest possible picture of each house and its excavation. I also made detailed studies of the water systems of some of the houses, which involved being lowered into underground water cisterns so as to measure them and work out their capacity, the system of waterproofing, the inlet system and the overflow system.

Over the years the Australian team has worked on the House of the Coloured Capitals, the House of the Old Hunt and the House of the Grand Duke, all in Region VII, Insula 4, close to the Forum of Pompeii. Penelope Allison and I collaborated on a large volume, Casa della Caccia Antica (VII.4.48), published in the Houses in Pompeii series in 2002, and Professor Descœudres and I are working on an even larger volume for the series. Each large-format book fully documents a single house and is lavishly illustrated with plans, sections, photographs and detailed reconstructed drawings of the wall-paintings.

For Pompeii as a whole things were beginning to look up with the appointment of Pietro Giovanni Guzzo as superintendent in 1995. A law was passed in 1997 giving the Archaeological Superintendency at Pompeii financial autonomy by allowing all the gate receipts – a sum approaching €20 million a year – to be retained and spent on the site. In 1998 Guzzo commissioned a conservation report which included the estimated costs for preserving at least part of the site. Meanwhile, the funds in hand were used for conservation across the whole site, including famous houses like the House of Menander and the House of the Vettii. At the same time the experience for visitors was improved, with new signs, leaflets and itineraries and an audio guide system.

But despite all of these efforts, most of the buildings continue to crumble and most of the houses are still closed to the public. In 2008 the Italian government declared a state of emergency for Pompeii and made a temporary allocation of extra funds for its upkeep. These are still insufficient, as the latest disaster has shown, but that doesn’t mean that recent calls for the privatisation of the site should be taken seriously. Privatisation would represent a total abdication of governmental responsibility as well as constituting a further threat to the site.

The present state of affairs is not surprising given what has happened to Pompeii during the last 250 years. The best that can be said of the whole sorry situation is that a third of the site is still buried. It should stay that way. •

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