The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts

This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, exploring the cultural and environmental history of these drylands.

Mike Smith (Author)

9780521407458, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 February 2013

424 pages, 80 b/w illus. 10 maps 45 tables
26 x 18.2 x 3 cm, 1.06 kg

'… the most important exploration of Australia's ancient human history since John Mulvaney's The Prehistory of Australia was published forty-four years ago.' Tom Griffiths, Inside Story

This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, one of the world's major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia's deserts, the formation of distinctive desert societies, and the origins and development of the hunter-gatherer societies documented in the classic nineteenth-century ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen. Written by one of Australia's leading desert archaeologists, the book interweaves a lively history of research with archaeological data in a masterly survey of the field and a profoundly interdisciplinary study that forces archaeology into conversations with history and anthropology, economy and ecology, and geography and Earth sciences.

1. The archaeology of deserts: Australia in context
2. Deserts past: a history of ideas
3. The empty desert: inland environments prior to people
4. Foundations: moving into the deserts
5. Islands in the interior: last glacial aridity and its aftermath
6. The 'desert culture' revisited: assembling a cultural system
7. Rock art and place: evolution of an inscribed landscape
8. The chain of connection: trade and exchange across the interior
9. The last millennium: archaeology and the classic ethnographies.

Subject Areas: Arid zones, deserts [RGBA], Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA], Archaeology [HD], Asian history [HBJF]