Discarding the evidence: The place of natural resources stewardship in the creation of the Peel Island Lazaret Midden, Moreton Bay, southeast Queensland

Indigenous oyster fisheries persisted for millennia and should inform future management

“…At some of these sites, oysters were harvested in the tens of millions or even billions (Table 1 ). In some cases, archaeological evidence points to use of oyster shells in the construction of artificial reefs for oyster farms 65 . In other cases, such as Chesapeake Bay and southern New England, a large number of smaller sites combine to account for a massive harvest.…”

Challenging metanarratives: The past lives in the present

“…At the Peel Island shell midden, shellfish discard, and especially oyster discard, did not follow the pattern that would be predicted by an evolutionary ecology model (after Lupo 2007). People were not exploiting the shellfish resources ‗optimally', but were managing resources (particularly oysters) according to cultural requirements that continue to the present day (Ross et al 2011(Ross et al , 2015. From such an analysis we can discover how to define both science and religion in social terms, rather than in ‗scientific' terms (Wright 1992:43-44).…”

“…This is particularly the case in Australian Aboriginal archaeology, where many researchers recognise that Indigenous knowledge and narratives of both place and object are grounded in socio-cultural narratives of people, place and environment (e.g. Bradley 2008Bradley , 2010Lewis and Rose 1988;McDonald and Veth 2013;Ross et al 2015).…”

Multidisciplinary approaches to Australian island pasts: Late Pleistocene to historical perspectives on Australian island use

“…Beyond Torres Strait, the large swathe of northern tropical Australia is also represented by eight papers -two from Western Australia (Manne and Veth 2015;McDonald 2015), one from the Northern Territory (Kearney and Bradley 2015), two from Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria (Moss et al 2015;Rosendahl et al 2015) and the remaining three papers from central and southern Queensland Ross et al 2015;Rowland et al 2015). Manne and Veth (2015) and McDonald (2015) provide unique perspectives on not only Australia's earliest island use but also some of the earliest evidence for human use of islands in the world.…”

“…The social complexities of understanding past Aboriginal use of offshore islands is brought into sharp focus with Kearney and Bradley's (2015) nuanced discussion of historically and ethnographically-known voyaging by the Yanyuwa people to the islands of the Sir Edward Pellew Group in the Gulf of Carpentaria. That social practices may also dramatically alter midden deposits is explored by Ross et al (2015) in relation to Peel Island within Moreton Bay, southeast Queensland. It is argued that oyster shell consumption may be unrepresented in midden deposits due to alternative use in the formation of artificial reefs to increase production and availability of oysters.…”