The Great ‘Intensification Debate’: Its History And Place In Australian Archaeology

Lourandos, Harry; Ross, Anne

doi:10.1080/03122417.1994.11681528

Cited by 58 publications

(40 citation statements)

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“…But when each piece of evidence is examined individually, the apparent pattern becomes blurred (White 1994:225). explicit and implicit, have increasingly been incorporated into normative accounts of Australian archaeology (Lourandos and Ross 1994). However, by emphasising supraregional trajectories of change, some advocates of intensification devalued the importance of local and subregional trajectories as a primary locus of change, instead amalgamating diverse sequences from widely separated regions to define overarching patterns.…”

Section: The Continental Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A significant archaeological database accumulated during the 1970s, but it was the early 1980s that signalled a major turning point in the development of Australian archaeology. Heated debate during this period, labelled by Lourandos and Ross (1994) as the 'Intensification Debate', focussed critical attention on issues of change, particularly during the late Holocene. Although major recent change was recognised from the earliest excavations undertaken in Australia (e.g.…”

Section: The Continental Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is estimated that this pattern emerged in the mid-to-late Holocene and is associated with fundamental structural changes in the archaeological record, including increases in the rates of site establishment and use, evidenced by increases in discard of cultural materials, particularly stone artefacts; changes in stone artefact technologies, rock art styles and fishing technologies; the increased use of some marginal landscapes, such as offshore islands and the arid zone; changes in resource use, including the intensive utilisation of new foods such as cycads, cereals and some marine resources; evidence for long-distance exchange networks; an increase in the establishment of bounded cemeteries; and increased external contact, evidenced by the introduction of the dingo, fishhooks and some forms of watercraft (e.g. Beaton 1982;Bowdler 1981;David 2002; Flood 1980Flood , 1999Flood et al 1987;Godwin 1997;Hiscock 1994;Lourandos 1980aLourandos , 1983Lourandos , 1985Lourandos , 1988Lourandos , 1993Lourandos , 1997Lourandos and Ross 1994;Mulvaney 1969;Smith 1986;White and O'Connell 1982).These changes have been variously explained by one or a combination of five main arguments: -as an artefact of site preservation factors, including differential destruction and visibility (e.g. Bird 1992;Fanning and Holdaway 2001;Godfrey 1989;Head 1983;O'Connor and Sullivan 1994a, 1994b;Rowland 1983Rowland , 1989); -as a product of environmental factors, particularly resource productivity and availability (e.g.…”

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Coastal Themes: An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland : An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland

Ulm¹

2006

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terra australis 24Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present.Since the beginning of the series, the basic colour on the spine and cover has distinguished the regional distribution of topics as follows: ochre for Australia, green for New Guinea, red for South-East Asia and blue for the Pacific Islands. From 2001, issues with a gold spine will include conference proceedings, edited papers and monographs which in topic or desired format do not fit easily within the original arrangements. All volumes are numbered within the same series. List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3 994.01Copyright of the text remains with the contributors/authors, 2006. This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. THE RESEARCH DOCUMENTED here represents the first systematic archaeological work in this area of the southeast Queensland coast and was undertaken as a major part of a larger, multicomponent project concerning archaeology and cultural heritage in the traditional country of Gooreng Gooreng speaking people. Sean's task was to build upon the results of exploratory site survey and excavation to address two key concerns. The first was the relationship of patterns of cultural change in his study area to those described elsewhere in southeast Queensland. The second was to ensure that any such comparisons were taphonomically well-founded, particularly with regard to the analytical integrity of the shell middens upon which he and other coastal researchers in Australia rely so heavily. Sean took to this task with a vengeance, closely surveying a large area of landscape and excavating an array of site types to provide himself with a solid sample of the archaeological variation thus revealed. Though most were not archaeologically rich, these sites provided substantial grist for Sean's taphonomic mill, prompting him to adapt conjoining techniques to work on bivalve shellfish -a simple but clever innovation -as well as to undertake much more sophisticated work on local variation in correction factors for the radiocarbon dating of marine shell. In the end, he was able to distil the three-phase cul...

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Section: The Continental Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Continental Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coastal Themes: An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland : An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland

Ulm¹

2006

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“…The 'intensification debate' (Lourandos 1985, Lourandos andRoss 1994) characterises late Holocene increases in the number of sites and changes in their uses. A number of researchers have explored the archaeological evidence for Holocene demographic and technological changes in a range of different environments (e.g.…”

Section: Diachronic Variation In the Art Of The Sydney Basinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

McDonald¹

2008

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Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3 vi Dreamtime Superhighway: an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange FOREWORD I remember the visit with clarity: it was 1991 and my first trip to Australia. One day was spent at Sydney's West Head with the young and enthusiastic Jo McDonald, where we toured some of the rock engraving sites and the painted Great Mackerel rock shelter. I can still see the large flat curving rocks at West Head on which animals had been engraved -fish, kangaroos, a goanna. And, as is so often the case when I visit rock art sites, my imagination gets going as to the 'how's' and 'why's'. I try to run some sort of a show in my head as to the people who produced these, viewed these, and what kinds of significations the images and their makings played in the lives of past peoples. At the time of this visit, Jo McDonald was well into her 1994 dissertationthe work upon which this monograph is based. Already, in that PhD dissertation, she was able to touch on some of the things that my imagination was searching for. Thus, it is with great pleasure and even more enthusiasm that I am writing this Foreword to a revised and thoroughly up-dated monograph based on that initial dissertation research.At the time of the 1994 dissertation, the anthropological and archaeological study of 'rock art' was really emerging into new trends and new prominence. Surely Australia was one of the leaders in the training of students and in the research that contextualized the images and 'art', thanks to such scholars as Andrée Rosenfeld, Robert Layton, and John Clegg among others. By this time, the work of David Lewis-Williams and colleagues in southern Africa had set off numerous studies world-wide into the relationship between the production of rock art images and altered states of consciousness and the role of shamans in image-making practices. But this was not the direction or focus of rock art studies in Australia, and McDonald's original work would not be tempted either. Rather, she carried out an extensive project of contextualizing the rock art in question, and in two different ways. First, she wanted to give us an understanding of the rock art in its archaeological contexts-sheltered or open, dates and chronologies, site types and, in general, what the archaeology c...

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“…1) subsequently have been reworked to include a more nuanced understanding of "the filling of the continent" (p. 453 in ref. 15) as variably dependent on a matrix of biogeographic (16), ecological/climatic (17), and sociological/technological (18,19) facilitators of-or barriers to-dispersal from an initial point of entry in the north (20). The vast interior of the continent is now viewed as a mosaic of potential oases, corridors, and barriers, with the viability of a specific region for occupation or transit also depending on the trajectories of environmental change (21)(22)(23)(24).…”

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confidence: 99%

Humans, water, and the colonization of Australia

Bird

O’Grady

Ulm

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The Pleistocene global dispersal of modern humans required the transit of arid and semiarid regions where the distribution of potable water provided a primary constraint on dispersal pathways. Here, we provide a spatially explicit continental-scale assessment of the opportunities for Pleistocene human occupation of Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. We establish the location and connectedness of persistent water in the landscape using the Australian Water Observations from Space dataset combined with the distribution of small permanent water bodies (springs, gnammas, native wells, waterholes, and rockholes). Results demonstrate a high degree of directed landscape connectivity during wet periods and a high density of permanent water points widely but unevenly distributed across the continental interior. A connected network representing the least-cost distance between water bodies and graded according to terrain cost shows that 84% of archaeological sites >30,000 y old are within 20 km of modern permanent water. We further show that multiple, well-watered routes into the semiarid and arid continental interior were available throughout the period of early human occupation. Depletion of high-ranked resources over time in these paleohydrological corridors potentially drove a wave of dispersal farther along well-watered routes to patches with higher foraging returns.Sahul | Pleistocene colonization | radiocarbon | human dispersal | paleohydrological corridor

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The Great ‘Intensification Debate’: Its History And Place In Australian Archaeology

Cited by 58 publications

References 65 publications

Coastal Themes: An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland : An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland

Coastal Themes: An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland : An Archaeology of the Southern Curtis Coast, Queensland

Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

Humans, water, and the colonization of Australia

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