Torres Strait Archaeology and Material Culture
IAN J MCNIVEN AND MICHAEL QUINNELL(editors). Torres Strait Archaeology and Material Culture.
From the Preface:
This special issue of the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum Cultural Heritage Series brings together a wide range of scholarship on the archaeology and material culture of Torres Strait undertaken over the last 20 years. With renewed archaeological interest in the region, much of the earlier scholarship was in danger of being forgotten or even lost. Thus the volume benchmarks current archaeological understandings of Torres Strait to lay foundations for the next generation of archaeological research. While most papers concern Torres Strait Islander history Bepotaim (before the Coming of the Light), attention is also given to the archaeology of shipwrecks, the pearling industry and stone tool use across the adjacent Papuan lowlands. The papers show how fruitful research results occur when a synergy exists between material heritage (including archaeological and museum items), historical records and contemporary oral testimony. The secret to such synergies is meaningful collaborations between outsiders (mostly university researchers) and Torres Strait Islanders. Yet formal academic publications resulting from such collaborative research is only part of the story. Torres Strait Islanders only see value in the results of collaborative research if it complements existing Islander narratives and processes of history and identity construction. Thus, the papers in this volume - all authored by non-Islanders - represent only one dimension of the history building process. The end result of that process for Islanders resides within Torres Strait Islander communities beyond the gaze of outsiders. Outsiders will only ever come to understand and appreciate these end results when they are expressed through Islander worldviews in publications either co-authored by Torres Strait Islanders or written and researched by Islanders themselves.
To ensure that scholarship produces useful and complementary information, a number of Islander communities across the Torres Strait have begun hosting long-term archaeological research projects. While most research involves archaeologists from the Programme for Australian Indigenous Archaeology at Monash University in Melbourne, a range of other institutions such as James Cook University in Townsville have commitments to researching the region's long-term history. But just as Torres Strait Islander communities have entered into research partnerships to better understand their past, commitment is required from government heritage agencies for ongoing protection and management of the region's rich archaeological heritage. All of the papers in this volume are based upon research on material heritage that requires active management to be available to future generations of Torres Strait Islanders.
A key issue that pervades Torres Strait's more than 2500 years of human history is the region's dynamic role as a bridge and barrier to cultural and environmental processes between the Australian and Melanesian worlds. This dynamism reflects the fundamental fact that Torres Strait Islanders today, as in the past, are one of the world's most specialised maritime peoples, weaving complex webs of social, political and economic ties between island communities and between island and nearby mainland communities. For thousands of years, material culture, food items, plants and animals were moved around the region to create the highly anthropomorphised land- and seascapes that we see today. In fact, the more we look into the long-term history of the region, the more we appreciate that Torres Strait Islanders modified and made their world. The history of this constructed world is both dynamic and complex owing to a mosaic of island, reef, and sea habitats coupled with myriad distinctive Islander communities and cultures. Papers in this volume reveal some of the ways archaeological research allows us to access some of the familiar and not so familiar historical dimensions of this constructed world.