Chillagoe : from archaeology to prehistory - contributions to a late holocene prehistory of the Chillagoe region, north Queensland

Abstract

I have chosen to begin my thesis with a quote from Foucault for a very specific reason. The reason is this: whereas the ancient practice of history attempted to transform the material by-products of human actions (monuments in Foucault's words) into documents, the underlying assumption behind this work is that I have begun with a document, which I have transformed as a result of the investigations reported in this thesis. The resultant work is itself a monument, which is a product of the socio-cultural conventions through which I, as analyst, have filtered the "data". Now by using the word "history" I refer to the practice of attempting to understand, or decipher, the past. I do not, of course, begin with the assumption that history can be retrieved from its material remains: rather, the practice of history is a transformation. To use Foucault's words, it is an attempt to define the "unities, totalities, series and relations" within the documentary material (Foucault, 1974: 7). The document is not an inert material, in which the historical truth, as past reality, is frozen; it is not a fundamental memory of history. History, rather, reflects the way in which a society perceives its present reality in the face of amassed documentation: it is the current social relations which transforms historical truths into new ones, through the system of ideas to which the analyst has been subjected. As De Saussure (1959: 67) states, a document, as a work represented by symbolic expression (language), is a combination of a concept (symbol as signified) and of an image (symbol as signifier). It is the ideas associated with the document that gives the latter meaning. Show more