Problem Orientation in Australian Historical Archaeology

Abstract

Australian historical archaeologists still have to convince many academics in other disciplines and the public at large that archaeological research concerned with the material record of the last two centuries is a legitimate intellectual pursuit in its own right. In the academic arena, their subject has gained comparatively little attention from departments usually dominated by prehistoric archaeologists and social anthropologists. In the heritage management field, they can find themselves competing with historians, architects, and engineers. An examination of a selection of the published research literature in Australian historical archaeology from the last 30 years suggests that this lack of legitimacy exists because of the sorts of questions that are being asked. Often these have been historical rather than archaeological, but the results have seemed inconsequential to historians. Yet archaeology can offer something that history cannot: it can extract unique information from physical evidence, providing it asks archaeological questions rather than historical ones and uses appropriate processes of archaeological analysis.