The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts
Australia’s deserts form the largest and most distinctive arid region in the Southern Hemisphere. A wealth of detailed new data on their environmental history and archaeology has become available over the last decade, revealing a more dynamic and deeper history than previously thought.
Wednesday 27 March 2013
Mike Smith National Museum of Australia, Canberra Cambridge World Archaeology, ISBN-13: 9780521407458. This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, one of the world's major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia's deserts, the formation of distinctive desert societies, and the origins and development of the hunter-gatherer societies documented in the classic nineteenth-century ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen. Written by one of Australia's leading desert archaeologists, the book interweaves a lively history of research with archaeological data in a masterly survey of the field and a profoundly interdisciplinary study that forces archaeology into conversations with history and anthropology, economy and ecology, and geography and Earth sciences.
Read a review by Nicolas RothwellPublisher's website