Colin Pardoe

Villages and Hamlets of the Barapa, a group living on the Murray River in southeastern Australia. We report on the last field season survey of more than 350 earth mounds organised into larger and smaller clusters. A direct result has been to secure an Environmental Water allocation for one of the recently surveyed villages, at Little Forest just e...

Aboriginal archaeology has a central role to play among the myriad government agencies and professional disciplines involved in land and water management of the Murray River Basin in south-eastern Australia. In this study, we examine managed water flows against the archaeological record which provides secure evidence of how people lived at the Murr...

Little is known about cultural change on the inlets of the northern subcoastal plains of the Alligator Rivers region during the transition period between sea-level highstand c.8,000 BP and the establishment of freshwater wetlands (c.2,000 BP to present). The research presented here begins to fill this gap by illustrating differences in Indigenous l...

Aboriginal archaeology has a central role to play among the myriad government agencies and professional disciplines involved in land and water management of the Murray River Basin in southeastern Australia. In this case study, we examine managed water flows against the archaeological record which provides secure evidence of how people lived in the...

Kiacatoo Man, a large, rugged Aboriginal adult buried in the Lachlan riverine plains of southeastern Australia, was discovered in 2011. Laser-ablation uranium series analysis on bone yielded a minimum age for the burial of 27.4 ± 0.4 ka (2σ). Single-grain, optically stimulated luminescence ages on quartz sediment in which the grave had been dug gav...

The quandong or native peach (Santalum acuminatum R.Br.) has been recognised as an important and tasty food resource among Aboriginal Australians in arid and semi-arid areas of southern Australia. It is valued for its fruit that is consumed raw or dried, and for its kernel, which is eaten raw or ground into paste for medicinal and skin care purpose...

After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repa...

After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repa...

Australia was colonized between 50,000 and 65,000+ years ago. Colonization models have addressed the origin of the first Australians, while the pattern and range of biological variation have increasingly been interpreted within evolutionary processes of adaptation, gene flow, and drift. The social context of research has become increasingly central...

Residues, surface features and wear patterns documented on experimental and ethnographic artefacts form the foundation of residue and usewear reference libraries, from which we can interpret and evaluate the function of archaeological specimens. Here we report controlled experiments to supplement previous studies and document variables that influen...

Tooth ablation has a long history among Australian Aborigines. Here we present a study of four groups along a 370km stretch of the Murray River in southeastern Australia. The frequency and patterning are examined with respect to the individual’s sex, population, and tooth type. Within the study area, ablation is nine times more common among men tha...

The time of arrival of people in Australia is an unresolved question. It is relevant to debates about when modern humans first dispersed out of Africa and when their descendants incorporated genetic material from Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominins. Humans have also been implicated in the extinction of Australia’s megafauna. Here w...

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has a variable record in identifying human burials, being least effective when distinctive burial features such as grave shafts or void spaces are not present, a common situation in Indigenous Australian archaeological sites. A GPR survey was carried out in advance of recent archaeological excavations at Madjedbebe (f...

For three decades, the relative merits of two models for the origin of modern humans - Regional Continuity (Multiregionalism) and Replacement (Out of Africa) - have been hotly contested. Evidence from Australia has been central to both models. This paper examines some of the concepts that underpin this debate and highlights the points on which the...

The Menindee Lakes are a 'chain of ponds' or series of large overflow lakes nestled in the Darling River floodplain, which is situated disconformably in the arid zone. They form an outpost of the greater Southeast, where it meets the Centralian desert. An intensive archaeological survey of the Lakes recorded 4,978 new sites and features at 2,432 lo...

Yes Yes

The rise of cemeteries, extreme biological diversification, size decrease, increased violence, disappearance of megafauna, exploitation of different resources, evolution of rivers to an expanded system of microenvironments, changes in occupation. How are these features of Australian Aboriginal societies in the great river-systems of the southeast r...

Like inspecting your new suit in a dressing room with opposing mirrors, the endlessly rcflccting stance of post-modernism effectively paralysed anthropolo-gists in a crisis of conlidence. How to do anthro-pology when the obsewer affects thc observations, when cultural biases are so entrcnchcd in text that the text and analysis is endlessly taken up...

Peter Brown's critique of Sim and Thorne (1990) is timely and insightful: the puberty of our discipline, where increasing professionalism is accompanied by growing pains, should be enjoyed. With that in mind, I would like to take up a small point with which Brown ends his criticism, namely 'that information of this type is not data in the scientifi...

Forty seven burials exposed by erosion at Wamba yadu dune, near the River Murray in northwestern Victoria, were mapped and information on age, sex, orientation and method of burial collected. Data collection was restricted by preservation and exposure. This locality is a cemetery. Orientation of graves appears typical of the central Murray region,...

In 1987 a female adult skeleton with a small child was found near Dubbo, NSW, during the course of landscape gardening. Although the burials were disturbed by the landscaping work, artefacts found at the time can be associated with the burials. The presence of certain artefacts raises questions concerning the status of the female, and the cause of...

In HG file

The results of our investigation encourage us to think that a bridge can be established between subjects as seenlirrgly diverse as archaeology and genetics. We find that it is possible to interpret patterns of the geographic distribution of genes, something t h a t has long puzzled geneticists. on the basis of events observed in the archaeological...

This thesis seeks to account for patterns of variation of non-metric traits of the skull in Australian Aboriginal skeletal populations. Forty-five features are examined for variation in 38 samples, comprising over 2500 individuals. Two complementary methods are used to describe the data. These are logistic regression and cluster analysis. The forme...

We describe an adult skeleton excavated in 1976 near Chéria, Algeria, in the context of a Capsian escargotière, associated with an absolute date of 9130 B.P. Analysis suggests a young adult male of moderate robustness and c. 181 cm in height. Comparison with published skeletal material from North Africa in Epipalaeolithic context concludes that the...