
Peter HiscockUniversity of Queensland | UQ · School of Social Science
Peter Hiscock
BA, PhD, DSc
Peter is Honorary Professor at University of Queensland, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Griffith University.
About
173
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Introduction
I am an archaeologist interested in evolution of technology and social organisation, including religion and other ideologies. Increasingly I advocate for improved workplace understanding of and opportunity for people with ASD and ADHD.
Education
November 2012 - December 2012
April 1982 - November 1988
March 1977 - November 1979
Publications
Publications (173)
For most of the period of human occupation of Sahul (the combined Pleistocene landmass of Australia and New Guinea), lower sea levels exposed an extensive area of the northwest of the Australian continent, connecting the Kimberley and Arnhem Land into one vast area. Our analysis of high-resolution bathymetric data shows this now-drowned region exis...
Across the Australian continent, backed artefacts are produced in enormous numbers during the mid‐late Holocene. Previous examinations have revealed variation in the average shape of these artefacts, at both continental and regional scales. To better understand the factors creating this variability, we examine a large assemblage of backed artefacts...
Silcrete heat treatment was the earliest known transformative process enhancing the mechanical properties of materials. Its study has implications for our understanding of the cultural evolution of early humans in the Middle Stone Age and southern Africa. Here, we analyze a silcrete assemblage from the South African site Klein Kliphuis. We first in...
Unresolved questions about the nature and coherence of microlithic production in Sri Lanka underlay many discussions about the microlith tradition in this region as well as the origins of those technologies and norms. Previous studies have not examined whether there were changes over time in the form of the microliths themselves, and in this paper,...
Siran Upendra Deraniyagala was a remarkable and influential figure in South Asian Paleolithic archaeology. His extensive excavations of Palaeolithic sites, his massive synthesis of chronology and ecological context of prehistoric life in Sri Lanka, contributions to conservation and research policy in his country, and his support of later generation...
Archaeological evidence of technology reflects myriad influences on past life, including economic contexts and mobility, which remain at the forefront of archaeological science. Given that forager groups needed to anticipate future technological needs and often had to transport tools, provisioning was necessary to enhance foraging success. Scheduli...
The Still Bay is a key technocomplex within the Middle Stone Age (MSA), and Sibudu, in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, provides one of the longest and richest pre-Still Bay to Still Bay sequences. It has been hypothesised that the Still Bay industry emerged through technological revolution or alternatively through gradual change. In this paper we con...
Modern satellite imaging offers radical new insights of the challenges and opportunities confronting traditional Aboriginal ecology and land use in Australia’s Western Desert. We model the likely dynamics of historic and precontact desert land use using Earth observation data to identify the distribution of suitable foraging habitats. Suitability w...
Ground-edge artefacts (GEAs), also known as ground-edge axes, are an independent innovation that date to the earliest sites in Sahul (the continental landmass of Australia and New Guinea). During the Pleistocene, these tools were localized to the northern parts of the continent. Over time, significant changes took place in the distribution of GEAs,...
This article re-envisages the human settlement of Australia’s deserts. It makes a case for their early occupation at the continental scale (a) by c. 60 ka; (b) during an early wet phase; (c) with rapid expansion of people; (d) relying on water features; and (e) showing changes through time in response to changing regional conditions. It is now well...
Signalling is a critical capacity in modern human cultures but it has often been difficult to identify and understand on lithic artefacts from pre-literate contexts. Often archaeologists have minimized the signalling role of lithic tools by arguing for strong form-function relationships that constrained signalling or else imposed ethnographic infor...
Heat treatment of stone for tool making has important implications for our understanding of the early human history of the Australian continent. New data on the antiquity of Australian heat treatment and its evolution through time in different regions have posed questions about the origin and temporal stability of technical practices. In this paper...
Cover: The cover image is based on the Research Article Reflecting on siliceous rocks in central Australia: Using advanced remote sensing to map ancient “tool‐stone‐ resources by Wallace Boone Law et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.21776.
A synthetic history of human land use
Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....
Religious stories of Australian Aboriginal people, myths, were not stable and long lasting; they were often short-lived and frequently changed. High rates of turnover in narrative content allowed them to incorporate accurate reference to short-lived resources, but was a significant obstacle to the preservation of a story over long periods. Evidence...
HyMap™ airborne hyperspectral imagery was used to discriminate and map hydrated silica mineralization in the Dalhousie Springs area of central Australia. A spectral feature fitting algorithm was used to match laboratory reference spectra with image pixel spectra, producing a scaled goodness‐of‐fit raster map of silicified “tool‐stone” sources in ou...
Religious stories of Australian Aboriginal people, myths, were not stable and long lasting; they were often short-lived and frequently changed. High rates of turnover in narrative content allowed them to incorporate accurate reference to short-lived resources, but was a significant obstacle to the preservation of a story over long periods. Evidence...
A previous use‐wear and residue analysis of backed artefacts from Deep Creek Shelter showed that they had a range of functions and had been used with a variety of raw materials. Were non‐backed retouched flakes at Deep Creek used for different purposes? To answer this question, 40 non‐backed specimens were selected for microscopic use‐wear and resi...
We document long-term evolution in the rate of heat treatment in Eastern Australia and explore them as a technological response to dynamic industrial and social contexts that developed in the last 25 millennia. We employed methods previously used in Africa but novel in Australia to infer long-term directional changes in the relative frequency of si...
In Australia lithic technologies were entangled in the diverse processes by which people occupied environmental and social niches. Over the last few millennia, technological shifts were synchronized to paleoenvironmental transitions, but the mechanisms connecting technology and environment were multivalent. The mid-to-late-Holocene-intensified use...
The question "How common is convergence?" remains unanswered and may be unanswerable. Our examples indicate that even the minimum detectable levels of convergence are often high, and we conclude that at all levels convergence has been greatly underestimated.-Moore and Willmer (1997: 1) Convergence in stone-tool technology, much like in biology, was...
Scholars from a variety of disciplines consider cases of convergence in lithic technology, when functional or developmental constraints result in similar forms in independent lineages.
Hominins began using stone tools at least 2.6 million years ago, perhaps even 3.4 million years ago. Given the nearly ubiquitous use of stone tools by humans and the...
en Watura Jurnti (DAA #6287) was first occupied in 42000–45000 BP, with evidence of occupation continuing through the arid LGM and deglacial period to c.15000 BP. There was a very pronounced reduction in both occupation and deposition between c.15000 and 1500 BP. The small size and nature of the stone artefact assemblage indicates that use of the s...
Landscapes throughout any region vary in the resources they contain. We investigate how Holocene forager populations adapted to this variation in a linear sand dune desert of arid South Australia. We use data from surface scatters of stone artefacts collected during pedestrian survey to compare behaviours at landform boundaries to behaviours at the...
This review focuses on the relationships between palaeoenvironmental change and prehistoric occupation in the driest part of the Australian arid zone. Palaeoclimatic evidence from the last ∼60 ka identified fluctuating periods of wet and dry conditions during the late Pleistocene and Holocene. For most of this period conditions were arid, including...
We report evidence for the world’s earliest ground-edge axe, 44–49,000 years old. Its antiquity coincides with or immediately follows the arrival of humans on the Australian landmass.Ground/polished axes are not associated with the eastward dispersal of Homo sapiens across Eurasia and the discovery of axes in Australia at the point of colonisation...
We report evidence for the world’s earliest ground-edge axe, 44–49,000 years old. Its antiquity coincides with or immediately follows the arrival of humans on the Australian landmass. Ground/polished axes are not associated with the eastward dispersal of Homo sapiens across Eurasia and the discovery of axes in Australia at the point of colonisation...
Our paper (Attenbrow and Hiscock ) raised serious concerns about the use of radiocarbon dates (sum probability distributions) as evidence of ancient demography. Prominent researchers who commented here and who rely on such interpretations are uncomfortable with our critique, and insist that quantities of dates are a reliable indicator of past popul...
Archaeological excavations at Ingaanjalwurr rockshelter in western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, have revealed evidence of human settlement on the East Alligator River floodplain from approximately 1900 years ago through to the twentieth-century. This short report summarises the results of archaeological excavations at the site, focusing on date...
Bipolar techniques enable knappers to (i) fracture very small lithic cores, (ii) reduce cores to a smaller size than is convenient and efficient with freehand knapping techniques, and (iii) to remove relatively large flakes from those small cores. In this paper the capacity of bipolar percussion knapping to extend reduction is explored with a model r...
Archaeological excavations at Bindjarran rockshelter in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, have revealed evidence of human settlement on the East Alligator River floodplain from the terminal Pleistocene through to the twentieth century. This excavation report summarises the archaeological, ethnographic and rock art research from the site, fo...
In recent decades, two different hypotheses have competed as the best explanation for the variability observed in Mousterian implements from the Dordogne. One model advocates the primacy of retouch intensity in models explaining morphological diversity in ancient tools, with some researchers arguing this is the sole significant factor creating typo...
Volume 1 of The Cambridge World History is an introduction to both the discipline of world history and the earliest phases of world history up to 10,000 BCE. In Part I leading scholars outline the approaches, methods, and themes that have shaped and defined world history scholarship across the world and right up to the present day. Chapters examine...
Can archaeologists describe human population size and population growth in prehistoric Australia? This question is at the heart of some of the most intense debates about Australian prehistory: investigations into the spread of people into Australia, the rate of dispersal of people across the continent and the impact of colonisers on the environment...
Throughout the Palaeolithic and across the globe small, regular cores were made using bipolar techniques,
in which the object was placed between an anvil and hammer. While there has been much discussion about
whether they might have been used as tools or were debris from a manufacturing process it is likely that
both are true in different locations...
The discovery and initial excavation of Dabangay in 2006 established a 7200 year chronology for human settlement on Mabuyag (Mabuiag) in western Torres Strait. This was one of only two Torres Strait sites to pre-date 4000 years ago, providing a rare opportunity to study human activities spanning the mid-to-late Holocene. Remarkable organic preserva...
Geographical variation in backed artefact size and morphology has long been recognised in Australia. This paper evaluates a novel measure of symmetry that can quantify regional and continental-scale geographic patterns in backed artefact forms. The result indicates that we can construct new depictions of regional differences in Australian backed ar...
A study of lithic artefacts at Haua Fteah, North Africa, documents the recycling of scrapers and burins during the period 70–15,000 BP. Rates of recycling are high during the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic but far lower during the post-LGM Epi-palaeolithic industry. These data indicate that factors other than cognitive capacity and ‘modern behaviour...
This article reconsiders the early hominid “lithic niche” by examining the social implications of stone artifact making. I reject the idea that making tools for use is an adequate explanation of the elaborate artifact forms of the Lower Palaeolithic, or a sufficient cause for long-term trends in hominid technology. I then advance an alternative mec...
In the Australasian region cultural differentiation, experimentation, and adaptation characterize the global dispersion of Homo sapiens. The migration of humans out of Africa and into Australia was not a singular process governed and guided by persistent traditions; normative and static images of social and economic organization cannot explain the...
Prehistoric stone technologists needed to understand the behaviour of the raw materials they worked with. The physical characteristics and geological sources of stone materials used by the people in the stony and sandridge desert at Olympic Dam in northeastern South Australia are described. Using data on the characteristics of stone artefact assemb...
Recent excavations at the Birriwilk rockshelter in Mikinj Valley, southwest Arnhem Land, have revealed evidence for mid- to late Holocene settlement, including a major period of site use in the last millennium. The site is important to the traditional owners, with a rich oral tradition associated with 'Birriwilk', an ancestor of the Urningangk trib...
Changes in mythology and ritual practice are studied in southern Australia. In the early nineteenth century a reworked set of myths that have incorporated Christian motifs was grafted onto a pre-existing system of axe production, revealing the malleability of cosmological notions and the persistence of the tool production system. Transformations of...
This chapter complements chapter 4 by focusing on the cultural evidence for the origins and dispersal of early Homo sapiens. It points out that the dispersal of modern humans across the Old World was not so clearly marked in the archaeologi-cal record as some earlier models suggested, especially those focused only on Africa, the Near East, and Euro...
The colonization of Australia between 50 and 60 kya required a significant sea crossing in eastern Indonesia, and led to the development of one of the world's most remarkable hunter-gatherer cultural traditions.
The discovery and initial excavation of Dabangay in 2006 established a 7200 year chronology for human settlement on Mabuyag (Mabuiag) in western Torres Strait. This was one of only two Torres Strait sites to pre-date 4000 years ago, providing a rare opportunity to study human activities spanning the mid-to-late Holocene. Remarkable organic preserva...
Close analysis of modern movies reveals — yet archaeologists and historians have failed to understand — that the dominant representation of archaeological research and ancient human culture in mainstream cinema involves explorations of supernatural objects and events. Cinematic archaeology tends to be mythic rather than realistic in focus. Movies f...
After more than a century, debate over the explanation of microliths continues. We review debates on three continents (Australia, India and southern Africa), and argue that depictions of them as purely symbolic items manufactured for public display are implausible. Two different mechanisms dominate recent discussions: 1) exchange of symbolically lo...
POSTER: In south-eastern Australia during the second half of the Holocene a strong correlation exists between climate proxies indicating cooler and drier conditions and the proliferation of small stone tools called backed artefacts. Production of backed artefacts increased significantly between 4000-35000 years BP and their production subsequently...
The distinctive tool called 'tula' is an endemic adaptation, which was adopted by Aboriginal people across central and western Australia, encompassing some two-thirds of the continent. The tula is a hafted tool used for working hardwoods as well as other tasks including butchery and plant-processing. The geographic spread of tulas appears to have b...
Archaeologists have variously used the terms 'indurated mudstone' and 'tuff' as a description for the fine-textured, very hard, yellowish, orange, reddish-brown or grey rocks from the upper Hunter Valley from which many of the stone artefacts there were made. The desire of archaeologists working in the region to offer a precise and accurate geologi...
This study confirms the increased capacity to predict flake mass that arises from more accurately measuring surface area in three dimensions using a digital scanner. We also reveal the existence of significantly different relationships between platform area and flake mass for flakes with different platform types and ventral and dorsal morphologies....
Today studies of lithic technology almost invariably employ models of the reduction process, and often models of the extent of reduction that specimens and classes of tools have undergone. Debates about the explanation of lithic assemblage variability are based upon methods for inferring the nature and extent of reduction. In this paper, we constru...
We report on early occupation from the Parnkupirti site on Salt Pan Creek at Lake Gregory, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert of northwest Australia. OSL ages from excavations, and stratigraphie correlations between dated exposures along Salt Pan Creek, show some stone artefacts in situ in sediments dating from greater than 37ka and most probabl...
The timing of the introduction, proliferation and decline of backed artefacts in Australia has been much debated. In south-eastern Australia, after initially appearing at least 8500 years ago, backed artefacts greatly increased in number between 4000 and 3500 years ago to the extent that they are found in numerous sites and are recorded in large nu...
We report on early occupation from the Parnkupirti site on Salt Pan Creek at Lake Gregory, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert of northwest Australia. OSL ages from excavations, and stratigraphic correlations between dated exposures along Salt Pan Creek, show some stone artefacts in situ in sediments dating from greater than 37ka and most probabl...
There is no ambiguity in the existing empirical support for a GIUR as a robust predictor of mass lost from flakes through unifacial retouching. We demonstrate why the GIUR is a reliable method for inferring mass loss, in appropriate circumstances, and why it is a more powerful predictor of mass loss than touted competitors. We explain why Eren, M.I...
Backed artefacts, otherwise microliths or backed bladelets, are key indicators of cultural practice in early Australia - but what were they used for? The authors review a number of favourite ideas - hunting, scarification, wood working - and then apply use-wear analysis and residue studies to three prehistoric assemblages. These showed contact with...
Complex lithic assemblage variation in Arnhem Land, Australia, was initially explained by suggestions that multiple cultural groups had co-existed or that a single group had used different toolkits as they moved seasonally to exploit temporary resources. These models have proved untenable and differences in assemblage composition across the landsca...
Material ProcurementFlake ProductionQuina ImplementsThe Quina SystemReferences
Conditions in which thermal fractures occur are explored experimentally, and the results are used to assess heat treatment strategies. We conclude that no single ‘critical temperature’ for thermal fracturing or heat treatment can be specified for any particular raw material, as has so often been attempted, because threshold temperatures exist in re...
In this chapter we present a study of flake retouching on one level of the Combe Grenal, located in the Black Perigord of France. We use the results to reflect on existing explanations of Middle Paleolithic tool production and diversity. Our evidence indicates the nonstaged and multilinear character of implement production and the apparent importan...
This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to explore the performance of a variety of reduction measures currently used in international lithic studies. This research expands on previous experiments (Hiscock and Clarkson 2005 a, b) which focused on the changes in reduction indices as flakes were retouched from a single margin. In thi...
IntroductionDepicting the Archaeological ChangesExplanations for Backed Artifact EfflorescenceResearch Programs as Reflections of Desert ImagesReferences
This chapter contains section titled: