A CELEBRATION OF THE HISTORY, CULTURE, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF RECHERCHE BAY
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Auditorium Hobart, Tasmania
26–28 February 2007

Tasmanian archaeology and language origins
Professor Iain Davidson

Iain Davidson began his life as an archaeologist in the 1960s, working in England, France, Jordan, Knossos, Turkey and other parts of the east Mediterranean. He joined UNE in 1974, and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology in 1997. He was Head of his Department or School from 1993 to 2000. Iain has worked on the Spanish Palaeolithic, the archaeology and ethnography of Northwest Queensland, Australian rock art, archaeology and heritage, and language origins. He has contributed discussions of interpreting animals as evidence of prehistoric economy, the use of ethnography in archaeological interpretation, evidence of non-human primates for understanding language origins, the interface between psychology and archaeology, problems of understanding the 'meaning' of prehistoric art, and the relations between stone tools and cognition. He has worked on projects with Undekerebina, Yulluna, Kalkadoon, Darug, Wonarua, Anaiwan and Gamilaraay people. He obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and has been a Fellow of the Collegium Budapest, Hungary. While President of the Australian Archaeological Association, he ensured the adoption of the first Code of Ethics for the Association. From 2000 to 2006 he was the foundation Director of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at UNE.

The first colonisation of Australia required language. Although language must have emerged earlier and elsewhere, no earlier evidence for language origins is generally agreed upon. As language is a form of communication using symbols, we might expect that the earliest archaeological record of all parts of Australia would be full of evidence for material symbols, but it has been suggested that this is not the case (as it is also not the case in North America or in the putative cradle of language in southern Africa. In fact the evidence from mainland Australia for symbol-use only becomes abundantly recognisable after the dates for separation of Tasmania from the mainland. The archaeological record of the first Tasmanians, therefore, is the key to understanding the apparently paradoxical scarcity of symbol-use throughout Australia.

Language and symbol-use lie at the heart of human cultures and it is through them that people are able to structure their lives symbolically, make choices about their uses of the environment, and work out novel ways to survive in unfamiliar territory. The archaeological record of Tasmanians shows that they were able to do this in the past, as they are today. I will explore the implications of this observation for understanding how hunter-gatherers generated diverse behaviours in Tasmania and other parts of Australia.