Harrison, Rodney
(2002).
Australia’s Iron Age: Aboriginal post-contact metal artefacts from Old Lamboo station, southeast Kimberley, WA.
Australasian Historical Archaeology, 20 pp. 67–76.
Abstract
While Aboriginally flaked bottle glass artefacts have been widely described in the Australian archaeological literature as the type fossil of Aboriginal post-contact sites, the introduction of metal as a raw material had a far wider and longer-term impact on the development of post-contact indigenous technologies. However, Aboriginally produced metal artefacts have been poorly described in the archaeological literature. This paper describes an assemblage of post-contact manufactured metal artefacts collected as part of archaeological investigations of the Aboriginal pastoral worker’s encampments at Old Lamboo Station, a cattle station located in the southeast Kimberley region of Western Australia. The paper concludes with observations regarding the potential for a study of regional variation in post-contact artefact forms and the need for a more mature approach that acknowledges the complexities in meaning which have been attributed to unmodified ‘western’ objects by indigenous people in colonial contexts.
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