Archaeology at the University of New England, 1975-6

An account of current research at the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, University of New England, was published in Australian Archaeology 3, just a year ago (Connah, 1975) . The purpose of the present account is to bring the reader up to date with archaeological activities at Armidale over the last year

Current Research at the Department Of Prehistory and Archaeology, University of New England

Research interests include topics outside as well as inside Australia, for instance my own work on the Late Stone Age and Iron Age of West Africa has recently led to the publication of the Archaeology of Benin, by Oxford University Press. Further material is in preparation for publication concerning the Lake Chad area of N.E. Nigeria. Likewise, Iain Davidson is presently completing work on man-environment relationships during the late Pleistocene in Spain

A Hoard of Stone Beads near Lake Chad, Nigeria

In 1980, a small pot containing 622 carnelian and quartz beads was found accidentally at Ala, in the Nigerian part of the clay plain south of Lake Chad. It appears to constitute a hoard of wealth which its owner buried and subsequently failed to retrieve. Beads of this sort first appear in this area in the second half of the first millennium A.D., but also occur in second-millennium deposits. However, they are usually found as grave goods, and the Ala discovery is almost the only example of a hoard of such beads known to the author. Their presence on the stoneless Chadian plain indicates the development of trading contacts with other areas, but neither the source of the raw materials nor the place of manufacture of the beads is known. The quartz could have come from the Cameroon Mountains but the origin of the carnelian, often assumed to be from India, remains problematic. More attention needs to be paid to the possibility of West African sources and production, but there is also an urgent necessity both to compile a corpus of firmly dated material and to conduct characterization studies that could throw more light on the origin of the carnelian

Battlefield Casualty: The Archaeology of a Captured Gun

Many artefacts in museums lack adequate information about the context from which they were collected. Not surprisingly, this often applies to artefacts recovered from battlefields, where chaotic conditions can result in uncertainty about their origins. This paper examines the case of a Second World War German 88 mm gun preserved in an Australian museum. The museum had little contextual information for this weapon, except that the Australian Army captured it in North Africa in 1942, probably after the Second Battle of El Alamein. However, an archaeological analysis of the gun, particularly of damage incurred during battle, can link it to photographs taken after the battle and re-establish its historical context and the circumstances of its acquisition. In this way, a museum artefact can become more than a mere exhibit: it can be made to document its own past

Estimating individual cone fundamentals from their color-matching functions

Estimation of individual spectral cone fundamentals from color-matching functions is a classical and longstanding problem in color science. In this paper we propose a novel method to carry out this estimation based on a linear optimization technique, employing an assumption of a priori knowledge of the retinal absorptance functions. The result is an estimation of the combined lenticular and macular filtration for an individual, along with the nine coefficients in the linear combination that relates their color-matching functions to their estimated spectral-cone fundamentals. We test the method on the individual Stiles and Burch color-matching functions and derive cone-fundamental estimations for different viewing fields and matching experiment repetition. We obtain cone-fundamental estimations that are remarkably similar to those available in the literature. This suggests that the method yields results that are close to the true fundamentals

Lake Innes: Identifying socioeconomic status in the archaeological record

Lake Innes Estate, near Port Macquarie, New South Wales, flourished in the 1830s, declined during the 1840s, and faded away during the late-19th century. In its heyday, its viability was based on the labor of assigned servants who were not free, that is to say transported convicts, but paid free workers were also employed. There was a complex social hierarchy, at the top of which were the residents of Lake Innes House: family members of Major Innes, a retired British army officer. The documentary record for Lake Innes is extensive, but so is the archaeological record. The remains and sites of domestic buildings display differences that reflect the social order of the estate, in which even the servants were divided into several classes. Artifact assemblages provide a similar picture. Small items subject to accidental loss rather than discard are particularly informative, such as coins, buttons, dressmaking pins, and fragments of smoking pipes

Writing about Archaeology

In this book, Graham Connah offers an overview of archaeological authorship: its diversity, its challenges, and its methodology. Based on his own experiences, he presents his personal views about the task of writing about archaeology. The book is not intended to be a technical manual. Instead, Connah aims to encourage archaeologists who write about their subject to think about the process of writing. He writes with the beginning author in mind, but the book will be of interest to all archaeologists who plan to publish their work. Connah's overall premise is that those who write about archaeology need to be less concerned with content and more concerned with how they present it. It is not enough to be a good archaeologist. One must also become a good writer and be able to communicate effectively. Archaeology, he argues, is above all a literary discipline.</jats:p