Without the artefact richness of Western Europe, Griffiths notes, Australian archaeologists work with a subtle material archive: “They read history in landscapes and vegetation, percussion marks and plant residue, sediment and stone arrangements.” One of Griffith’s archaeologists suggests a billion people may have lived on this continent, a realisation that forces a changed way of thinking about Australian history.īut those billion voices speak softly. They developed attachment to place – to country.Įach of his chapters explores an individual’s relationship with a site or region, setting up a history of archaeology in this country from the late 1950s to the present, and a map of the changing way we think about the link between past and present. He saw the archaeologists work – not just the science they applied but their relationships to the cultures they unearthed. It is this Australian journey that Billy Griffiths takes us on in Deep Time Dreaming.Īs Griffiths notes, Australians – or at least those who arrived in the past 240 years – have an uneasy relationship with the history of their continent, particularly struggling to comprehend and accommodate the Indigenous strand.Ī historian, the author spent years around archaeological digs as cook, camp manager, labourer or observer. But its most human face arguably looks the other way, with archaeology bringing us an understanding of a shared human culture from the deep past to a point where the historians take the baton. We often think of science as a forward-facing discipline, bringing the promise of tomorrow and the solutions to the problems that lie there.

Deep Time Dreaming by Billy Griffiths