This multidisciplinary book focuses on the relationships and interactions between palaeobiogeography, biogeography, dispersal, vicariance, migrations and evolution of organisms in the SE Asia-Australasian region. The book investigates biogeographic links between SE Asia and Australasia which go back more than 500 million years. It also focuses on the links between geological evolution and biological migrations and evolution in the region. It was in the SE Asian region that Alfred Russell Wallace established his biogeographic line, now known as Wallace's Line, which was the beginning of biogeography. Wallace also independently developed his theory of evolution based on his work in this area. The book brings together, for the first time, geologists, palaeontologists, zoologists, botanists, entomologists, evolutionary biologists and archaeologists, in the one volume, to relate the region's geological past to its present biological peculiarities. The book is organized into six sections. Section 1 Paleobiogeographic Background provides overviews of the geological and tectonic evolution of SE Asia-Australasia, and changing patterns of land and sea for the last 540 million years. Section 2 Palaeozoic and Mesozoic Geology and Biogeography discusses Palaeozoic and Mesozoic biogeography of conodonts, brachiopods, plants, dinosaurs and radiolarians and the recognition of ancient biogeographic boundaries or Wallace Lines in the region. Section 3 Wallace's Line focuses on the biogeographic boundary established by Wallace, including the history of its establishment, its significance to biogeography in general and its applicability in the context of modern biogeography. Section 4 Plant biogeography and evolution includes discussion on primitive angiosperms, the diaspora of the southern rushes, and environmental, climatic and evolutionary implications of plants and palynomorphs in the region. The biogeography and migration of insects, butterflies, birds, rodents and other non-primate mammals is discussed in section 5, Non Primates. The final section 6 Primates focuses on the biogeographic radiation, migration and evolution of primates and includes papers on the occurrence and migration of early hominids and the requirements for human colonization of Australia.

The colonial history of nineteenth-century Queensland was arguably dominated by the actions of the Native Mounted Police, Australia's most punitive native policing force. The centrality of the Native Mounted Police to the sustained economic success of Queensland for over half a century, and their widespread, devastating effects on Aboriginal societies across the colony, have left a complex legacy. For non-Indigenous Queenslanders, a process of obscuring the Native Mounted Police began perhaps as soon as a detachment was removed from an area, reflected today in the minimisation of the Native Mounted Police in official histories and their omission from non-Indigenous heritage lists. In contrast, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Database preserves several elements of frontier conflict and Native Mounted Police presence, giving rise to parallel state-level narratives, neither of which map directly onto local and regional memory. This highlights potential issues for formal processes of truth-telling relating to frontier conflict that have recently been initiated by the Queensland and Federal Governments. Of particular concern is the form that such a process might adopt. Drawing on a 4-year project to document the workings of the Queensland Native Mounted Police through archival, archaeological and oral historical sources, we suggest that this conflicted and conflictual heritage can best be bridged through empathetic truth-telling, using Rothberg's notion of the implicated subject to consider contemporary contexts of responsibility and connect present-day Queenslanders with this difficult, divisive and disruptive past.

Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that subject, and the seer. Through the stories of the producer and the seers, this system implicated members of society in ways that were not limited to the images produced. By tying those stories to particular places, rock art influenced society more broadly through foraging choices and ritual. Because the persisting marks of rock art necessarily required storytelling, the stories penetrated the mental lives of people in the society. Interwoven with these considerations is the observation that for archaeologists, the producer, the stories and the original seers are gone and all that is left is the material of the rock art and the archaeologist. Writing archaeohistory from these materials requires interpretation in light of the archaeological evidence distributed across both space and time. One way of interpreting archaeohistory suggests that rock art played a significant role in cognitive evolution through its engagement in ritual.

Oscar Moro Abadía & Martin Porr (ed.). 2021. Ontologies of rock art: images, relational approaches, and Indigenous knowledges. Abingdon: Routledge; 978-0-367-33780-3 hardback £120. - Volume 96 Issue 389

Lithic assemblages associated with Indigenous Australian built structures are underexplored. The Hilary Creek Site 1 (HCS1) complex, western Queensland, comprising at least 16 stone-based hut structures and multiple stone arrangements, also contains a surface assemblage of thousands of flaked stone artefacts. Analysis of a sample of this assemblage provides novel insights into the technology and role of flaked stone artefacts at this site, revealing trends in production reminiscent of industries found elsewhere in arid Australia, including the highly standardised tula adze technology. The nature of the HCS1 complex, revealed through a combination of Indigenous knowledge, historical research and archaeology, facilitates exploration of theoretical models seeking to detect aspects of social learning amongst those making flaked stone artefacts. We offer social learning theory as a novel way to expand on the significance of lithic technology at this unique site - a Pitta Pitta place of teaching, learning, and youth initiation - and present new directions for theoretical modelling of flaked stone artefact variability in Australian archaeology.

The Archaeology of Seeing: Science and Interpretation, the Past and Contemporary Visual Art. LILIANA JANIK. 2020. Routledge, New York. xiii + 233 pp. $46.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-429-34333-9. - Volume 87 Issue 3

Abstract This article considers some of the uncertainties about the position of oral traditions in relation to historical studies with written texts and in the narrative studies derived from archaeological evidence that may be called archaeohistories. There are issues about the ways in which we learn about Indigenous peoples, sometimes using non-Indigenous people as intermediaries and sometimes, though rarely, in the direct voices of Indigenous peoples. This article discusses the relationships among oral history, oral tradition, history from written texts, and archaeohistory, including the role of sanctification in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the accuracies of these sources given the different time and personal scales over which they operate. Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in different parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include narratives about different sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the complex interplay of memory and forgetting, verifiable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and different classes of historical knowledge. Application of different cultural knowledge to these sources by different agents produces different accounts of the past.

El Niño cave, located on the south-eastern border of the Spanish Meseta, hosts a discontinuous sequence including Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic levels, along with Upper Palaeolithic and Levantine style paintings. It is a key site for understanding human occupations of inland Iberia during the Palaeolithic and early prehistory. This paper summarises the main results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at defining the prehistoric human occupations at the site.

This paper explores the notion of absence as a key, but elusive, element in the contemporary recognition, perception and reception of Australian frontier conflict. It derives from a four-year-long community archaeology project to document the lives and legacies of a devastating frontier paramilitary policing force – the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP). The sources of absence in the heritage of the NMP are complex, deriving from silences in historical records, the partial nature of archaeological data, and the vicissitudes of memory work. We offer an introductory taxonomy for the kinds of absence that characterize the NMP and use this to consider the potency of absence in theorizing, reconstructing, defending and interpreting the heritage of Australian frontier conflict.

It seems likely that there is an argument to be developed here about the emergence of the ‘Western’ styles of scene representation (which is by no means confi ned to Western rock art traditions). Just as the emergence of naturalism through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world during the European Renaissance, so changes in the ways images of animals were represented with other animals probably testify to changes in the ways people saw the world.

This paper reports on an Aboriginal site complex, incorporating hut structures, ceremonial stone arrangements, an extensive surface artefact assemblage of lithics and mussel shell, and a silcrete quarry, located along Hilary Creek, a tributary of the Georgina River in western Queensland, Australia. At least two phases of occupation are indicated. The most recent huts have their collapsed organic superstructure still present, while those of a presumably earlier phase are distinguished as bare, circular patches of earth which are conspicuous amongst the ubiquitous gibber, with or without stone bases, and lacking any collapsed superstructure. Immediately adjacent to the huts and also a few hundred metres away are clusters of small stone arrangements, and about 2 km to the southwest, along the same creekline, is another series of larger, more substantial stone arrangements; these features speak to the importance of the general Hilary Creek area for ceremonial purposes. Radiocarbon dating reveals use of the Hilary Creek complex dates to at least 300 years ago; the absence of any European materials suggests it was likely not used, or only used very sporadically, after the 1870s when pastoralists arrived in the area, and when traditional lifeways were devastated by colonial violence.