The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction
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The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction Jane Lydon & Jeremy Ash
Published online: 19 January 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract Missions have long been recognized as spaces of colonial contact and cultural exchange, and they are significant places in Indigenous landscapes today. However, archaeologists have only recently begun to explore such places across Australasia. This collection canvasses a range of approaches to this dynamic field. Keywords Missions . Australasia . Colonialism . Exchange Missions have long been recognized as spaces of colonial contact and cultural exchange, and they are significant places in Indigenous landscapes today. However, archaeologists in Australasia have been slow to explore these important sites. This special issue addresses the archaeology of Indigenous missions in Australasia, and canvasses new archaeological approaches that have begun to emerge in Australasia, toward understanding the role of missions and reserves within colonialism. The collection has its origin in a session from ‘New Ground’; a conference of the major Australian archaeological associations held in Sydney 2007, and has been supplemented by three solicited papers (see Birmingham and Wilson, Ireland, and Smith). We believe that the research represented here is relevant to debates about colonialism and archaeology and deserves a wider audience. Missions are key places in the history of the “colonial encounter” in many settlersocieties. From the earliest decades of invasion, colonists sought to confine Indigenous peoples within defined and secluded bounds. Although this process of segregation varied across colonies and time period, it became a central element in antipodean Aboriginal policy. Missions as archaeological sites are particularly revealing of the dynamics of power relations, and the role of space in controlling and J. Lydon (*) Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia e-mail: [email protected] J. Ash Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2010) 14:1–14
effecting social change. Both in a regional and an international context, missions have been understood as didactic or even carceral landscapes, and often evidence a heavily orchestrated form of interaction between Indigenous peoples and Europeans. Indeed, since the 1960s, accounts of such places have ranged from hagiography to condemnation, focusing on whether they were “good” or “bad” for Indigenous people. Now, however, attention is shifting to issues such as the current status of these sites in Indigenous and local community memory, their representation by various colonial interests, the power of didactic landscapes and spatial relationships to shape human interaction, the role of material culture in the process of exchange, and Indigenous responses to missionization.
Defining Missions In her review of mission archaeology in North America an
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