Iain Davidson
Professor Iain Davidson (BA, PhD Cambridge, UK). I am Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Humanities at the University of New England and have held honorary positions at Flinders University, Arizona State University, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I worked at the University of New England for 34 years, where I helped start the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. I was awarded a Personal Chair in 1997 which I held until retirement in 2008.
I held the Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 2008-9. I was awarded the Rhys Jones Medal of the Australian Archaeological Association 2010.
I have worked on the Spanish Upper Palaeolithic, archaeology and ethnography of Northwest Queensland, Australian rock art, archaeology and heritage, and language origins.
I have contributed to discussions of interpreting animal bones as evidence of prehistoric economy, use of ethnography in archaeological interpretation, evidence of non-human primates for understanding language origins, the interface between psychology and archaeology, problems of understanding the "meaning" of prehistoric art, and the relations between stone tools and cognition, and the evolution of cognition.
I have held major grants from the Australian Research Council and its predecessors, and from AIATSIS and AINSE, to investigate Aboriginal archaeology, rock art, resource use and museum collections.
I have worked on projects with Anaiwan, Darug, Gamilaraay, Kalkadoon, Undekerebina, Wankamadla, Wonarua, Mitakoodi and Yulluna people. I completed major research projects arising from archaeological consultancy in western Sydney and in the Hunter Valley. My consultancy work has been funded by for BHP Billiton, Cyprus Gold, Department of Environment and Conservation (NPWS), Flinders University, Placer Dome, Rouse Hill Stage 1 Development, Transgrid, Western Mining, Woodside Energy Limited, Xstrata.
My publications include 4 books, 6 edited books, 48 chapters in books and more than 65 articles in refereed journals.
I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and have been a Fellow of the Collegium Budapest, Hungary. While President of the Australian Archaeological Association, I ensured the adoption of the first Code of Ethics for the Association. From 2000 to 2005 I was the foundation Director of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England.
I enjoy taking photographs
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23766603@N07/
Last upload 25 June 2016
Some of my other publications are available as pdfs if you contact me
Phone: 0402106853
Address: 205 Faulkner St
Armidale
NSW 2350
AUSTRALIA
I held the Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 2008-9. I was awarded the Rhys Jones Medal of the Australian Archaeological Association 2010.
I have worked on the Spanish Upper Palaeolithic, archaeology and ethnography of Northwest Queensland, Australian rock art, archaeology and heritage, and language origins.
I have contributed to discussions of interpreting animal bones as evidence of prehistoric economy, use of ethnography in archaeological interpretation, evidence of non-human primates for understanding language origins, the interface between psychology and archaeology, problems of understanding the "meaning" of prehistoric art, and the relations between stone tools and cognition, and the evolution of cognition.
I have held major grants from the Australian Research Council and its predecessors, and from AIATSIS and AINSE, to investigate Aboriginal archaeology, rock art, resource use and museum collections.
I have worked on projects with Anaiwan, Darug, Gamilaraay, Kalkadoon, Undekerebina, Wankamadla, Wonarua, Mitakoodi and Yulluna people. I completed major research projects arising from archaeological consultancy in western Sydney and in the Hunter Valley. My consultancy work has been funded by for BHP Billiton, Cyprus Gold, Department of Environment and Conservation (NPWS), Flinders University, Placer Dome, Rouse Hill Stage 1 Development, Transgrid, Western Mining, Woodside Energy Limited, Xstrata.
My publications include 4 books, 6 edited books, 48 chapters in books and more than 65 articles in refereed journals.
I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and have been a Fellow of the Collegium Budapest, Hungary. While President of the Australian Archaeological Association, I ensured the adoption of the first Code of Ethics for the Association. From 2000 to 2005 I was the foundation Director of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England.
I enjoy taking photographs
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23766603@N07/
Last upload 25 June 2016
Some of my other publications are available as pdfs if you contact me
Phone: 0402106853
Address: 205 Faulkner St
Armidale
NSW 2350
AUSTRALIA
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Papers by Iain Davidson
En este artículo, reviso mi relación con el arte parietal en la Península Ibérica, sobre todo, en la cueva de El Niño y Parpalló, en el mismo contexto que algunas de las publicaciones de Manolo, especialmente las de la cueva de El Mirón. A partir de esa introducción, reflexiono acerca de algunas de las cosas que he aprendido gracias a mi involucración en el estudio del arte parietal australiano y como esa experiencia podría facilitar el conocimiento del arte parietal ibérico.
Mi conclusión es que es imposible interpretar el arte parietal en cuevas sin conocer su contexto arqueológico y, por eso, el trabajo que Lawrence Straus y Manolo González Morales han llevado a cabo en El Mirón es más que importante.
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
sanctication in the survival of knowledge. This discussion includes some consideration of the
accuracies of these sources given the dierent time and personal scales over which they operate.
Illustrating the argument with examples of Indigenous oral knowledge from communities in dierent
parts of eastern Australia, it then discusses the possibility that other Indigenous accounts include
narratives about dierent sea levels around Australia. The article concludes with a discussion of the
complex interplay of memory and forgetting, veriable secular knowledge and ritual beliefs, and
dierent classes of historical knowledge. Application of dierent cultural knowledge to these sources
by dierent agents produces dierent accounts of the past.
mayo de 1970. Aunque la cavidad ya se conocía con anterioridad y había
sido visitada por vecinos de la zona, el descubrimiento se atribuye a
Esteban Rodríguez Tercero, Emilio Rodríguez Tercero y Benito García
Roldán, quienes tras visitar la cueva informaron de la presencia de pinturas rupestres en su interior. La cavidad fue entonces visitada por Samuel
de los Santos, director del Museo de Albacete, quien tras constatar la
relevancia de las representaciones rupestres dio aviso del descubrimiento
a la Dirección General de Bellas Artes. Tras este aviso, la cueva es visitada por Almagro Gorbea (1971), por aquel entonces Conservador del
Museo Arqueológico Nacional, quien certifica la autenticidad y carácter
paleolítico de las pinturas, lo que conlleva el cierre de la misma en el mes
de agosto. También en el mes de mayo de 1970 se descubren las pinturas
rupestres de estilo Levantino situadas en el abrigo exterior de la cavidad,
gracias a tres vecinos de Aýna que visitaron la cueva pocos días después
del descubrimiento, pero antes de que fuese anunciado: Agustín Ortega,
Lorenzo Marco y Eusebio González, quien informó a Almagro Gorbea
de su existencia (Almagro Gorbea, 1971).
This chapter is about how we go about writing archaeohistory, a form of history written about the deep past from archaeological evidence. It is oriented towards an understanding that all knowledge is a product of the histories of the systems that produce it. Knowledge in the present is literally colonised by prior knowledge in the past. Writing such an archaeohistory of hominin and human evolution depends on knowing about the evolution of biology, behaviour and cognition since we shared ancestry and cognition with the ancestors of apes. How we know about them turn out to depend on how we knew about them in the past. Within the process of evolution, modern humans emerged, but because of problems of definition, the history of that emergence is an invention of scholars.
This paper will argue that ‘human origins’ is about the origins of people who are like the author and the readers in every respect as a result of using language. The paper and each of its sections has a title derived from ‘LOLspeak’ but with a deliberately different expansion of the acronym. The intention of this device is to keep to the fore the defining characteristic of language that meanings are conventional.
Australian Aboriginal societies. Analyses of the variation in material culture
in Australia have been relatively underemphasised since scholars became disillusioned
with the hyper-diffusionist assumptions that drove the pioneering
studies by D.S. Davidson (Davidson 1930, 1933, 1934, 1935a, 1935b, 1935c,
1936a, 1936b, 1937a, 1937b, 1937c, 1937d). The present study addressed one
particular approach to variation that derives from Peterson’s (1976a) discussion
of the possibility of defining ‘culture areas’ in Australia delimited by drainage
basins. Peterson’s approach used an analogy with an analysis that had been
applied in North America, and was presented at a conference celebrating the
careers of Birdsell and Tindale, and reflected the interests of its time in territoriality
and ecology (Peterson 1976b). It did not contain any conclusive analysis
showing that social, material or linguistic evidence could be grouped into such
‘culture areas’ in Australia. The approach is now best known through Horton’s
use of drainage basins to group the languages of Australia on a map (Horton
1994). Language groupings were also a theme of Peterson’s initial proposition.
Bowern’s (Bowern and Atkinson 2012) phylogenetic analysis of the relations
among Pama-Nyungan (PN) languages shows that the drainage basins are not
a good way to group languages because many overlap the boundaries of the
basins. That analysis also shows that the historical relationships among the languages
make such bounding ahistorical.
was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22):
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.
The initial intent was to explore the question of scenes in the Paleolithic broadly, but then the question was
expanded to include rock and cave art from later periods. It has been traditional to state that there are few
representations of scenes in the Upper Paleolithic Cave art of Western Europe. Davidson (Ch. 1) reviews some
of the ways the absence of scenes in Paleolithic art has been represented in textbooks over the last sixty years
or more. In general, it has persistently proved to be true that scenes do not appear to be common in the art on
the cave walls. On the other hand, Davidson (Ch. 1), Culley (Ch. 12) and Villaverde (Ch. 15) demonstrate that
the view is distorted by the concentration on cave art to the neglect of portable art that is contemporary with
it. Van Gelder and Nowell (Ch. 13) show also that the distortion derives from emphasizing representations of
animals at the expense of other markings on the cave walls. When attention is turned to images engraved on
bones or on plaquettes of stone or to more nuanced understandings of what constitutes a scene, scenes are
not so rare. This suggested that the presence or absence of scenes might help reveal how the image making
was used by the societies of the artists. Importantly, recent work by Fritz, Tossello, and Lenssen-Erz (2013)
has addressed the problem of the lack of conventional scenes in cave art, identifying some instances where
animals seem to have been represented with the ground on which they would be seen.
The project, then, had its beginnings with one particular defi nition of how a scene might be recognized
and has morphed, through the successive defi nitions by different authors in the book, into a broader discussion
of scenes in rock art. The hope is that our broadening can contribute to correcting ideas about
scenes that took hold early and have persisted despite general knowledge of exceptions that proved those
ideas wrong. Kelly and David (Ch. 4) outline one history of the concept of scenes in rock art, and Lenssen-Erz
and colleagues (Ch. 6) also address that history.