2001 Conference Report: Barriers, Borders, Boundaries

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Barriers, Borders, Boundaries

Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference
6-8 December 2001
Hervey Bay, Queensland

The 2001 Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference was held at the luxurious Kondari Resort in Hervey Bay, approximately 300km north of Brisbane in Queensland. Sponsored by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit and School of Social Science at the University of Queensland, it was the largest AAA conference since Gatton in 1995 with an official total of 212 registered delegates.

On the evening preceding the formal opening of the conference, a session on the State of the Discipline (convened by Ian Lilley) was held to discuss the status and future of archaeology in Australia, which had been the subject of some debate earlier in the year on AUSARCH-L. Various senior members of the discipline presented brief perspectives on what they saw as the major issues influencing contemporary archaeology in Australia, with a particular focus on the emerging impact of changes in university funding formulae.

Formal sessions covered a variety of topics. Papers were of a consistently high standard across all sessions. Sessions topics included: Regions and Boundaries: Archaeological Explorations of Regionalism, Localisation and Boundedness (Bryce Barker & Sean Ulm); Written in Stone: Regional, Temporal and Technological Boundaries in Stone Artefact Assemblages (Lara Lamb & Chris Clarkson); Archaeology of Isolation (Jon Prangnell); Boundaries of Archaeological Thinking (Annie Ross); Frontier-Games: Rock Art Variability in the Arid Zone (Jo McDonald); and the well-attended Reality of Barriers: The Evidence from Biological Anthropology (Colin Pardoe & Michael Westaway).

The Best Overall Paper Prize was shared by Ken Mulvaney for Snake Sisters and Their Imprint on the Landscape: Sacred Sites and the Changing Pattern of Petroglyph and Martin Gibbs and Peter Veth for ''Ritual Engines'': Archaeological and Historical Evidence for an Outflow of Western Desert Culture into Southwest Western Australia. June Ross won the Best Student Paper Prize for Rocking the Boundaries: Scratching the Surface. Luke Godwin, Scott L'Oste-Brown, Bob Ellis and Mike Morwood won the inaugural Laila Haglund AACAI Prize for Dating of Burial Practices in Central Queensland: Continuity and its Implications for Native Title, sponsored by the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists.

One of the highlights of the conference was the formal Poster Session (convened by Jill Reid) which attracted a record 30+ entries. While many of the entries were student posters, a significant proportion were also presented by professional archaeologists. This suggests that a broader cross-section of delegates are now valuing the Poster Session as a forum to present research results. University of New England and University of Queensland students once again scooped the pool of poster prizes. Robert Theunissen (UNE) won the Best Overall Poster Prize for Indian or Indigenous?: Tracing the Origin of the Carnelian Beads of Iron Age Southeast Asia. The Best Overall Poster Prize (Cultural Heritage) went to the Awoonga Alliance team of Robyn Yow Yeh, Trisha Coleman, Nikki Johnson, Annii Johnson, Tamara Blackman and Gabrielle Blackman for their Indigenous Cultural Heritage in the Boyne Valley, Central Queensland. Alison Crowther (UQ) won the Best Student Poster Prize for Pots, Plants and Pacific Prehistory. Justine Eckersley (UQ) and Penny McCardle (UNE) shared the Runner-Up Student Poster Prize for A Genetic View of London's Population History and A New Relative Dating Technique and its Application to Bark Burial Coffins from the Central Queensland Highlands respectively.

The full program and abstracts of the conference are still available for viewing and downloading at:

http://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/conferences/2001/HTML/ProgramAbstracts.html [no longer available]

or the hard copy is available for purchase from:

http://www.uq.edu.au/ATSIS/publications/barriers-borders-boundaries.html

The formal conference was followed by a recovery fieldtrip to Fraser Island where conference-wearied archaeologists basked in the recuperative powers of air conditioned buses and icy cold freshwater creeks. Other extra-curricula activities included a President''s 11 vs Queensland All-Stars cricket match, with the victorious All-Stars humbly accepting the trophy on the day.

The conference made an operating profit of $10,900. $6,800 of these funds were dispersed directly to students in the form of student subsidies ($5,300) and poster prizes ($1,500). A further $500 went to students for the Best Student Paper Prize out of Australian Archaeological Association coffers.

Preparation of the conference proceedings is well underway. The volume will be published in the Tempus series by the Anthropology Museum at the University of Queensland and should be available around November 2002. A resource page for proceedings contributors is available on the AAA website at:

http://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/conferenceproceedings/ [no longer available]

Organisation of the 2002 conference is well advanced. It will be held as a joint conference with the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology (AIMA) and the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology (ASHA) between 17-22 November 2002 at the Southbank Hotel and Convention Centre in Townsville, Queensland. The theme of the 2002 conference is Land and Sea: Common Ground and Contemporary Issues for Australasian Archaeology. Further details at:

http://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/conferences

For help and support the conference organisers would like to thank Kondari Resort, the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, and the 2001 Australian Archaeological Association Executive. Finally, I would like to thank other members of the organising committee - Jill Reid, Catherine Westcott, Annie Ross, Luke Kirkwood, Ian Lilley and Jon Prangnell - for giving up mornings, afternoons, evenings and weekends to make it all happen.