Kangaroo Island sealers and their descendants: Ethnic and gender ambiguities in the archaeology of a creolised community

Our understanding of the European-Aboriginal contact period are restricted by our limited engagement with and interrogation of the categories used for analysis. Dividing the past into Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and invader and so on, fails to reveal the complexity and nuances of cross-cultural, negotiated encounters and the emergence of new social formations and identities. Furthermore the ascription of ethnicity to historical actors generally relies on late twentieth (early twenty-first) century conceptions of what it means to be Aboriginal which are not necessarily valid for the period under consideration.