Archaeology's early origins
Speaker: Michael Westaway, Curator - Archaeology, Queensland Museum
Date: 4 February 2009
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Duration: 29:03 minutes
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Archaeology's early origins is a discussion on the significance of the Museum's Skertchly Collection, consisting of Palaeolithic artefacts from Western Europe made by Proto-Neanderthals almost 200,000 years ago. These artefacts played an important role in the 1870s to build a case that the antiquity of humankind was very ancient indeed.
Queensland based geologist Professor Sydney Skertchly's view that humanity had a deep geological past was largely dismissed by the Victorian Scientific elite and it was not until the beginning of the 1920s that Skertchly's age estimates were accepted in England.
Equally important to archaeology are the Aboriginal stone artefacts collected by Skertchly from Nerang in Queensland in the early 1900s, dating back perhaps as early as the last Ice Age, which suggested that Aboriginal people had been in Queensland much longer than previously thought. Once again the research of Skertchly attracted very little interest, and the broader Australian public would have to wait almost 50 years until the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation was finally demonstrated as extending back to the Last Ice Age following the excavations at Kenniff Cave in 1960.
See Skertchly and Keniff Cave research and artefacts on display in the Inquiry Centre at Queensland Museum South Bank during National Archaeology Week 2009.
About the speaker
Michael Westaway is the curator of archaeology at Queensland Museum. He has qualifications in archaeology and biological anthropology and has undertaken research in Australia, Indonesia, Tanzania, Cyprus and India. He is currently researching how people interact with their environment, and is particularly interested in the archaeological record of the Australian Pleistocene and how people used closed rainforests. In his spare time he enjoys throwing deceased pigs to crocodiles to compare pig bone trauma with earlier hominids. Read Michael's extended biography.
This talk was presented as part of the 2009 Queensland Connections series, highlighting some unique and fascinating aspects of Queensland's history and cultural heritage.
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