Terra Australis

When James Boswell famously lamented the irrationality of war in 1777, he noted the universality of conflict across history and across space – even reaching what he described as the gentle and benign southern ocean nations.

‘This volume presents ground-breaking research on fortified sites in three parts of Wallacea by a highly regarded group of scholars from Australia, Europe, Southeast Asia and the United States.

‘This volume is the most comprehensive review of Lapita research to date, tackling many of the lingering questions regarding origin and dispersal.

‘The island world of Melanesia—ranging from New Guinea and the Bismarcks through the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia—is characterised more than anything by its boundless diversity in geography, language and culture.

This monograph reports the results of archaeological investigations undertaken in the Northern Moluccas Islands (the Indonesian Province of Maluku Utara) by Indonesian, New Zealand and Australian archaeologists between 1989 and 1996.

Drawing in the Land offers an important contribution to the field of rock art research and Australian archaeology. It provides a detailed study of the previously under-examined rock art of the Hawkesbury/Nepean area of New South Wales.

The central Indonesian island of Sulawesi has recently been hitting headlines with respect to its archaeology.

Western Arnhem Land, in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory, has a rich archaeological landscape, ethnographic record and body of rock art that displays an astonishing array of imagery on shelter walls and ceilings.

Kuk is a settlement at c. 1600 m altitude in the upper Wahgi Valley of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, near Mount Hagen, the provincial capital.

‘This volume brings together a diversity of international scholars, unified in the theme of expanding scientific knowledge about humanity’s past in the Asia-Pacific region.

Religious change is at its core a material as much as a spiritual process. Beliefs related to intangible spirits, ghosts, or gods were enacted through material relationships between people, places, and objects.

This monograph presents the results of archaeological research that takes a longitudinal approach to interpreting and understanding Aboriginal–European contact.

Excavated in 2009, An Son, Long An Province, southern Vietnam has been dated to the second millennium BC, with evidence for neolithic occupation and burials.

Dr Parke’s monograph examines how Fijians, especially in western areas of Fiji, currently understand and explain the origins and development of the social and political divisions of late pre-colonial traditional Fijian society.

The project reported on in this monograph has been concerned with the archaeology of the Batanes Islands, an archipelago that must have been settled quite early in the process of Austronesian dispersal from Taiwan southwards into the Philippines.

Although historic sources provide information on recent centuries, archaeology can contribute longer term understandings of pre-industrial marine exploitation in the Indo-Pacific region, providing valuable baseline data for evaluating contemporary

While considerable research and on-ground project work focuses on the interface between Indigenous/local people and nature conservation in the Asia-Pacific region, the interface between these people and cultural heritage conservation has not recei

The research presented here is primarily concerned with human-environment interactions on the tropical coast of northern Australia during the late Holocene.

This volume brings the remote and little known island of Rapa firmly to the forefront of Polynesian archaeology.

This impressive collection celebrates the work of Peter Kershaw, a key figure in the field of Australian palaeoenvironmental reconstruction.

‘This volume emerges from a ground-breaking conference held in the Republic of Palau on cultural heritage in the Pacific.

The site of Man Bac in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, one of the most meticulously excavated and carefully analysed of Southeast Asian archaeological sites in the past few years, is emerging as a key site in the region.

Like a star chart this volume orientates the reader to the key issues and debates in Pacific and Australasian biogeography, palaeoecology and human ecology.

I enjoyed reading this volume. It is rare to see such a comprehensive report on hard data published these days, especially one so insightfully contextualised by the editors’ introductory and concluding chapters.

These highly varied studies, spanning the world, demonstrate how much modern analyses of microscopic traces on artifacts are altering our perceptions of the past.