That was then this is now: An Introduction to Contemporary Archaeology in Australia

Contemporary archaeologies should be global (Graves-Brown et al. 2013), but in truth much of the scholarship in the field is an archaeology in and of the present Northern hemisphere. For an Antipodean audience, and many archaeology practitioners located outside the Euro-American hegemony, existing scholarship is always grounded in a distant elsewhere. Yet one of the charms and challenges that contemporary archaeologies offer is a proximity to the familiar. Thus for an archaeology of the recent past to be truly global we need to account for contemporary life as it is experienced in Africa, South America, Asia, and Oceania. This rationale is what first motivated us to host a two-day workshop on contemporary archaeology as practiced in or by Australians. The workshop was held at the University of Sydney and attended by established scholars and students of archaeology as well as artists, designers and historians(1). That event, and the discussions it raised, seeded the present volume.