I J Mcniven
Biographic Data
| ID | 3451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I J Mcniven |
| GIVEN NAMES | I J |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcniven |
| SIGNATURE | MCNIVEN I J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5767-2199 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 107 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1053 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 107 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Collaborative archaeological research reveals 1000 years of sustained Butchulla mollusc harvesting and cultural resilience on the largest sand island in the world, K’gari, Australia
Indigenous island and coastal occupation of southeast Queensland has been one of the most intensively studied topics in Australian archaeology. Indeed, the region possesses the best documented coastal archaeological record in the country. Yet the most famous and iconic landscape in this region, K’gari (Fraser Island) World Heritage Area in Butchulla Country, has been comparatively less studied. Here we present a new and detailed radiocarbon chron…
In the service of archaeology and community
Late Lapita seafaring networks
Not Mary Watson's cottage
The remains of a nineteenth century stone building at Watson's Bay, Lizard Island, Jiigurru (Lizard Island Group), are referred to today as 'Mary Watson's Cottage'. As such, the ruin provides a tangible link to the young woman who fled Lizard Island in 1881 with her infant son and Chinese employee, only to die of thirst on nearby Howick No. 5 Island. The association of the extant stone structure and the historic personage of Mary Watson has becom…
More than the sea
Fishboneviz
Fish remains are a common component of coastal and inland archaeological assemblages from Australia and the Pacific Islands. Physical reference collections are the primary tool that researchers use to taxonomically identify fish bones but given the high biodiversity of fishes in this region, collections are frequently not complete at the genus- and species-level. Adjunct resources, such as online photograph repositories of fish bone reference col…
Andrew Border (20 July 1954–11 March 2024)
Garden Range 2
This paper provides new insights into the long-term history of Aboriginal use of mountainous Victoria over the past 25,000 years. It presents results of excavations at Garden Range 2 rock art site located on the edge of the Strathbogie Ranges in central Victoria. The excavations were a research collaboration between the Taungurung Land and Waters Council (TLaWC) and Monash University. Results indicate possible ephemeral visitation by the Old Peop…
Beyond hinges and spires
Quantification, as one of the pillars of the zooarchaeological subdiscipline, is an invaluable component of the toolkit researchers use to study past people-animal interactions. Despite being the subject of rigorous (zoo)archaeological debate, the calculation of Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) values remains one of the main methods of quantifying the relative abundance of taxa within faunal assemblages. Choosing the appropriate quantification…
Towards an archaeology of Country
Assessing the Reliability of a Small-Scale Legacy Radiocarbon Dataset Using Chronometric Transparency Approaches
A new quality assurance framework was developed to assess the reliability of 14 C ages from a small-scale legacy dataset from archaeological sites across the Torres Strait (northeastern Australia). Chronometric transparency principles were applied across three stages of data analysis, comprising of a basic, immediate, and advanced assessment of the 14 C ages and associated metadata. Reliability ratings (1*, 2*, 3*, and 4*) were assigned to repres…
Re‐assessing regional chronologies for island southeast Asian voyaging to Aboriginal Australia
According to written histories, trepang fishers from Island Southeast Asia (“Makassans”) frequented coastal northern Australia from c.1750 to 1907 CE. Yolŋu oral traditions and old Austronesian borrow words in coastal Aboriginal languages suggest a long and complex history of foreign voyaging to northern Australia. Yet archaeological radiocarbon chronologies for the Southeast Asian trepang industry and earlier voyaging encounters are few and the …
Beyond bridge and barrier
For over 200 years, Western scholarship has presented Torres Strait variously as a bridge and barrier to cultural influences between mainland New Guinea and Australia. An alternative approach is to see Torres Strait as neither a bridge (permeable boundary) nor a barrier (impervious boundary) but as a socially and culturally co-constructed border zone. Central to this new approach is conceptualisation of the Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere (…
The Presence of Absence
Studies into the presence and absence of post-European contact rock art within Indigenous communities are particularly relevant to questions of colonial impact and influence. However, it is the presence of post-contact motifs and introduced subject matter that typically takes precedence in these studies. In this paper, we focus on the absence of post-contact paintings of European ships in Torres Strait (northeastern Australia) rock art. This abse…
Bandwagons and bathwater
Changing use of Lizard Island over the past 4000 years and implications for understanding Indigenous offshore island use on the Great Barrier Reef
Archaeological records documenting the timing and use of northern Great Barrier Reef offshore islands by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples throughout the Holocene are limited when compared to the central and southern extents of the region. Excavations on Lizard Island, located 33 km from Cape Flattery on the mainland, provide high resolution evidence for periodic, yet sustained offshore island use over the past 4000 years, with focuse…
Middle to Late Holocene near-shore foraging strategies at Caution Bay, Papua New Guinea
How long have dogs been in Melanesia? New evidence from Caution Bay, south coast of Papua New Guinea
Primordialising Aboriginal Australians
Nineteenth-century European theorising on the origins of Aboriginal Australians was underpinned by spurious concepts that emphasised primitivism and simplification. In particular, these essentialist notions were used to explain Aboriginal culture as primordial and undeveloped with so-called advanced cultural traits linked to external influence. Far from obsolete musings from an age of colonialism, such views continue to have traction and currency…
Meta-analysis of Queensland’s coastal Indigenous fisheries
Sustainable harvesting of Conomurex luhuanus and Rochia nilotica by Indigenous Australians on the Great Barrier Reef over the past 2000 years
Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management as World Heritage Values
A Holocene record of savanna vegetation dynamics in southern lowland Papua New Guinea
Aboriginal marine subsistence foraging flexibility in a dynamic estuarine environment
Although the sea arrived in southeast Queensland around 8000 years ago, most estuarine middens date to the past 1000 years. An example is midden deposits dating to the past 400 years forming the upper levels of Sites 62 and 75b from Tin Can Inlet located immediately south of the Fraser Island (K'gari) World Heritage Area. Both sites were excavated and analysed in the 1980s. This paper revisits these results following a detailed re-analysis of mid…
Recording Kastom
In early May 2015, Anita Herle, Senior Curator and Reader in Museum Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, drove me to a house in Cambridge to have afte
Saltwater People
Anthropological research reveals that the scale and complexity of Australian indigenous seascapes correlate with the scale and complexity of spiritual engagements with the sea and use of its resources. Marine specialists see and represent themselves as Saltwater People - an identification spiritually embedded within seascapes rich in cosmological meaning. For Aboriginal people, this embeddedness is underwritten by a Dreaming cosmology that formal…
Theoretical Challenges of Indigenous Archaeology
Indigenous archaeology focuses on laudable processes of collaborative community research and decolonization. In contrast, theoretical contributions of Indigenous archaeology in terms of interpreting archaeological materials have been minimally articulated beyond praxis. Does Indigenous archaeology have an interpretative theoretical agenda? This paper addresses this question and articulates an agenda through distillation of theoretical development…
Mask Cave
Excavations at Mask Cave on the sacred islet of Pulu off Mabuyag in the central west of Zenadh Kes (Torres Strait) reveal four occupational phases: Phase 1 (2900–3800 years ago), Phase 2 (2100–2600 years ago), Phase 3 (1500–1700 years ago) and Phase 4 (last 1500 years). Faunal remains indicate marine specialization (turtle and fish) during all phases. Petrographic analysis of sherds of finely made red‐slipped pottery dating back 2400–2600 years r…
New Direction In Human Colonisation of The Pacific
Expansion of Austronesianspeaking peoples from the Bismarck Archipelago out into the Pacific commencing c.3300 cal BP represents the last great chapter of human global colonisation. Bismarck Indonesia Archipelago Papua New Guinea Torres Strait Caution Bay The earliest migrants were bearers of finelymade dentate-stamped Lapita pottery, hitherto found only across Island Melanesia and western Polynesia. We document the first known occurrence of Lapi…
Navigating the human-animal divide
Hunting as praxis provides an opportunity to investigate how humans and animals meet economically and ontologically. It also provides a window into how societies may ritually construct, manipulate and navigate the human-animal divide as a liminal and permeable boundary. Founded upon the ontological status of prey as kin, marine mammal hunters often establish interpersonal dialogue with prey to aid hunting success. It is usually through the senses…
High-resolution radiocarbon dating of marine materials in archaeological contexts
Ritualized Middening Practices
Badu 15 and the Papuan-Austronesian settlement of Torres Strait
Archaeological excavations on the island of Badu have for the first time revealed evidence of people in Torres Strait before 2500 years BP. We interpret this evidence as representing three phases of island use and occupation. Phase 1 (8000-6000 years BP), when the high islands of Torres Strait were part of terminal Greater Australia, saw permanent occupation of the region. During Phase 2 (6000-c.3500/3000 years BP), the Western Islands of Torres …
Lapita sites in the Central Province of mainland Papua New Guinea
For over forty years, archaeologists working along Papua New Guinea's southern coastline have sought evidence for early ceramics and its relationship with Lapita wares of Island Melanesia. Failing to find any such evidence of pottery more than 2000 bp, and largely based on the excavation of eight early pottery-bearing sites during the late 1960s into the early 1970s, synchronous colonization some 2000 bp along 500km of the south Papuan coastline …
Ritually Orchestrated Seascapes
People dwell in a world of their own subjective making. For many hunters, engagement with the ‘natural’ world is a negotiated affair because animals, like people, possess spirits. A critical part of the negotiation process is mediation of the human–prey relationship by hunting magic. Torres Strait Islanders of NE Australia are skilled hunters of dugongs, a marine mammal whose capture entails a broad range of ritual practices. Following ethnograph…
Of Lightning Brothers and White Cockatoos
Northern Australia is one of the very few regions of the world where an established tradition of rock-art has continued and extends into present-day knowledge. Excavation of deposits under the painted surfaces allows the age of the paintings to be estimated, by linking across to these deposits and their dateable contexts. One can begin to assess the antiquity of those systems of knowledge and of 'signifying
Nawarla Gabarnmang, a 45,180±910 cal BP Site in Jawoyn Country, Southwest Arnhem Land Plateau
Recent excavations at Nawarla Gabarnmang in Jawoyn country, southwest Arnhem Land have produced a long sequence of AMS radiocarbon determinations on individual pieces of charcoal reliably associated with stone artefacts dating back to 45,180±910 cal BP. It represents one of the earliest radiocarbon-dated archaeological sites in Australia. Here we report on initial results
Berberass
Excavations at Badu 19 midden on the islet of Berberass in western Torres Strait have revealed a 4000 year antiquity for dugong hunting and finfishing, with major increases in intensities of site and regional land use and marine exploitation after 2600 years ago. We model the nature of late Holocene coastal resource specialisation and intensification in relation to changing demography and marine resource availability
The Great Kod of Pulu
Communal ceremonial sites and social groups often share mutually reinforcing and structuring properties. As a result of this dynamic relationship, ceremonial sites and social groups exhibit ever-emergent properties as long-term works-in-progress. Ceremonial kod sites featuring shrines of trumpet shells and dugong bones were central to the communal ritual life of Torres Strait Islanders. Continuously formed over the generations by ritual additions…
Technological organization and settlement in southwest Tasmania after the glacial maximum
A growing quantity of data about the late Pleistocene sequence in Tasmania has not been matched by an equivalent clear understanding of just what are the patterns of its lithic record. A new model is developed
Koey Ngurtai
Koey Ngurtai is a small, uninhabited island located midway between the residential islands of Badu and Mabuyag in western Torres Strait. In 2003 and 2004, 100% surveys of the islet revealed 166 cultural sites. Fifty archaeological excavations were undertaken, revealing a rich history of islet use culminating with the emergence of Koey Ngurtai as a ritual centre after 550–700 cal BP, and a proliferation of ritual structures focused on dugong hunti…
Dauan 4 and the Emergence of Ethnographically-Known Social Arrangements across Torres Strait during the Last 600-800 Years
Excavations at Dauan 4 on the island of Dauan in the Top Western Islands of Torres Strait revealed a 700 year sequence created by marine specialists who ate turtle, dugong, fi sh and shellfi sh and employed mostly a fl aked quartz technology. The presence of bipolar micro-cores less than 10mm in length reveals extreme reduction of quartz, possibly for manufacture of small skin cutting tools. While recent research indicates an antiquity of at leas…
Dating Aboriginal stone-walled fishtraps at Lake Condah, southeast Australia
Inclusions, exclusions and transitions
Many hunter-gatherer-cultivators, including Indigenous Australians, intentionally manipulated their environments via three broad processes - inclusions (plant and animal translocations), exclusions (quarantining of certain plants and animals) and transitions ( in situ change of biotas, landforms and hydrologies, often through fire). These environmental changes resulted in deliberately and strategically `constructed landscapes' that not only suppo…
Aboriginal shell middens at the mouth of the Maroochy River, southeast Queensland
This paper examines a series of shell midden and stone artefact sites located at the mouth of the Maroochy River, southeast Queensland. It represents the first detailed archaeological research undertaken on the Sunshine Coast since Jackson (1939) investigated a series of middens near Point Cartwright in the 1930's. The present study details the results of survey and excavation work, with a number of tentative hypotheses concerning late Holocene s…
Darumbal voyaging
Island archipelagos of the tropical coast of central Queensland include the most distant offshore islands used by Aboriginal Australians. Excavations on Collins, Otterbourne and High Peak Islands, located up to 40 km from the mainland, reveal evidence of offshore voyaging and marine specialisation in the Shoalwater Bay region for at least 5200 years. A time lag of up to 3000 years between island formation and systematic island use may reflect del…
Kurtonitj stone house
This paper provides the first detailed excavation report published for an Aboriginal stone house from south‐west Victoria. Stone house sites have generated considerable debate in Australian archaeology in terms of late Holocene intensification and claims for village‐scale settlements and sedentism. Fine‐grained excavation of KSH‐1 within the Budj Bim (stony rises) cultural landscape revealed house construction directly on to lava bedrock. Shallow…
Past and present marine mammal hunting rates and abundances
Micro-archaeology of Engraved and Painted Rock Surface Crusts at Yiwarlarlay (the Lightning Brothers site), Northern Territory, Australia
Backed to the Pleistocene
The recent identification of Australian backed artefacts dating to the early Holocene by Hiscock and Attenbrow (1998) opens the way for new explorations into the origin, distribution and use of these implements across Sahul. In particular, it draws attention to the fact that the technology of backed artefact production should not be seen as innovative but as an adaptive response to changing technological demands on stone tools. Using information …
An archaeological survey of the Cooloola Region, S.E. Queensland
Within the last decade a general model of Aboriginal subsistence and settlement has emerged for coastal southeast Queensland. Investigations have concentrated in two areas, Fraser Island (Devitt 1979, Lauer 1977, 1979) and Moreton Bay (Alfredson 1983, 1984, Crooks 1982, Draper 1978, Hall 1980, 1982a, 1984, Hall and Robins 1984, Richardson 1979, 1984, Robins 1983, Robins and Hall 1981, Stockton 1974, Walters 1980). The general ethnohistorical and …
Small unifacial pebble cores from Fraser Island, southeast Queensland
During the 1970's Lauer (1977, 1978) identified and collected numerous surface scatters of stone artefacts from Fraser Island in an attempt to reconstruct prehistoric Aboriginal activities. The assemblages which he recovered displayed a wide range of artefact forms, including some which had not previously been described. One class of artefact, which Lauer (1978:65-6) termed the "pebblescraper", has a distinctive morphology which he interpreted as…
Brooyar Rockshelter
This paper details the results of an excavation undertaken at Brooyar Rockshelter, southeast Queensland during August 1987. The Rockshelter was excavated as part of a larger research project focused upon the adjacent coastal region of Cooloola (McNiven 1985). The excavation had two main aims. The first was to establish a chronological framework for backed blades in the Gympie-Cooloola region, thus providing insight into the antiquity of non-strat…
Aboriginal shell middens at the mouth of the Maroochy River, southeast Queensland
This paper examines a series of shell midden and stone artefact sites located at the mouth of the Maroochy River, southeast Queensland. It represents the first detailed archaeological research undertaken on the Sunshine Coast since Jackson (1939) investigated a series of middens near Point Cartwright in the 1930's. The present study details the results of survey and excavation work, with a number of tentative hypotheses concerning late Holocene s…
The Lightning Brothers Project
In 1988 we began a research project in Wardaman country, Northern Territory. The project centres on the rock art located to the immediate northeast of the Victoria River and to the south of Katherine. The rock art itself currently forms an integral part of Wardaman lore, and is largely seen by Wardaman people not so much as 'art' but as an expression of the land and of the Dreaming beings which give identity to the land (cf. Frost et al, in press…
Blowout Taphonomy
Taphonomic analyses of archaeological sites in coastal regions of Australia have made important contributions to our understanding of processes that create the archaeological record (e.g. Balme et al. 1978; Barker 1987; Bowdler 1984; Hope et al. 1977). Unfortunately, most of these studies have focused upon terrestrial faunal assemblages with the result that few insights have been made concerning the creation of marine faunal assemblages (cf. Coll…
Yiwarlarlay 1
Recent archaeological excavations at Yiwarlarlay, the Lightning Brothers site (Northern Territory), shows that the large, paired striped figures which today decorate the rock wall were originally painted late last century. Other similar paintings found throughout what is today Wardaman country likewise appear to be of recent antiquity. We report these findings, with preliminary discussion of their implications and prospects for future research
The Double Island Point Aboriginal Burials, Coastal Southeast Queensland
This paper reports on the excavation of two Aboriginal burials from near Double Island Point, Cooloola National Park, southeast Queensland. The work represents the first controlled excavation of Aboriginal burials in southeast Queensland since Haglund's Broadbeach Aboriginal Burial Ground excavation in the 1960s (Haglund 1976). The examination of the two burials arose out of a larger regional study of settlement and subsistence at Cooloola (McNiv…
Settlement and subsistence activities along Tin Can Bay, southeast Queensland
Tin Can Bay flanks the northwestern boundary of the Cooloola region, coastal southeast Queensland. It is a rich estuarine environment emptying into the southern end of the Great Sandy Strait which separates Fraser Island from the mainland. In 1983, I undertook a survey along the eastern periphery of the bay as part of Stage 1 of the Cooloola Region Archaeological Project (McNiven 1984, 1985). The survey aimed to provide insights into the form, fr…
Shell Middens and Mobility
The traditional focus of research into prehistoric coastal settlement and subsistence systems is large shell middens. Such site-based analyses have formed the basis of many regional culture histories and yielded insights into associated economic activities. In many coastal regions, however, large shell middens may only form part of the archaeological record. Less conspicuous, but no less significant, are low-density shell scatters representing th…
Bevel-edged tools from coastal southeast Queensland
A distinctive type of stone tool, from midden sites on the eastern Queensland coast of Australia, is identified from ethnographic accounts of the preparation of fern roots as food
Sandblow sites in the Great Sandy Region, coastal southeast Queensland
Excavations and surface collections undertaken at four large stone artefact sites situated within huge, active parabolic dunes at Cooloola are described. I argue that these sites, along with similar sites on Fraser Island, represent elements of an Early Phase of Aboriginal use of the Great Sandy Region between at least c. 5500 to 2300 BP. Demise of the Early Phase is seen as a response to climatically-induced, regional decreases in rainforest …
Tula Adzes And Bifacial Points On The East Coast Of Australia
The documentation and explanation of distributions of artefacts are of major concern in prehistoric archaeology. A fundamental component of this concern is the production of distribution maps. In Australia, a strong historical-diffusionist tradition using distribution maps in the interpretation of historical items of Aboriginal material culture flourished in the 1930s (e.g. Davidson 1933, 1934, 1936; McCarthy 1939-40). In contrast, major use of s…
Raw material proximity and bevel‐edged tool use, Teewah Beach, Southeast Queensland
This paper examines the relationship between raw material proximity and changes in stone artefact reduction and stone tool maintenance using a case study from coastal SE Queensland. It is argued that a drop‐off in the relative use of raw materials with increasing distance from source locations paralleled increases in the relative importance of tool maintenance over tool manufacturing activities. The implications of these results for future studie…
Of Lightning Brothers and White Cockatoos
Northern Australia is one of the very few regions of the world where an established tradition of rock-art has continued and extends into present-day knowledge. Excavation of deposits under the painted surfaces allows the age of the paintings to be estimated, by linking across to these deposits and their dateable contexts. One can begin to assess the antiquity of those systems of knowledge and of 'signifying
Technological organization and settlement in southwest Tasmania after the glacial maximum
A growing quantity of data about the late Pleistocene sequence in Tasmania has not been matched by an equivalent clear understanding of just what are the patterns of its lithic record. A new model is developed
Pre-European coastal settlement and use of the sea
We draw attention to important omissions in the chronology of Australian coastal occupation presented by Nicholson and Cane (1994) in their recent review of the subject. In the Queensland section of their review, Nicholson and Cane (1994:110-11) state that coastal settlement is confined to the last 2000 years in the Moreton Bay area, and to the last 1500 years for the remainder of the Queensland coast, with the exception of Princess Charlotte Bay…
Strange paintings' and 'mystery races
Amongst the most striking and the most handsome of ancient Australian relics are the Bradshaw paintings of the Kimberley, in the remote northwest of the continent, uncertainly dated but seemingly most ancient. According to one published view, the Bradshaws are not so much 'early Aboriginal' as 'pre-Aboriginal'. Issue is taken with that notion, in light of European attitudes to Aboriginal accomplishment over the last two centuries
Excavations at Sos Höyük
Enmity and Amity
Historical records for Torres Strait, including those from Haddon's 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, identify the Papuan mainland as the main trade source for stone‐headed clubs ( gabagaba ). This view has persisted despite the contradictory facts that the Papuan lowlands are essentially devoid of stone and Torres Strait abounds in stone suitable for club manufacture. Not surprisingly, preliminary raw material findings for ethnographic …
Clay tobacco pipes from Aboriginal middens on Fraser Island, Queensland
This paper examines the age, place of manufacture and cultural significance of clay tobacco pipes found on two Aboriginal shell middens at Corroboree Beach, Fraser Island south-east Queensland. Although clay pipes are often found in European archaeological sites in Australia, surprisingly few detailed analyses of these items have been published. As such, the methodological approach taken in this paper will be of interest to those analysing clay p…
Monumental Colonialism
Colonizers often subjugate the colonized Other as an inferior form of humanity. In the Euro-Australian settler-colonial context such ethnocentric views legitimated the acquisition of indigenous lands. An important element of this process of dispossession was the appropriation of indigenous heritage and the (re)presentation of indigenous archaeological sites as dimensions of European prehistory. In America and Africa last century, interpretations …
Long‐term Aboriginal use of western Victoria
Long‐term archaeological trends for western Victoria have been a cornerstone in the modelling of changes in Aboriginal site and regional land use in Australian prehistory since the early 1980s. Both the archaeological trends and the explanatory socio‐demographic models, however, have been contested in the archaeological literature. Bird et al.'s (1998:35) recent paper offers new data which are claimed to ‘call for a re‐evaluation of current think…
Micro-archaeology of Engraved and Painted Rock Surface Crusts at Yiwarlarlay (the Lightning Brothers site), Northern Territory, Australia
Backed to the Pleistocene
The recent identification of Australian backed artefacts dating to the early Holocene by Hiscock and Attenbrow (1998) opens the way for new explorations into the origin, distribution and use of these implements across Sahul. In particular, it draws attention to the fact that the technology of backed artefact production should not be seen as innovative but as an adaptive response to changing technological demands on stone tools. Using information …
Archaeology (88 works) · Geography (86 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (76 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (53 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (52 works) · History (48 works) · Geology (32 works) · History (32 works) · Ecology (29 works) · Ethnology (24 works)