C Ballard
Biographic Data
| ID | 38044 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Ballard |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Ballard |
| SIGNATURE | BALLARD C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8455-6908 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 481 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Jack Golson
Emeritus Professor Jack Golson – known simply and universally as Jack – was a true pioneer in the study of Pacific archaeology, whose legacy through teaching, mentoring, and research remains immens
Reconstructing settlement histories in the Papua New Guinea Highlands through ceramic analysis and oral traditions
Damon Salesa, An Indigenous Ocean
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Setting parameters for developing undergraduate expertise in transdisciplinary problem solving at a university-wide scale
As part of a curriculum reform process, The Australian National University (ANU) is introducing a universal undergraduate requirement that responds to decades-long calls for universities to take seriously the development of expertise in the transdisciplinary problem solving required to address the major challenges facing society. Described here are the process and outcomes of the deliberations of the working group tasked with setting parameters f…
Jack
The new ANU Fellow's duties were to 'carry out and supervise research on the prehistory of Australia, Indonesia, Melanesia and neighbouring areas' (Allen 2019). The proposed research agenda was ambitious, innovative and timely; it called for skills for which Jack was already known. In the previous seven years, he had taught archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, the first such appointment in New Zealand. By 1…
Frontier Archaeology
Archaeological investigations have documented an ideological and occupied frontier in the Lower Tagali Valley along the southern margins of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Open-area excavations document two types of house structure associated with Huli occupation of the Lower Tagali Valley landscape, a women's house (wandia) and a lodge and ceremonial complex associated with a bachelor cult (ibagiyaanda). Excavation revealed the complete floor…
Stones in Motion
This paper addresses the ways in which stones have anchored stories and people in central Vanuatu. Three different sets of stones, and stories about those stones, cast light from different angles on the history of the distinctive chiefly title system of this region. The first set revolves around the fulcrum of Wotanimanu, a pillar of stone that rises from the sea between Efate and the Shepherd Islands. This is the figure of a chief who arrived on…
Agarabi pottery production in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Marginal history
Inspired by Klaus Neumann’s critical approach to Pacific history which attends to the ‘trash’ of the past – ‘the irrelevant, the insignificant, the marginal, and the negligible’ – this paper revisits the margins of our sources. Captions, doodles, annotations and other forms of marginal trash need to be addressed in their own right, and for the light they shed on the main body of source materials, whether textual, audio-visual, or artefactual. The…
Contact tracing
This article introduces the special issue on ‘Material Encounters’ by addressing the praxis of materiality across time, disciplines, areas of study, and technologies. We use the metonyms of track and trace and the distinction of objects and things to disentangle ways in which materials and understandings of the material mediate dynamic encounters with specific people or places, particularly in Oceania. These material encounters generate diverse, …
A Night on the Island
This paper addresses Jean Guiart’s 1958 ethnographic surveys of Efate and the Shepherd Islands – the South Central New Hebrides – in an attempt to articulate what we now owe to Guiart, and how we might best read and understand him. In particular, I focus on his fleeting encounter over the course of a single evening with a small group of elders on the island of Lelepa off the northwest coast of Efate, working between Guiart’s published field journ…
Manuscript XXXV
Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay (1846–88), the Russian explorer, naturalist and anthropologist, dedicated 12 years of his short life to field research in Oceania, from 1871 to 1883. Here we provide the first translation into English of an important but unfinished essay by Maclay, written early in the course of his travels, between 1871 and 1872, and titled ‘Why I chose the is[land] of New Guinea as the base of my voyage to the is[lands] of the Pacific Oc…
Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific
This introduction sets out some of the key themes addressed by the papers in the special issue on ‘Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific’. Disasters are now widely understood not as ‘natural’ phenomena but as events or processes that unfold at the intersection between natural or artificial hazards and human populations. We review some of the effects of the naturalisation of disaster before turning to the ways in which Pacific dis…
Disaster as Opportunity? Cyclone Pam and the Transmission of Cultural Heritage
Culture, by its very nature, is always at risk of change – whether through transformation, destruction or redefinition. So how might culture be said to be particularly at risk in the context of ‘natural’ disasters, and how are disasters ‘naturalised’ or incorporated under the terms of different cultural regimes? An earlier focus on the impacts to built or tangible heritage is increasingly being balanced by a concern for the transformations wrough…
Headhunt Revisited, with Brush, Canvas and Camera
"Headhunt Revisited, with Brush, Canvas and Camera." The Journal of Pacific History, 54(2), pp. 282–283
Miklouho-Maclay’s Legacy in Russian- and English-Language Academic Research, 1992–2017
This article provides an overview of recent scholarship dedicated to the legacy of the Russian scientist and traveler Nicolai Miklouho-Maclay. The fi rst part deals with the so-called “classic” approach of the second half of the 20th century, which tended towards a mythologized and idealized portrait of Miklouho-Maclay, as evidenced by the publications of D. Tumarkin and by the second edition of the Complete Works of N.N. Miklouho-Maclay, publish…
Rough Justice
This essay introduces the special issue by setting the concept and specific practice of the "punitive expedition" in Oceania in historical, linguistic and etymological contexts. In the process, we seek to classify punitive expeditions as a historically particular category of event in one global zone, with identifiable qualities, precursors and recursions. A brief consideration of sixteenth-century Spanish violence against Pacific Islanders sugges…
Swift Injustice
The category of "punitive expedition" has attracted surprisingly little analysis, possibly reflecting widespread consensus on its content and application. But how does "punishment," and especially the invariably collective punishment of a military operation, become naturalized as a colonial or imperial action? Under what conditions does that punishment take the form of an expedition and what specific events or qualities render an expedition punit…
Oceanic Historicities
We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past," wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a "poetic for histories": culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace "reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth ... saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle" (1991, 348-349). To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensor…
Bafa Zon
This paper critically examines local reactions and responses to the design and implementation of the buffer zone for a World Heritage property held under customary tenure, Chief Roi Mata's Domain (CRMD) in the Republic of Vanuatu. The primary goal is to consider the apparent contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the highly dynamic and contested process of rendering the globalised theory and praxis of buffering in a local context. Our case st…
Technologies of transmission
Comment on LEMONNIER, Pierre. 2012. Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press
Geismar, Haidy, and Anita Herle
Anthropos , Seite 316 - 316
The Return of the Past
Drawing is a fundamentally dialogic activity and yet it remains largely absent from anthropology's own accounts of its field practices and its history. The early Russian anthropologist of Oceania, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, employed drawing as a strategy to initiate dialogue with new interlocutors, often in the absence of a common language. My research on the history of Lelepa Island, Vanuatu, has built a series of conversations around Miklouho-Mac…
Wetland Archaeology in the Highlands of New Guinea
Fears of loss, tears of joy
Fears of loss, tears of joy: Raun Raun Theatre and its role in the construction of a national culture in Papua New Guinea, by Greg Murphy, Port Moresby, University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2010
Resource Wars
The scope for an anthropology of mining has been dramatically transformed since the review by Ricardo Godoy, published in this review journal in 1985. The minerals boom of the 1980s led to an aggressive expansion of mine development in greenfield areas, many of them the domains of indigenous communities. Under considerable pressure, the conventional binary contest between states and corporations over the benefits and impacts of mining has been wi…
The ship as symbol in the prehistory of Scandinavia and Southeast Asia
The ship is the dominant element in the visual culture of the South Scandinavian Bronze Age, appearing in several different media, including rock carvings, decorated metalwork and above-ground monuments. Discussion has divided between those scholars who interpret this imagery in terms of long-distance exchange networks and those who emphasize its more local significance, including its deployment in mortuary ritual. A strikingly similar system is …
The centre cannot hold. Trade networks and sacred geography in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
The critical potential of a ‘social landscape’ approach to the past lies in its attention to questions of human agency and scale in the archaeological explanation of change. However, an ethnographic study of trade relationships between Huli‐speakers of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea and their neighbours suggests that landscapes are a matter of perspective. A ‘hidden’, subterranean landscape described in Huli cosmology is shown to be i…
Oceanic Historicities
We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past," wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a "poetic for histories": culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace "reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth ... saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle" (1991, 348-349). To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensor…
The Ok Tedi Settlement
Stepping Stones Across the Lihir Islands
Large-scale resource extraction projects often create obstacles for the protection, maintenance, and inheritance of indigenous cultural heritage. In this article we detail some of the challenges and opportunities arising from our collaborative partnership with the community of the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea, which is seeking to establish, inform, and resource a formal cultural heritage management program in the context of a large-scale gol…
The Return of the Past
Drawing is a fundamentally dialogic activity and yet it remains largely absent from anthropology's own accounts of its field practices and its history. The early Russian anthropologist of Oceania, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, employed drawing as a strategy to initiate dialogue with new interlocutors, often in the absence of a common language. My research on the history of Lelepa Island, Vanuatu, has built a series of conversations around Miklouho-Mac…
The End of the Beginning? Mining, sacred geographies, memory and performance in Lihir
This article explores the critical ways in which the relationship between landscape and memory is mediated by performance—through song, dance, ritual and the movements of the living and the dead. In the Lihir group of islands, in Papua New Guinea, these acts of memorialisation are rehearsed on a remarkable stage, an involuted cosmography or sacred geography in which the cosmological point of origin, the sacred rock of Ailaya, is also the ultimate…
The Fire Next Time
Christian notions of the Apocalypse, which were first introduced to Huli speakers of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea during the 1950s,encountered an existing indigenous eschatology, or doctrine of last things. Precontact Huli cosmology posited a moral constitution for the fertility of the universe in which the health of people and the land reflected the state of moral order in Huli society. Failure in social behaviour, which could be g…
Strange alliance
Pygmies have long served, both in Western imagination and in Western science, as a sheet anchor for racial hierarchies and for putative sequences of human physical and social evolution. In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western exploration in Africa, Asia and the Pacific generated what might broadly be termed a colonial 'Pygmy mythology', composed of a set of characteristics deemed diagnostic of this diminutive '…
Wetland Drainage and Agricultural Transformations in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Models of prehistoric agricultural transformation in the New Guinea highlands have relied heavily on sequences of the use and abandonment of drained wetland gardens. Drawing on archaeological and oral historical lines of evidence, this paper offers a detailed account of wetland use in the Tari region of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The relatively late exploitation of the largest and most productive wetland in this region poses prob…
Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific
This introduction sets out some of the key themes addressed by the papers in the special issue on ‘Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific’. Disasters are now widely understood not as ‘natural’ phenomena but as events or processes that unfold at the intersection between natural or artificial hazards and human populations. We review some of the effects of the naturalisation of disaster before turning to the ways in which Pacific dis…
Writing (pre)history
The role of narrative in explanation has received considerable attention in most of the disciplines concerned with questions of historical process, including history, geology, psychoanalysis and palaeo‐anthropology. Archaeologists, however, have been curiously reluctant to consider the proposition that their reconstructions of the past are fundamentally narrative in character. An argument is put forward for the serious study of narrative in archa…
Bafa Zon
This paper critically examines local reactions and responses to the design and implementation of the buffer zone for a World Heritage property held under customary tenure, Chief Roi Mata's Domain (CRMD) in the Republic of Vanuatu. The primary goal is to consider the apparent contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the highly dynamic and contested process of rendering the globalised theory and praxis of buffering in a local context. Our case st…
Stones in Motion
This paper addresses the ways in which stones have anchored stories and people in central Vanuatu. Three different sets of stones, and stories about those stones, cast light from different angles on the history of the distinctive chiefly title system of this region. The first set revolves around the fulcrum of Wotanimanu, a pillar of stone that rises from the sea between Efate and the Shepherd Islands. This is the figure of a chief who arrived on…
Swift Injustice
The category of "punitive expedition" has attracted surprisingly little analysis, possibly reflecting widespread consensus on its content and application. But how does "punishment," and especially the invariably collective punishment of a military operation, become naturalized as a colonial or imperial action? Under what conditions does that punishment take the form of an expedition and what specific events or qualities render an expedition punit…
Jack Golson and the investigation of prehistoric agriculture in Highland New Guinea
Reconstructing settlement histories in the Papua New Guinea Highlands through ceramic analysis and oral traditions
Disaster as Opportunity? Cyclone Pam and the Transmission of Cultural Heritage
Culture, by its very nature, is always at risk of change – whether through transformation, destruction or redefinition. So how might culture be said to be particularly at risk in the context of ‘natural’ disasters, and how are disasters ‘naturalised’ or incorporated under the terms of different cultural regimes? An earlier focus on the impacts to built or tangible heritage is increasingly being balanced by a concern for the transformations wrough…
Race, Place and Civilisation
Blanks in the writing
A brief review of the dominant genres of history available for the territory of West New Guinea suggests that the lack of community consultation by successive political rulers has been matched by a broad disregard for indigenous voices in the writing of history. West New Guinea remains a blank on the geopolitical map, a casualty of the boundary between Asia and the Pacific imagined by former colonial powers. The evolution of a cartographic profil…
Dudumahan
Frontier Archaeology
Archaeological investigations have documented an ideological and occupied frontier in the Lower Tagali Valley along the southern margins of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Open-area excavations document two types of house structure associated with Huli occupation of the Lower Tagali Valley landscape, a women's house (wandia) and a lodge and ceremonial complex associated with a bachelor cult (ibagiyaanda). Excavation revealed the complete floor…
Agarabi pottery production in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea
A Night on the Island
This paper addresses Jean Guiart’s 1958 ethnographic surveys of Efate and the Shepherd Islands – the South Central New Hebrides – in an attempt to articulate what we now owe to Guiart, and how we might best read and understand him. In particular, I focus on his fleeting encounter over the course of a single evening with a small group of elders on the island of Lelepa off the northwest coast of Efate, working between Guiart’s published field journ…
Dudumahan
The centre cannot hold. Trade networks and sacred geography in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
The critical potential of a ‘social landscape’ approach to the past lies in its attention to questions of human agency and scale in the archaeological explanation of change. However, an ethnographic study of trade relationships between Huli‐speakers of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea and their neighbours suggests that landscapes are a matter of perspective. A ‘hidden’, subterranean landscape described in Huli cosmology is shown to be i…
The Force of Habit
Christopher Gosden. Social Being and Time. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass
Blanks in the writing
A brief review of the dominant genres of history available for the territory of West New Guinea suggests that the lack of community consultation by successive political rulers has been matched by a broad disregard for indigenous voices in the writing of history. West New Guinea remains a blank on the geopolitical map, a casualty of the boundary between Asia and the Pacific imagined by former colonial powers. The evolution of a cartographic profil…
Blurred Boundaries And Transformed Identities
The Ok Tedi Settlement
The Fire Next Time
Christian notions of the Apocalypse, which were first introduced to Huli speakers of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea during the 1950s,encountered an existing indigenous eschatology, or doctrine of last things. Precontact Huli cosmology posited a moral constitution for the fertility of the universe in which the health of people and the land reflected the state of moral order in Huli society. Failure in social behaviour, which could be g…
A.F.R. Wollaston and the 'Utakwa River Mountain Papuan' skulls
This note describes the results of research into the provenance of a small collection of human remains currently held at the Natural History Museum in London. These remains consist of four skulls, which almost certainly derive from individuals of the Amungme community in what is now the Indonesian province of Papua (Irian Jaya). The precise circumstances of the original collection of these skulls by the Wollaston Expedition to Dutch New Guinea of…
A.F.R. Wollaston and the 'Utakwa River Mountain Papuan' skulls
This note describes the results of research into the provenance of a small collection of human remains currently held at the Natural History Museum in London. These remains consist of four skulls, which almost certainly derive from individuals of the Amungme community in what is now the Indonesian province of Papua (Irian Jaya). The precise circumstances of the original collection of these skulls by the Wollaston Expedition to Dutch New Guinea of…
Wetland Drainage and Agricultural Transformations in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Models of prehistoric agricultural transformation in the New Guinea highlands have relied heavily on sequences of the use and abandonment of drained wetland gardens. Drawing on archaeological and oral historical lines of evidence, this paper offers a detailed account of wetland use in the Tari region of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The relatively late exploitation of the largest and most productive wetland in this region poses prob…
Beyond Intensification? Reconsidering Agricultural Transformations
Jack Golson and the investigation of prehistoric agriculture in Highland New Guinea
Writing (pre)history
The role of narrative in explanation has received considerable attention in most of the disciplines concerned with questions of historical process, including history, geology, psychoanalysis and palaeo‐anthropology. Archaeologists, however, have been curiously reluctant to consider the proposition that their reconstructions of the past are fundamentally narrative in character. An argument is put forward for the serious study of narrative in archa…
Resource Wars
The scope for an anthropology of mining has been dramatically transformed since the review by Ricardo Godoy, published in this review journal in 1985. The minerals boom of the 1980s led to an aggressive expansion of mine development in greenfield areas, many of them the domains of indigenous communities. Under considerable pressure, the conventional binary contest between states and corporations over the benefits and impacts of mining has been wi…
The ship as symbol in the prehistory of Scandinavia and Southeast Asia
The ship is the dominant element in the visual culture of the South Scandinavian Bronze Age, appearing in several different media, including rock carvings, decorated metalwork and above-ground monuments. Discussion has divided between those scholars who interpret this imagery in terms of long-distance exchange networks and those who emphasize its more local significance, including its deployment in mortuary ritual. A strikingly similar system is …
Strange alliance
Pygmies have long served, both in Western imagination and in Western science, as a sheet anchor for racial hierarchies and for putative sequences of human physical and social evolution. In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western exploration in Africa, Asia and the Pacific generated what might broadly be termed a colonial 'Pygmy mythology', composed of a set of characteristics deemed diagnostic of this diminutive '…
Foreign Bodies
From the 18th century, Oceania became the principal laboratory of raciology for scholars, voyagers, and colonisers alike. By juxtaposing encounters and theory, this magisterial book explores the semantics of human difference in all its emotional, intellectual, religious, and practical dimensions. The argument developed is subtle, engrossing, and gives the paradigm of ‘race’ its full use value. Foreign Bodies is a model of analysis and erudition f…
The Future of Indigenous Museums
New York : Berghahn Books , 2007 . A broad consensus about the essential universality of museological behavior—of collection or retrieval, display and conservation—is now matched by a growing awareness of the astonishing diversity of these practices beyond the narrow confines of Western conceptions of the museum. Like historicities and visualities, these variable museologies are culturally nuanced and often more locally or regionally than globall…
An Ocean of Images
In introducing a collection of papers deriving from a workshop dedicated to Pacific film and history, this article takes the opportunity to broadly map the disciplinary and textual terrain of professional historians' engagement with the cinema. The papers introduced by this essay were selected from the first workshop dedicated to the topic of film and history in the Pacific, held in Canberra in 2007, which brought together film-makers and scholar…
Watching First Contact
First Contact, the first in the celebrated Highlands Trilogy of documentary films by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, tracks the passage in 1933 of the first Europeans to enter the largest of Papua New Guinea's highland valleys. Interviews with surviving
Foreign Bodies
Synthetic Histories
This article considers the case for synthetic histories—broad narratives of historical process that critically combine the insights and perspectives of research from multiple disciplines. Drawing on the 28 contributions to the edited volume Papuan Pasts, on the deep history of the Papuan peoples, a brief synthesis of findings is offered in the form of a narrative. This enables the identification of a series of gaps, not just in the spatial and te…
Hontheim, Astrid de
Anthropos , Seite 652 - 653
Stepping Stones Across the Lihir Islands
Large-scale resource extraction projects often create obstacles for the protection, maintenance, and inheritance of indigenous cultural heritage. In this article we detail some of the challenges and opportunities arising from our collaborative partnership with the community of the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea, which is seeking to establish, inform, and resource a formal cultural heritage management program in the context of a large-scale gol…
Wetland Archaeology in the Highlands of New Guinea
History (38 works) · Archaeology (29 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (23 works) · Art (21 works) · Ethnology (19 works) · Geography (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · History (15 works) · New guinea (15 works)