M Porr
Biographic Data
| ID | 38339 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Porr |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Porr |
| SIGNATURE | PORR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6556-1007 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 168 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Creating safe spaces for critical and recursive dialogues
New evidence for Neolithic occupation in north-west Arabia: Standing Stone Circles on the Harrat ‘Uwayrid
Recent archaeological investigations in AlUla County have provided the first detailed chrono-cultural evidence for long-term Neolithic domestic occupation in this archaeologically unknown region of north-west Arabia. This paper presents the preliminary findings drawn from multi-scalar datasets collected through extensive aerial and ground surveys, and the excavations of ‘monumental’ architectural installations, named in this study as ‘Standing St…
Regional Reponses to Global Climate Change: Exploring Anthropomorphic Depictions in Rock and Mobiliary Art Expressions from the Kimberley and Europe During the Late and Terminal Pleistocene
Northern Australia and particularly the Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions are well known for the intensive production of figurative anthropomorphs as a dominant theme by the terminal Pleistocene. Ongoing analysis and dating places the archaeological efflorescence of individual human figures and grouped scenes, often with extraordinary detail in the depictions of accoutrements, weaponry, and personal ornamentation, subsequent to the LGM (MIS 2) an…
Digging Into the Human Past
Archaeology is fundamentally connected to notions of time, origins, and history. As an academic discipline, it is closely tied to the establishment of the geological antiquity of the world and humanity. Archaeology is a product of modernist notions of time, which similarly affect the understanding of long-term and short-term processes in the deep past. These aspects were amplified immensely during the second half of the 20th century with the deve…
The Blind Spots of the Colonial Legacies of Archaeological Theory and Practice
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Response
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields.
Indigenous global histories and modern human origins
It is generally accepted among scientists today that the deep roots of humanity can be found in Africa. However, what were the processes that created present humanity? How should these processes be conceptualised? How should these processes impact on our understanding of what it means to be human? While the deep roots of the human lineage are in Africa, the ancestors of today’s humans had already started exploring other parts of the world at leas…
The tragedy of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu
In the book Dark Emu, Pascoe argues that Aboriginal Australian societies should not be described as ‘hunter-gatherers’ but as ‘farmers’. In doing this, Pascoe actually places Aboriginal lifeways at the origin of a culture-historical trajectory that he himself has criticised for most of his life. He implicitly supports a historical narrative and a vision of human nature that is at the heart of most current environmental and social problems. The su…
First large‐scale provenance study of pigments reveals new complex behavioural patterns during the Upper Palaeolithic of south‐western Germany
The use of red iron‐based earth pigments, or ochre, is a key component of early symbolic behaviours for anatomically modern humans and possibly Neanderthals. We present the first ochre provenance study in Central Europe showing long‐term selection strategies by inhabitants of cave sites in south‐western Germany during the Upper Palaeolithic (43–14.5 ka). Ochre artefacts from Hohle Fels, Geißenklösterle and Vogelherd, and local and extra‐local sou…
Metal burial: Understanding caching behaviour and contact material culture in Australia's NE Kimberley
This paper explores identity and the recursive impacts of cross-cultural colonial encounters on individuals, cultural materials, and cultural practices in 20th-century northern Australia. We focus on an assemblage of cached metal objects and associated cultural materials that embody both Aboriginal tradition and innovation. These cultural materials were wrapped in paperbark and placed within a ring of stones, a bundling practice also seen in huma…
Recursivity in Kimberley Rock Art Production, Western Australia
Interrogating and decolonising the deep human past
The nineteenth century was also the time during which the understanding of human history and ethnographic variability was fundamentally reconfigured through a complex interaction between the emerging fields of archaeology and anthropology. The discovery and dating of the human remains – that became affectionally known as Mungo Lady – fundamentally changed the perception of the deep human past of Australia and influenced the global academic commun…
The temporality of humanity and the colonial landscape of the deep human past
Archaeology is fundamentally connected to notions of time, origins and history. The history of archaeology as an academic discipline is closely tied to the establishment of the geological antiquity of the world and, subsequently, the antiquity of humanity. This well-known history also establishes the close connections between archaeology and the establishment of modern ideological, discursive, economic and political structures in Europe in the ei…
Rock art as art
For a long time, art historians have developed a restrictive view of the phenomenon of art and have participated in the creation of a Eurocentric vision of global human history. Effectively, art history became a reflection of the wider framework of European cultural dominance, colonial exploitation and appropriation. A key notion in this respect is, for example, the idea of ‘primitive art’. One could argue that these configurations are still domi…
A preliminary study on ochre sources in Southwestern Germany and its potential for ochre provenance during the Upper Paleolithic
Country and Relational Ontology in the Kimberley, Northwest Australia: Implications for Understanding and Representing Archaeological Evidence
The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evi…
From Pessimism to Collaboration: The German Frobenius-Expedition (1938–1939) to Australia and the representation of Kimberley art and rock art
In 1938 and 1939 the Institut für Kulturmorphologie, based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, conducted an ethnographic expedition into the remote Kimberley in Western Australia. Despite some earlier activities and publications, this expedition represents the first dedicated effort to conduct detailed and extensive ethnographic work in the region. It was also the first endeavour to specifically focus on the recording of rock art images and related et…
Post-colonialism, human origins and the paradox of modernity
Post-colonial thought affects the heart of Western science. Although there is comparatively little engagement with post-colonial theory in the fields traditionally concerned with human origins or human evolution, it should be of critical importance to Palaeolithic archaeology and human evolutionary studies. Examination of recent literature dealing with so-called modern human origins highlights key neglected aspects of this discourse, namely the s…
Thinking through story: Archaeology and narratives
In this paper – which also serves as an introduction to this special issue of Hunter Gatherer Research – we concentrate on a number of aspects relevant to the relationships between archaeology and narratives, and also to the theoretical and methodological challenges of research involving hunting and gathering societies. We focus on the ‘narrative turn’, which became influential across a range of disciplines due to the shift it introduced from a s…
Yooddooddoom: A narrative exploration of the camp and the sacred place, daily life, images, arranged stones and Lalai Beings
This paper seeks to explore ‘taking a narrative approach’ as a research methodology in the wider context of gaining a situated understanding of the ethnographic context of the Indigenous rock art of the northwest Kimberley. Its phenomenological approach is based on the recollections of a senior Woddordda woman when she was a child living a largely subsistence existence with her older kin. This glimpse into the ways these Indigenous people engaged…
Settlement, Society and Cognition in Human Evolution: Landscapes in Mind
This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of early hominin culture and behaviour as dictated solely by the environment to present the early hominin world as the outcome of a dynamic dialogue between the physical environm…
Shell tool technology in Island Southeast Asia: An early Middle HoloceneTridacnaadze from Ilin Island, Mindoro, Philippines
The Past and Present of Human Origins in Southern Asia and Australia
Adaptation and foraging from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene: Excavation at Bubog on Ilin Island, Philippines
The recently discovered human remains from Callao Cave, northern Luzon, Philippines securely date the migration of hominins into the Philippines to ca. 70 kya (thousands of years ago). The direct route to reach Luzon from the Asian mainland is via Borneo, Palawan, through Mindoro and into Luzon. Our research focuses on Mindoro Island as a potential stepping stone to the main Philippine Archipelago. While Palawan and Luzon have produced evidence f…
North of the Southern Arc – The Mindoro Archaeological Research Program: A summary of the 2010 and 2011 fieldwork activities
This paper presents some preliminary results from a research project designed to identify, for the first time, prehistoric occupation sites in Mindoro Occidental, Philippines. The aim of the project was to identify cave and rockshelter sites with potential to contain undisturbed Pleistocene deposits and thus the prospect to enhance knowledge about the earliest settlement history of modern humans in Southeast Asia. Over the course of the project a…
Adaptation and foraging from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene: Excavation at Bubog on Ilin Island, Philippines
The recently discovered human remains from Callao Cave, northern Luzon, Philippines securely date the migration of hominins into the Philippines to ca. 70 kya (thousands of years ago). The direct route to reach Luzon from the Asian mainland is via Borneo, Palawan, through Mindoro and into Luzon. Our research focuses on Mindoro Island as a potential stepping stone to the main Philippine Archipelago. While Palawan and Luzon have produced evidence f…
Rock-art’, ‘Animism’ and Two-way Thinking: Towards a Complementary Epistemology in the Understanding of Material Culture and ‘Rock-art’ of Hunting and Gathering People
Palaeolithic Art as Cultural Memory: A Case Study of the Aurignacian Art of Southwest Germany
This article examines aspects of social memory in the Aurignacian mobiliary art of southwest Germany. An analytical distinction is introduced between cultural and communicative memory with different characteristics and functions in Palaeolithic social life. It is argued that the statuettes are reflections of cultural memory, but also stood in a complex and unstable relationship with the flexible conditions of everyday life. The figurative objects…
Country and Relational Ontology in the Kimberley, Northwest Australia: Implications for Understanding and Representing Archaeological Evidence
The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evi…
Post-colonialism, human origins and the paradox of modernity
Post-colonial thought affects the heart of Western science. Although there is comparatively little engagement with post-colonial theory in the fields traditionally concerned with human origins or human evolution, it should be of critical importance to Palaeolithic archaeology and human evolutionary studies. Examination of recent literature dealing with so-called modern human origins highlights key neglected aspects of this discourse, namely the s…
First large‐scale provenance study of pigments reveals new complex behavioural patterns during the Upper Palaeolithic of south‐western Germany
The use of red iron‐based earth pigments, or ochre, is a key component of early symbolic behaviours for anatomically modern humans and possibly Neanderthals. We present the first ochre provenance study in Central Europe showing long‐term selection strategies by inhabitants of cave sites in south‐western Germany during the Upper Palaeolithic (43–14.5 ka). Ochre artefacts from Hohle Fels, Geißenklösterle and Vogelherd, and local and extra‐local sou…
A preliminary study on ochre sources in Southwestern Germany and its potential for ochre provenance during the Upper Paleolithic
Shell tool technology in Island Southeast Asia: An early Middle HoloceneTridacnaadze from Ilin Island, Mindoro, Philippines
The tragedy of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu
In the book Dark Emu, Pascoe argues that Aboriginal Australian societies should not be described as ‘hunter-gatherers’ but as ‘farmers’. In doing this, Pascoe actually places Aboriginal lifeways at the origin of a culture-historical trajectory that he himself has criticised for most of his life. He implicitly supports a historical narrative and a vision of human nature that is at the heart of most current environmental and social problems. The su…
North of the Southern Arc – The Mindoro Archaeological Research Program: A summary of the 2010 and 2011 fieldwork activities
This paper presents some preliminary results from a research project designed to identify, for the first time, prehistoric occupation sites in Mindoro Occidental, Philippines. The aim of the project was to identify cave and rockshelter sites with potential to contain undisturbed Pleistocene deposits and thus the prospect to enhance knowledge about the earliest settlement history of modern humans in Southeast Asia. Over the course of the project a…
The burial of Bad Dürrenberg, Central Germany: Osteopathology and osteoarchaeology of a Late Mesolithic shaman's grave
The isolated burial of Bad Dürrenberg is one of the richest Mesolithic graves in Europe. Although it was excavated in the 1930s, new spectacular anthropological and archaeological evidence has emerged during a recent re-study. Firstly, we present here the results of an anthropological re-evaluation of certain features of the skull base and theforamen magnum. Our work has clearly established that the observable features are caused by an anatomical…
Thinking through story: Archaeology and narratives
In this paper – which also serves as an introduction to this special issue of Hunter Gatherer Research – we concentrate on a number of aspects relevant to the relationships between archaeology and narratives, and also to the theoretical and methodological challenges of research involving hunting and gathering societies. We focus on the ‘narrative turn’, which became influential across a range of disciplines due to the shift it introduced from a s…
Identifying Behavioural Modernity: Lessons from Sahul
This contribution is aimed at drawing attention to the fact that the current most widely accepted understanding of the origins of modern behaviour is very much dominated by Western concepts of the character of humanity. Here, it is briefly discussed that this understanding not only produces less than convincing results in the current discussion on ‘modern human origins’, but it is still plagued by problems that were already evident in the 18th an…
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Issue of “Behavioral Modernity” Again: A Comment on Shea
Metal burial: Understanding caching behaviour and contact material culture in Australia's NE Kimberley
This paper explores identity and the recursive impacts of cross-cultural colonial encounters on individuals, cultural materials, and cultural practices in 20th-century northern Australia. We focus on an assemblage of cached metal objects and associated cultural materials that embody both Aboriginal tradition and innovation. These cultural materials were wrapped in paperbark and placed within a ring of stones, a bundling practice also seen in huma…
Special objects – special creatures: Shamanistic imagery and the Aurignacian art of south-west Germany
In the summer of 1931 a German archaeologist by the name of Gustav Riek began excavating deposits at Vogelherd cave in the Swabian Mountains of south-west Germany. During the excavation he recovered a number of small ivory statuettes in layers of Aurignacian age (c.32,000 BP), the best known of which is the Vogelherd horse (Figure 11.1). The analysis of these statuettes is said to have captured Riek for the rest of his life (Wagner and Wehrberger…
The burial of Bad Dürrenberg, Central Germany: Osteopathology and osteoarchaeology of a Late Mesolithic shaman's grave
The isolated burial of Bad Dürrenberg is one of the richest Mesolithic graves in Europe. Although it was excavated in the 1930s, new spectacular anthropological and archaeological evidence has emerged during a recent re-study. Firstly, we present here the results of an anthropological re-evaluation of certain features of the skull base and theforamen magnum. Our work has clearly established that the observable features are caused by an anatomical…
Palaeolithic Art as Cultural Memory: A Case Study of the Aurignacian Art of Southwest Germany
This article examines aspects of social memory in the Aurignacian mobiliary art of southwest Germany. An analytical distinction is introduced between cultural and communicative memory with different characteristics and functions in Palaeolithic social life. It is argued that the statuettes are reflections of cultural memory, but also stood in a complex and unstable relationship with the flexible conditions of everyday life. The figurative objects…
Rock-art’, ‘Animism’ and Two-way Thinking: Towards a Complementary Epistemology in the Understanding of Material Culture and ‘Rock-art’ of Hunting and Gathering People
Identifying Behavioural Modernity: Lessons from Sahul
This contribution is aimed at drawing attention to the fact that the current most widely accepted understanding of the origins of modern behaviour is very much dominated by Western concepts of the character of humanity. Here, it is briefly discussed that this understanding not only produces less than convincing results in the current discussion on ‘modern human origins’, but it is still plagued by problems that were already evident in the 18th an…
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Issue of “Behavioral Modernity” Again: A Comment on Shea
North of the Southern Arc – The Mindoro Archaeological Research Program: A summary of the 2010 and 2011 fieldwork activities
This paper presents some preliminary results from a research project designed to identify, for the first time, prehistoric occupation sites in Mindoro Occidental, Philippines. The aim of the project was to identify cave and rockshelter sites with potential to contain undisturbed Pleistocene deposits and thus the prospect to enhance knowledge about the earliest settlement history of modern humans in Southeast Asia. Over the course of the project a…
The Past and Present of Human Origins in Southern Asia and Australia
Adaptation and foraging from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene: Excavation at Bubog on Ilin Island, Philippines
The recently discovered human remains from Callao Cave, northern Luzon, Philippines securely date the migration of hominins into the Philippines to ca. 70 kya (thousands of years ago). The direct route to reach Luzon from the Asian mainland is via Borneo, Palawan, through Mindoro and into Luzon. Our research focuses on Mindoro Island as a potential stepping stone to the main Philippine Archipelago. While Palawan and Luzon have produced evidence f…
Settlement, Society and Cognition in Human Evolution: Landscapes in Mind
This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of early hominin culture and behaviour as dictated solely by the environment to present the early hominin world as the outcome of a dynamic dialogue between the physical environm…
Shell tool technology in Island Southeast Asia: An early Middle HoloceneTridacnaadze from Ilin Island, Mindoro, Philippines
Thinking through story: Archaeology and narratives
In this paper – which also serves as an introduction to this special issue of Hunter Gatherer Research – we concentrate on a number of aspects relevant to the relationships between archaeology and narratives, and also to the theoretical and methodological challenges of research involving hunting and gathering societies. We focus on the ‘narrative turn’, which became influential across a range of disciplines due to the shift it introduced from a s…
Yooddooddoom: A narrative exploration of the camp and the sacred place, daily life, images, arranged stones and Lalai Beings
This paper seeks to explore ‘taking a narrative approach’ as a research methodology in the wider context of gaining a situated understanding of the ethnographic context of the Indigenous rock art of the northwest Kimberley. Its phenomenological approach is based on the recollections of a senior Woddordda woman when she was a child living a largely subsistence existence with her older kin. This glimpse into the ways these Indigenous people engaged…
From Pessimism to Collaboration: The German Frobenius-Expedition (1938–1939) to Australia and the representation of Kimberley art and rock art
In 1938 and 1939 the Institut für Kulturmorphologie, based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, conducted an ethnographic expedition into the remote Kimberley in Western Australia. Despite some earlier activities and publications, this expedition represents the first dedicated effort to conduct detailed and extensive ethnographic work in the region. It was also the first endeavour to specifically focus on the recording of rock art images and related et…
Post-colonialism, human origins and the paradox of modernity
Post-colonial thought affects the heart of Western science. Although there is comparatively little engagement with post-colonial theory in the fields traditionally concerned with human origins or human evolution, it should be of critical importance to Palaeolithic archaeology and human evolutionary studies. Examination of recent literature dealing with so-called modern human origins highlights key neglected aspects of this discourse, namely the s…
Country and Relational Ontology in the Kimberley, Northwest Australia: Implications for Understanding and Representing Archaeological Evidence
The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evi…
Interrogating and decolonising the deep human past
The nineteenth century was also the time during which the understanding of human history and ethnographic variability was fundamentally reconfigured through a complex interaction between the emerging fields of archaeology and anthropology. The discovery and dating of the human remains – that became affectionally known as Mungo Lady – fundamentally changed the perception of the deep human past of Australia and influenced the global academic commun…
The temporality of humanity and the colonial landscape of the deep human past
Archaeology is fundamentally connected to notions of time, origins and history. The history of archaeology as an academic discipline is closely tied to the establishment of the geological antiquity of the world and, subsequently, the antiquity of humanity. This well-known history also establishes the close connections between archaeology and the establishment of modern ideological, discursive, economic and political structures in Europe in the ei…
Rock art as art
For a long time, art historians have developed a restrictive view of the phenomenon of art and have participated in the creation of a Eurocentric vision of global human history. Effectively, art history became a reflection of the wider framework of European cultural dominance, colonial exploitation and appropriation. A key notion in this respect is, for example, the idea of ‘primitive art’. One could argue that these configurations are still domi…
A preliminary study on ochre sources in Southwestern Germany and its potential for ochre provenance during the Upper Paleolithic
Recursivity in Kimberley Rock Art Production, Western Australia
Response
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields.
Indigenous global histories and modern human origins
It is generally accepted among scientists today that the deep roots of humanity can be found in Africa. However, what were the processes that created present humanity? How should these processes be conceptualised? How should these processes impact on our understanding of what it means to be human? While the deep roots of the human lineage are in Africa, the ancestors of today’s humans had already started exploring other parts of the world at leas…
The tragedy of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu
In the book Dark Emu, Pascoe argues that Aboriginal Australian societies should not be described as ‘hunter-gatherers’ but as ‘farmers’. In doing this, Pascoe actually places Aboriginal lifeways at the origin of a culture-historical trajectory that he himself has criticised for most of his life. He implicitly supports a historical narrative and a vision of human nature that is at the heart of most current environmental and social problems. The su…
First large‐scale provenance study of pigments reveals new complex behavioural patterns during the Upper Palaeolithic of south‐western Germany
The use of red iron‐based earth pigments, or ochre, is a key component of early symbolic behaviours for anatomically modern humans and possibly Neanderthals. We present the first ochre provenance study in Central Europe showing long‐term selection strategies by inhabitants of cave sites in south‐western Germany during the Upper Palaeolithic (43–14.5 ka). Ochre artefacts from Hohle Fels, Geißenklösterle and Vogelherd, and local and extra‐local sou…
Archaeology (22 works) · History (22 works) · Geography (15 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (14 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (11 works) · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies (11 works) · Art (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works)