This book is an introduction to the archaeology of Australia from prehistoric times to the eighteenth century AD. It is the only up-to-date textbook on the subject and is designed for undergraduate courses, based on the author's considerable experience of teaching at the Australian National University. Lucidly written, it shows the diversity and colourfulness of the history of humanity in the southern continent.

The Archaeology of Ancient Australia demonstrates with an array of illustrations and clear descriptions of key archaeological evidence from Australia a thorough evaluation of Australian prehistory. Readers are shown how this human past can be reconstructed from archaeological evidence, supplemented by information from genetics, environmental sciences, anthropology, and history. The result is a challenging view about how varied human life in the ancient past has been.

This book is an introduction to the archaeology of Australia from prehistoric times to the eighteenth century AD. It is the only up-to-date textbook on the subject and is designed for undergraduate courses, based on the author's considerable experience of teaching at the Australian National University. Lucidly written, it shows the diversity and colourfulness of the history of humanity in the southern continent.

The Archaeology of Ancient Australia demonstrates with an array of illustrations and clear descriptions of key archaeological evidence from Australia a thorough evaluation of Australian prehistory. Readers are shown how this human past can be reconstructed from archaeological evidence, supplemented by information from genetics, environmental sciences, anthropology, and history. The result is a challenging view about how varied human life in the ancient past has been.

This monograph represents a new step in Australian archaeology. It presents a detailed quantitative, technological analysis of flaked stone artefacts, of a kind not published previously in Australia. The detailed nature of the analysis reflects the measurement of a large number of variables on each specimen, as well as the use of those measurements in an extended study of the archaeological patterns. The monograph deals with only one archaeological assemblage: the stone artefacts from Capertee 3, a site excavated in the Blue Mountains immediately west of Sydney. This volume develops and tests models of artefact variation and production to an extent not seen before in Australia. More importantly, the analysis of data involves the statistical interrogation of quantitative measurements and is designed to reveal the magnitude and direction of morphological variation within the assemblage. The technological approach adopted allows for the first time in Australian archaeology an evaluation of the nature of changes in the manufacture of retouched flakes in a sequence spanning the entire Holocene. This evaluation enhances current understanding of cultural change in Holocene eastern Australia by allowing the testing of a number of propositions about the rate and uniformity of change in archaeological assemblages. In particular these analyses initiate a review of models of the Eastern Regional Sequence by creating a record of the stoneworking processes in one of the key archaeological sites that define the purported Eastern Regional Sequence.