New blog post on rethinking ethnographic collections

A new blog post by Martin Porr has been published on a collaborative German blog, "How to move on with Humboldt's legacy? Rethinking ethnographic collections". Go here to read the full post, "Overcoming Distances and Boundaries Some Reflections on Collaboratively Working with Ethnographic Materials in Germany and Australia".

Colonialism, coloniality and opportunities for necessary engagement, critique and reflection

A comment on the current debate around the Humboldt Forum in Berlin

Martin Porr

After a long period of relative obliviousness, an extensive public debate has recently erupted in Germany about the significance and role of ethnographic museums and, more broadly, the colonial dimensions of Germany’s past and present. For decades, public debate about historical responsibilities, effects and trajectories were dominated by the Holocaust, the atrocities under the Nazi regime and during the Second World War. The centenary of the beginning of the First World War in 2014 has contributed towards a shift away from this focus and other events in Germany’s past are now receiving more attention. This shift now includes a renewed interest in Germany’s colonial past (see e.g. Hamburgs postkoloniales Erbe). The Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin ran, for example, a high-profile exhibition on the topic from October 2016 to May 2017.

In this way, public debate in Germany is now linking up with developments that have been a focus in other countries for some time, particularly within the academic fields of social anthropology, cultural studies and archaeology.

Myths that refuse to die. Kimberley rock art and the interpretation of Australian Indigenous heritage

Martin Porr

A review essay on Nicholas Hasluck, The Bradshaw Case. Melbourne, ARCADIA/Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 213 pages, ISBN: 978-1-925333-48-0. This essay is also available to download as a pdf or via academia.edu here.

Summary

The publication of Hasluck’s The Bradshaw Case is extremely frustrating. It contributes nothing to an understanding of the multidimensional past and present of Kimberley heritage, which continues to fascinate so many people in Australia and beyond. To the contrary, it reiterates viewpoints and convictions that had been put forward and refuted decades ago. As a historical novel, it is largely a failure. The author seemingly had no intention to accurately reflect and comment on the complex history he uses as inspiration for his book. Rather he seems to aspire to be a player himself, by creating an elaborate statement of admiration for Grahame Walsh, his work and convictions. Yet the selective combination of fictitious and factual elements make this book a politically problematic and outdated statement on this subject. This book will only be appreciated by those who prefer a simplistic and sanitised version of Australia’s past, and who refuse to accept the difficult historical challenge of the process of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians.

Viewpoint post on world's oldest ground-edge ax for SAPIENS

A quick update to direct everyone's attention to the recently published op-ed Jacq Matthews and Martin Porr authored for SAPIENS. This piece is our attempt to put the recent news of the world's oldest ground-edge ax, published by Peter Hiscock and colleagues in Australian Archaeology in May, into a critical but accessible context and discuss how this find challenges some problematic assumptions in human origins research. You can read it here, A Ground-Edge Ax Rewriting Australia's Early Human History!

Our thanks to the hard-working editors at SAPIENS for their assistance and guidance on bringing this piece to fruition!

Many voices and perspectives, all the way down

Some thoughts on how to start taking ‘culture’ seriously in human evolution

Martin Porr

In recent years, the origin of modern humans has been increasingly framed in terms of the origins of the uniquely human cognitive capacity for symbolic behaviour. This behaviour is seen as the basis for the creation of cultural meanings that are shared and negotiated through a range of verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. This forms the foundation for the incredible variability and flexibility of modern human cultural practices and artefacts in a wide sense of the term. Some of the most significant questions in archaeology are related to these issues. What are the mechanisms that influence these cultural forms? How do they originate? Why do some persist and some disappear?

Archaeologists working on Palawan Island, Philippines. Image: Martin Porr

On the Politics of Human Origins – Homo naledi and beyond

Martin Porr and Jacqueline Matthews

The topic of human origins has been making headlines again recently with the announcement from the Rising Star team of the new species, Homo naledi. The open access eLife articles describing this new species and its geological and taphonomic context can be found here and here (respectively).

Image of the Dinaledi skeletal specimens from Berger et al. 2015 (CC BY 4.0)

As was to be expected, the discovery and its circumstances (including the dramatic cave and the trowelblazers who worked in it!) have generated immense interest but also quite a bit of controversy. Each new find in palaeoanthropology and announcements of new human or hominin species has always tended to generate fierce debates among academics, and in a positive move in this case these debates are now far more accessible and open to the public rather than being locked into academic-only spaces (for commentary on this aspect see this Savage Minds post and also John Hawks' recent blog post).

From the origins of art to the decolonisation of human origins

Martin Porr

Archaeology/Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, University of Western Australia

The recent dating of cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia, to about 40 kyr ago has opened up new avenues for our understanding of human origins and crucial developments in humanity’s deep past. However, the contribution of archaeological research in Southeast Asia and Australia to these fundamental questions is far more extensive and provides a much more substantial challenge to current models of what it means to be human and how we became who we are today.