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Book Cover
Book
Author Smith, Mike, 1955- author

Title The archaeology of Australia's deserts / Mike Smith
Published Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013
©2013

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  994.01 Smi/Aoa  AVAILABLE
Description xxv, 406 pages : illustrations, maps, photographs ; 26 cm
regular print
Series Cambridge world archaeology
Cambridge world archaeology.
Contents 1.The Archaeology of Deserts: Australia in Context -- 2.Deserts Past: A History of Ideas -- 3.The Empty Desert: Inland Environments Prior to People -- 4.Foundations: Moving into the Deserts -- 5.Islands in the Interior: Last Glacial Aridity and Its Aftermath -- 6.The ̀€Desert Culture' Revisited: Assembling a Cultural System -- 7.Rock Art and Place: Evolution of an Inscribed Landscape -- 8.The Chain of Connection: Trade and Exchange across the Interior -- 9.The Last Millennium: Archaeology and the Classic Ethnographies
Summary "This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia's deserts, one of the world's major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia's deserts, the formation of distinctive desert societies, and the origins and development of the hunter-gatherer societies documented in the classic nineteenth-century ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen. Written by one of Australia's leading desert archaeologists, the book interweaves a lively history of research with archaeological data in a masterly survey of the field and a profoundly interdisciplinary study that forces archaeology into conversations with history and anthropology, economy and ecology, and geography and earth sciences"--Back cover
Analysis Australian
Notes Formerly CIP. Uk
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Aboriginal Australians -- Antiquities.
Aboriginal Australians -- History.
Archaeology -- Australia.
Deserts -- Australia -- History.
Deserts -- Australia.
Environmental archaeology -- Australia.
Desert people -- Australia.
Excavations (Archaeology) -- Australia.
Human ecology -- Australia.
SUBJECT Australia -- Antiquities. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85009577
Australia -- Civilization. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh87002863
Australia -- History. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85009591
LC no. 2012031958
ISBN 9780521407458 (hardback)