Between the Murray and the Sea: Aboriginal Archaeology in Southeastern Australia (front matter and introduction)

Abstract

Tourism Victoria’s long-running ‘jigsaw’ campaign took the diversity of the state as its key motif (Figure I.1). This also provides an appropriate theme when exploring the area’s past. In this book, I reflect on this variability in geography and ancient Aboriginal society, raising some critical issues in how we can understand the past. Like other people, archaeologists often seek broad patterns when writing stories from isolated and patchy fragments. But we need to find the right focus so that we do not force disparate pieces of evidence into the wrong frames, while at the same time not losing ourselves in trivial detail. It’s a question of scale: of leaves, trees and woods.