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September 24, 2006
Mike Smith, an archaeologist at ANU, says that between 1986 and 1990, he has carried out three seasons of digging at the rock shelter known as Puritjarra, and that he has spent the better part of a decade since then analysing and publishing the results. He says that a site like Puritjarra is not just sequence and chronology, but also a dynamic part of landscape - a place on someone's itinerary as they moved across western central Australia, stepping out across the desert.
Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 3, Found local and sourced pigment, sand, ochre and acrylic on canvas
Mike Smith suggests that we can explore the links between people and place in Puritjarra by following the fortunes of Aboriginal people associated with the area as well as following the events shaping its cultural and natural landscapes ... bringing together archaeology, anthropology and history'. Can we connect this to Heidegger's argument that the modern devastation of nature is the result of the predominance of our modern “technological” understanding of the world, which, in turn, he sees as the culmination of the western “metaphysical” tradition. In his later writings on “dwelling” Heidegger presents an account of a wholesome “non-technological” understanding of the world. Was there a different understanding of the world at Puritjarra?
Mike Smith says:
The first people to visit Puritjarra would have found a huge domed rock shelter very like the one we see today. Structurally, it is a mature rock shelter. There is little evidence of any significant rock fall during the formation of the archaeological deposits, apart from some shedding of large boulders along bedding planes and slip faces in the centre of the overhang. The shelter owes its domed shape to slip faces inherited from an ancient Devonian dune, which now forms the sandstone roof of the shelter. This gives a sense of a desert within a desert. Standing in the deepest part of my excavations, I would be shoulder deep in a Quaternary desert, the walls of my trench spanning 100,000 years of desert history. But, looking up, I would see the hollowed out form of an ancient dune, literally the underside of an ancient coastal desert, about 360 million years older.
What of the people in this place? All Smith says is that though the archaeological evidence is imperfect, it provides a record of a society with deep roots, interacting with a series of changes in population, technology and landscape, and an overall trend over 300 centuries towards increasingly consolidated use of the Cleland Hills.
So how did they understand their place? It would be different from the technological understanding of the world that Heidegger says manifests itself as an estrangement from the world, an existential sense of homelessness. Technological man, swept along in the blind currents of fashion, fluid money markets and job flexibility, is portrayed as being no longer in touch with the earthiness of things.The people who dwelled at Puritjarra would be in touch with the earthiness of things.
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