Australian Archaeology ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/raaa20 Australian archaeology and heritage: Leadership and legacy Lynn Meskell To cite this article: Lynn Meskell (2024) Australian archaeology and heritage: Leadership and legacy, Australian Archaeology, 90:1, 87-88, DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2024.2317556 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2024.2317556 Published online: 24 May 2024. 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These disciplinary strengths and specifics have come from taking seriously Indigenous knowledge and engage- ments since the early 1980s. This has rendered archaeology and heritage more methodologically and politically aligned, more collaborative, and responsive to community needs. Such a participa- tory and lived approach necessarily blurs the trad- itional divides of archaeology and heritage work that still remain siloed and entrenched in other countries. These developments have also been reflected in the pages of Australian Archaeology, that regularly publishes on ethics, Indigenous scholarship and critique, as well as the role of the discipline as it intersects with environment, education, legislation and government. Australian archaeologists were some of the first to flag the problematic Western hegemony in arch- aeological management (Byrne 1991), building upon novel ethical approaches to archaeological practice and conservation by pioneers like Sandra Bowdler and Sharon Sullivan. These scholars and the gener- ation that followed effectively sought to capture a sensitivity to attachment, spirituality and practice, masking the lines between material and immaterial. In the main, that work was focused upon Indigenous Australians, but it was later extended to the nation’s migrant communities and their new- found experiences. Indeed, community and collab- orative archaeologies have been the mainstay of the discipline for decades, while these required inten- tional crafting as new ethical modalities, and only relatively recently, in the United States. New frame- works such as those elevating the importance of ‘social significance’ (Byrne et al. 2001) sought to move beyond traditional models of assessment and value not only in national parks and conservation zones, but in cultural resource management, academia, museums and beyond. Overturning older notions that heritage is merely material was champ- ioned by Australian archaeologists, decades ago, while colleagues elsewhere are still wrestling with such categories. Furthermore, such pioneering approaches proved vital in extending those method- ologies to Asian contexts, to the specificities of spir- itual heritage and place-making, concealing the distinctions between the categories of nature and culture in the process (Byrne 2007, 2014, 2021). It is probably the case that I have an overly posi- tive view of Australia’s postcolonial engagement with Indigenous issues; spending much of my career teaching in the United States that may be under- standable. Apologies to Indigenous Australians offered formally and at the highest state levels, have not been enacted in the same way in the US. And while these remain symbolic gestures, they still rep- resent incremental achievements towards recogni- tion and reconciliation, and some early attempts to redress issues of Native Title (Lilley 2000) and decolonisation (Lilley 2006), long before these issues were taken up by other nations. Yet while Australian archaeology, with its focus on Indigenous pasts and the violence of colonisation, might be a world leader in this regard, it does not mean that more cannot be done. As Brown (2022:93) argues in his critique of recent reframings of ‘contact’ and ‘cultural entanglement’, archaeologists need to ‘develop language, in local Indigenous languages as much as English, that is specific to each situation and place’ to address the onslaught of cultural and natural violations that accompany settler colonial- ism. And while the rest of us look to Australia to practise exemplary Indigenous archaeologies, practi- tioners there and elsewhere, still need to do much more to respect and promote Indigenous rights to culture, heritage, land and wellbeing. As an Australian abroad, I have witnessed the global impact of Australian archaeology and heritage scholarship not only in academia but in broader intergovernmental settings, including the United Nations. First, there was the huge impact of the � 2024 Australian Archaeological Association Inc. CONTACT Lynn Meskell lmeskell@sas.upenn.edu University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. AUSTRALIAN ARCHAEOLOGY 2024, VOL. 90, NO. 1, 87–88 https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2024.2317556 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/03122417.2024.2317556&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2024-05-20 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9087-3611 http://www.tandfonline.com 1979 Burra Charter on the wider international stage, in both archaeological and heritage practice, that offered alternatives to all the charters and conven- tions that came before, derived from Eurocentric, monument-centered perspectives. The original Burra Charter and its later iterations has had significant global influence stemming from its ability to encom- pass evolving notions of heritage, within ever chang- ing social, political and economic contexts (Mackay 2019). Australia ICOMOS developed the Burra Charter to accommodate the Australian setting and thus it reflects the nature, multifaceted values, and historical circumstances of the nation’s vast array of heritage places. Its dynamism has been lauded, though it has still attracted critique for not going far enough in recognising community-driven expertise and living culture. Building off Burra, archaeologists (Ireland, Brown, and Schofield 2020) have further drawn our attention to ‘(in)significance’, which entails the places or objects deemed unimportant, unworthy of consideration, lacking in power, and thus not warranting official protection. Pushing beyond Burra, these authors (Ireland, Brown, and Schofield 2020:827) maintain that (in)significance offers a heuristic device for thinking through the inherent duality of value concepts and value attribu- tion practices and their effects and impacts. And so the reflexivity and recursiveness of heritage work continues. Australian archaeologists have played active and high-profile roles in ICOMOS and UNESCO, specif- ically in the World Heritage arena. They are highly proficient and well-regarded. They were also some of the first to identify World Heritage politics and problematics (Askew 2010). Most are committed to publicly promoting a human rights agenda with spe- cific attention to Indigenous rights (Larsen and Buckley 2018) within UNESCO’s processes of nomi- nating and inscribing sites to its List. Recognising that Indigenous values are under-represented as World Heritage (Smith et al. 2019), Australian archaeologists worked on the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape nomination, showcasing a 6000-year-old Gunditjmara eel aquaculture system, and recognis- ing its Indigenous knowledge and management sys- tem, retained through oral transmission and continuity of cultural practice. Successfully inscribed in 2019,1 Budj Bim is not only testament to the scale, complexity and antiquity of this site, but to the Gunditjmara’s struggle to overturn European misunderstandings of the complexity and sophistica- tion of their culture and history (McNiven 2017). This is indeed difficult heritage and it exemplifies one of the major challenges that remain: to fully support and promote Indigenous archaeologists to senior decision-making roles who will shape how Australian archaeology is practised and presented not only at home, but to the world. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. ORCID Lynn Meskell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9087-3611 References Askew, M. 2010 The magic list of global status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the agendas of states. S. Labadi and C. Long (eds) Heritage and Globalisation, pp.33– 58. London: Routledge. Brown, S. 2022 Against ‘contact. Australian Archaeology 88(1):92–93. Byrne, D. 1991 Western hegemony in archaeological heritage management. History and Anthropology 5(2):269–276. Byrne, D. 2007 Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia. Walnut Creek: AltaMira. Byrne, D. 2014 Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia. London: Routledge. Byrne, D. 2021 The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. London: Routledge. Byrne D., H. Brayshaw and T. Ireland 2001 Social Significance: A Discussion Paper. Sydney: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Serivce. Ireland, T., S. Brown and J. Schofield 2020 Situating (in)significance. International Journal of Heritage Studies 26(9):826–844. Larsen, P.B. and K. Buckley 2018 Approaching human rights at the World Heritage Committee: Capturing sit- uated conversations, complexity, and dynamism in glo- bal heritage processes. International Journal of Cultural Property 25(1):85–110. Lilley, I. 2006 Archaeology, diaspora and decolonization. Journal of Social Archaeology 6 (1):28–47. Lilley, I. (ed.) 2000 Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in the Postcolonial World. Oceania Monographs, Vol. 50. Sydney: University of Sydney. Mackay, R. 2019 Values-based management and the Burra Charter 1979, 1999, 2013. In E. Avrami, S. Macdonald, R. Mason and D. Myers (eds), Values in Heritage Management: Emerging Approaches and Research Directions, pp. 110–126. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. McNiven, I.J. 2017 The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid. The Conversation 8. https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind- the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800. Smith, A., I.J. McNiven, D. Rose, S. Brown, … S. Crocker 2019 Indigenous knowledge and resource management as world heritage values: Budj Bim cultural landscape, Australia. Archaeologies 15(2):285–313. 1https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/. 88 L. MESKELL https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind-the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800 https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind-the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800 https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/. Australian archaeology and heritage: Leadership and legacy Disclosure statement Orcid References