Desert Archaeology, Linguistic Stratigraphy, and the Spread of the Western Desert Language

Prehistory is written from many sources. When I began archaeological work incentral Australia more than 20 years ago, my long-term objective was to usedifferent strands of evidence to provide a fine-grained reconstruction of theprehistory of the region. I hoped – eventually – to be able to compare a regionaloccupation sequence, obtained through archaeological excavations, with detailed information on changes in regional environments, rock art, patterns of trade and exchange between regions, and data on the genetic and linguistic history of central Australian Aboriginal groups. My premise was that an interdisciplinary approach and a wide range of data would be necessary before we could understand the development of the distinctive central Australian societies documented by ethnographers at the close of the nineteenth century. The task as I saw it was broadly historical, but concerned with cultural process and with environmental history, as much as with culture history. The problem is that it has taken much longer to build up this data-set than anyone imagined.