Encountering the Past: Ancestors with Agency in Australian Archaeology

Ian McNiven recently argued that interpretive theoretical frameworks shaped by Indigenous worldviews offer the potential to enrich archaeological understandings of the past and inform archaeological practice in the present. In this chapter, the authors apply one of the core theoretical concepts McNiven identified—Indigenous experiences of encountering the past—to their work with Ngarrindjeri, Jawoyn, and Yanyuwa Aboriginal people. Through the lens of encountering the past, they focus on the notions of living landscapes, revelation by the ancestors, and ancestral remains as people, not objects. All three are underpinned by the concept of ancestors having and exerting agency that shapes how the ‘archaeological record’ is interpreted. In doing so, they are also contributing to research movements that seek to obtain interpretations of the past that are not only more closely aligned to the knowledge systems of the people who created the archaeological material and cultural landscapes but also grounded in emotional connections to people, place, and objects.