TY - JOUR
T1 - The historiography of kardimarkara
T2 - Reading a desert tradition as cultural memory of the remote past
AU - Smith, M. A.
PY - 2019/2
Y1 - 2019/2
N2 - The idea that the kardimarkara tradition in the Lake Eyre region is a distant cultural memory of the remote past, of a time when the desert once teemed with life, was propelled into the public domain by JW Gregory in his 1906 book, The Dead Heart of Australia. This paper examines the historiography of the kardimarkara narratives, arguing that such use of Indigenous tradition needs to be subject to the same canons of scholarship and critical analysis as other historical records. The reading of kardimarkara as cultural memory is a misunderstanding of a typical ‘Dreaming’ narrative, in which kardimarkara represents the rainbow serpent, and where contemporary observations of fossil bones are used to validate this landesque ideology. This paper proposes a general framework for scrutinising and evaluating the historicity of oral tradition.
AB - The idea that the kardimarkara tradition in the Lake Eyre region is a distant cultural memory of the remote past, of a time when the desert once teemed with life, was propelled into the public domain by JW Gregory in his 1906 book, The Dead Heart of Australia. This paper examines the historiography of the kardimarkara narratives, arguing that such use of Indigenous tradition needs to be subject to the same canons of scholarship and critical analysis as other historical records. The reading of kardimarkara as cultural memory is a misunderstanding of a typical ‘Dreaming’ narrative, in which kardimarkara represents the rainbow serpent, and where contemporary observations of fossil bones are used to validate this landesque ideology. This paper proposes a general framework for scrutinising and evaluating the historicity of oral tradition.
KW - aboriginal history
KW - cultural memory
KW - deep time
KW - Lake Eyre basin
KW - Oral tradition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059344507&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1469605318817685
DO - 10.1177/1469605318817685
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85059344507
VL - 19
SP - 47
EP - 66
JO - Journal of Social Archaeology
JF - Journal of Social Archaeology
SN - 1469-6053
IS - 1
ER -