Prehistory from Antipodean Perspectives

Abstract

My initial Australian fieldwork was still a year ahead when, surprisingly, I featured anonymously on a verbal distribution map confidently sketched by the Disney Professor. I was the ‘Australia’ reference of his Inaugural lecture, thereby illustrating his proposition (Clark, 1954, 33), that ‘the geographical field of Cambridge prehistorians has been … the whole world’. My Cambridge contemporaries, Sieveking and Golson, respectively represented ‘Malaya’ and ‘New Zealand’.We were indeed the forerunners of a sizeable band of hunter-diggers which ventured into the Pacific world and which numbers Cambridge amongst its totemic centres. Such incipient, though benevolent imperialism, has not gone unchallenged. A participant in an Australian archaeological congress recently deplored what he judged to be the errors and dogmatism of the ‘Cambridge school’. He erred in affixing this label, because there is no such implicit cohesion within the ranks; diversity is already a healthy characteristic of Pacific research.What was relevant about Cambridge training, but no more so than of any sound methodological discipline, was that it encouraged respect for, and critical evaluation of, evidence. What was intellectually satisfying to the student were the concepts of universality and interdependence in past human affairs. Such is the message from Miles Burkitt's Prehistory to Grahame Clark's World Prehistory.