From Fire and Hearth to regional archaeology in Tasmania

WA Museum Records and Supplements | Updated 7 years ago

ABSTRACT – In this paper we aim to track the intellectual connections between Dr Sylvia Hallam (Sylvia), in her time as a lecturer with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, and ourselves, three ex-students and research assistants. Together, our experiences span a period of almost a decade of Sylvia’s lecturing years (1973–1981), with numerous other professional and social encounters. In particular, we focus on outlining the influences from Sylvia’s work and values brought to our archaeological and cultural heritage work in Tasmania (1984 to present). We emphasise two main influences that we took to Tasmania from Sylvia’s teachings – the first a landscape or regional approach to archaeology, and the second a holistic or integrated approach to archaeology that incorporated a wide range of data sources. We note that both regions are rich in historical source materials relating to Aboriginal people and this facilitated the flow of ethnohistorical methods from Western Australia to Tasmania.