Colonization, environment and insularity: prehistoric island use in the Great Barrier Reef Province, Queensland, Australia

Abstract

Archaeological research has been undertaken on a limited number of islands throughout the Great Barrier Reef Province, Queensland, from Torres Strait to Facing Island. Significant studies are limited to the Torres Strait, Whitsunday, Keppel and Northumberland Islands (see Rowland 1996: 193, table 11.2). I commenced archaeological investigations on islands in the Great Barrier Reef Province in 1978, predominately on the Keppel Islands (Rowland 1980, 1981, 1982a, 1982b, 1983a, 1985a, 1992, 1996, 1999a, 2002), more briefly in the Torres Strait (Rowland 1985b; Barham et al. 2004), on the Percy Islands (Rowland 1984), Dunk Island (Rowland 1989) and the Whitsunday Islands (Rowland 1986). At this time there was little evidence to suggest when, why and how the islands were used. Archaeological data from offshore islands elsewhere in Australia suggested they might have been occupied largely on a seasonal basis for specialized food gathering and perhaps only within the last few thousand (ca. 2000) years. However, this did not prove to be the case on islands of the Great Barrier Reef Province.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.