Journal of Social Archaeology

ARTICLE

Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(1): 2847 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060560

Archaeology, diaspora and decolonization

IAN LILLEY
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (ATSIS) Unit, University of
Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

ABSTRACT
Archaeologists in settler societies need to find theoretically wellfounded ways of understanding the sociopolitical milieux in which
they work if they are to deal sensibly and sensitively with the colonizers as well as the colonized in their communities. This article
explores one avenue that the author has found helpful in a number
of contexts. He advances the proposition that, with certain qualifications, the social conditions of settler nations might usefully be
approached as the products of a single social condition diaspora
in a manifestation that is unique to such societies because it positions
indigenous peoples as well as settlers as diasporic.
KEY WORDS
decolonization diaspora postcoloniality

INTRODUCTION
Archaeologists in settler societies live in interesting times. Thinking of those
in Australia, most are politically supportive of colonized Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander minorities despite broader community skepticism
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regarding assertions of Indigenous identity and claims to land, resources

and cultural property. While most have close working relationships with
particular Indigenous groups and individuals, as a group they continue to
be confronted by skeptical if not hostile Indigenous reactions to their work
on a more abstract, political level. This state of affairs has prompted sometimes radical efforts to decolonize archaeological theory and practice by
encompassing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests and outlooks
and their complex and often subtle interplay with those of the colonizers
(Byrne, 2003a, b; Clark and Frederick, 2005; David and McNiven, 2004).
Such initiatives have unquestionably made progress, but if the Australian
situation is any guide, the circumstances in which settler archaeologists find
themselves can still occasion a great deal of personal and professional angst.
This state of affairs would be easier to cope with intellectually, ethically and
emotionally if practitioners had a better theoretical grasp of the phenomena they are trying to accommodate. To that end I propose that with certain
provisos they might usefully be approached as the products of a single social
condition diaspora in a manifestation that is unique to settler societies
because it positions both the colonizer and the colonized as diasporic.
The qualifications are as follows. First, I am not equating the historical or
contemporary socioeconomic or political realities of settlers and colonized
minorities. Unlike the case for Aboriginal people after European settlement,
the dispersal of colonists to Australia was voluntary for all but those transported as convicts or ordered to accompany them as guards and administrators. Moreover, no amount of hardship subsequently endured by
colonizers as a group including grievous losses in overseas wars would
come close to the enormities visited upon native minorities. What is more,
in Australia as in other settler nations the intersection of race and class
continues to result in gaping sociopolitical differentials between these
groups, as made abundantly clear by empirical indices such as the appalling
health statistics that characterize many if not most Indigenous communities.
The issue, though, is very much one of perception. As I will show, there is
good reason to contend that settler Australians, particularly but not exclusively the large Anglo-Celtic majority, see themselves as victims of a capricious and unforgiving colonial fate. At the level of the social processes
underlying it, this aspect of the settler mentality is not fundamentally dissimilar to the perception of victimhood quite justifiably present in the outlook
of colonized Indigenous peoples owing to their history of dispossession.
Both groups have been uprooted and relocated by the colonial process,
undeniable differences in the nature of this experience notwithstanding, and
both have thus been left with the very strong perception that they are victims
of colonial circumstance. The decolonization of the discipline (and indeed
the nation as a whole) demands that these shared perceptions are exposed
and explained rather than ignored or denied, in recognition of the fact that
they reflect a shared rather than a segregated colonial history.

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While the quality of victimhood through dispossession suggests that

colonized native minorities can be characterized as diasporic, it must be
stressed as a second proviso that this identification is an exploratory one
that remains controversial. For indigenous people and those who sympathize with them politically, the potential for controversy lies in two
prospects. The first, elaborated later in the article, is that characterizing
native communities as diasporic (i.e. dispersed) can imply that they have
been cut off from the homelands with which they identify to ground their
identity claims. The second is the opposite of the first to the extent that
the diasporic condition emphasizes links to a homeland, it can imply that
contemporary indigenous identity necessarily entails ties to land, as, for
example, Ingold (2000) contends in his discussion of relational indigeneity. This could decentre Aboriginal perspectives that emphasize dimensions
of existence other than space (e.g. time) as more critical to social identity
(as in the case in the US Southwest discussed by Bernardini, 2005). For
conservative political interests, on the other hand, the potential for
controversy lies in the implication of diaspora theory that native peoples
assumed to have been thoroughly deracinated and delegitimized can still
claim an authenticity rooted in traditional lands and traditional ways of
life. In contrast to the foregoing, the characterization of European colonialism as a diasporic process is commonplace, but the particular perspective on Australia that I take up may be somewhat contentious.

BACKGROUND
Aboriginal people in what are now settler societies have protested against
non-indigenous interference with their cultural property since Europeans
first ventured into their worlds centuries ago (e.g. McGuire, 1992: 827). It
is only over the last couple of decades, though, that their objections have
begun to make any concrete impression on those doing the interfering, as
processes of decolonization have reached beyond the outposts of empire
where colonizer minorities had integrated or withdrawn to those where the
colonizers had become majorities and stayed. These latter Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and the USA are among the established liberal
democracies with developed capitalist economies in which postcolonialism
was born and continues best to thrive (Appiah, 1991; Dirlik, 1994). They
have thus seen sociopolitical change transform archaeology much faster
than it has in other former colonies. Shifts to decolonize or indigenize
archaeology are just beginning to make themselves felt in Africa (Shepherd,
2002) and Latin America (Politis and Prez Golln, 2004) as well as in
some of the many parts of Asia not normally thought of as colonial but
which have indigenous minorities, such as Japan (Mizoguchi, 2004) and

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Taiwan (Blundell, 2000) but the process has made much more headway
in North America and most especially Oceania (Bedford, 1996; Byrne,
2003a; Lilley, 2000a, b; Lilley and Williams, 2005; McGuire, 2004; Nicholas
and Andrews, 1997; Watkins, 2000). The French territory of New Caledonia
should also be included owing to its close parallels with Australia (see Sand,
2000; Sand et al., 2005).
Perhaps as much because of these positive developments as despite
them, emotive issues of who owns the past? (McBryde, 1985) continue to
dog relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in all
these places, owing to a moral imperative on politically sympathetic settlers
always to do more to alleviate racism and social injustice. The well-publicized controversy surrounding the repatriation of the Kennewick/Ancient
One skeleton in the USA is probably the most obvious current example
(Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, 2005; Friends of
the Past, 2005), but Australian archaeologists will not forget difficult repatriation cases such as the Tasmanian Affair in a hurry (Allen, 1995; Murray,
1996a; Ross, 1996). This saw a major research project stopped in its final
stages and all excavated material returned from university laboratories to
the state from which it originated, where it remains in storage.
In such contexts, archaeologists are forced to engage with some
confronting questions. Perhaps the most common asks how native minorities widely seen to be distanced from the traditional pre-European past
by the passage of time and attendant cultural change can claim any sort of
authentic indigenous identity or, even if that is not overtly challenged,
whether they can legitimately assert control over either access to indigenous cultural property or knowledge about that property.
The issue is conventionally couched in terms of a highly instrumentalist
politics of the past peculiar to decolonizing settler states. Broadly
speaking, there are two perspectives on the matter. The first diminishes the
distinctiveness of indigenous peoples identity in relation to that of the
wider population or at least that of other minorities. In Australia, this means
especially the urban and itinerant rural poor with whom Indigenous peoples
historically mixed socially and biologically. On these grounds they are taken
to be making claims regarding cultural heritage, land and other resources
primarily on the basis of morally dubious short-term political expediency
rather than to advance morally acceptable agendas founded on genuine
cultural continuity with the traditional past (see, e.g., Maddock, 2003 for a
recent social-anthropological version of this position; cf. papers in Keen,
1994[1988] and Lilley, 2000a).
The alternative view acknowledges that maneuvering for political advantage is a significant part of the equation. It also understands, however, that
any such advantage is not inevitably about financial rewards or an end in
itself in a relentless spiral of special-interest politics. Rather, it accepts that
political gains are more usually used as leverage in pursuit of other ends,

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such as access to country or control over cultural heritage, that allow people
to assure themselves and others of the legitimacy of their distinctive
identity. This position agrees it is unacceptable to continue to portray real
native peoples only as the timeless, geographically remote Other. On this
basis it sees contemporary politicking as the unexceptional behavior of
pragmatic modern people using the institutional tools at their disposal to
make their way in the modern world, and emphatically not as a sign that
people asserting a questionable native identity have fatally undermined
their authenticity by behaving in such an obviously non-traditional
manner.
Most archaeologists in Australia take the second view, including those
excoriated by the profession for being on the wrong side of the Tasmanian repatriation affair (Allen, 1987; Murray, 1996a, b, c). Thus it is that
Australian archaeologists like those in other settler nations find themselves working in the confusing and often combative circumstances of the
sort sketched at the outset. On the one hand, there are the contemporary
Indigenous people with whom archaeologists work. As noted earlier, most
archaeologists are politically well-disposed towards them and Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people routinely make use of archaeological
evidence to advance their agendas. These Indigenous people believe they
can make legitimate claims to cultural property despite the history of
dispossession and dislocation most have suffered, and assert that this allows
them to deny or diminish the validity of archaeological interests if it
advances their agendas. On the other hand, the wider national communities of which these archaeologists and native peoples are part, and upon
which both groups depend for funding, legislative support for heritage
protection and the like, go to considerable ideological, legislative and
judicial lengths to deny or curtail Indigenous claims, often in the process
denying the validity of archaeological support for those claims.
Australian commentators seeking to explain this situation usually make
generalized allusions to processes of colonialism and of identity construction by the colonizers as well as the colonized. Allen (1987: 4) is undoubtedly the most succinct in the latter connection. He declares simply that the
need for modern Indigenous communities to symbolize their evolving
identity through archaeological cultural property is apparent, though on
what grounds he leaves unsaid. As regards settler Australians, writers such
as Byrne (1996, 2003a), Murray (1996a, b) and Russell (2001) contend that
colonizers inevitably deny native populations access to their own cultural
property even as they, the settlers, appropriate it for themselves. It is part
and parcel of the way settlers establish and maintain a positive view of
themselves while they occupy what was (and in the view of most Indigenous people still is) someone elses country. These sorts of perspectives are
much the same as those concerning the situation in North America
(McGuire, 1992, 2004; Rubertone, 2000; Trigger, 1980; though cf. Lilley,

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2000b for a qualification), and both reflect broader concerns about archaeology in the colonial and postcolonial worlds (Clifford, 2004; Gosden, 2004;
Meskell, 1998; Meskell and Preucel, 2004; Scham, 2001; Trigger, 1980, 1984).
My interest in this article is to add a dimension to such positions by
considering the situation through the lens of contemporary diaspora theory.

DIASPORA
My contribution (Lilley, 2004) to Meskell and Preucels Companion to
Social Archaeology details the conceptual background of the term
diaspora, and the following draws directly from it. The simplest meaning
of the word is to scatter people as seed is scattered for planting. All current
conceptualizations of the phenomenon rest on post hoc Biblical and
Classical reworkings of even earlier and usually only vaguely documented
historical events. Old Testament references to Jewish exile have been
continually reworked by Jewish and Christian writers, while Classical Greek
and Roman visions of the world have been refracted through modern
European imperial and anti-imperial experience. Cohen (1997: 2) states in
his overview Global Diasporas that the ancient Greeks coined the term to
refer in a positive vein to the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean in the Archaic period (800600 BC) . . . through plunder, military
conquest, colonization and migration. Cohen (1997: 26) contends that this
original broad meaning was highjacked over the last two millennia by the
notion of the Jewish victim diaspora, which rests upon connotations of
forced exile and continuing exclusion. Thus it is, in his view, that this more
sinister and brutal (1997: ix) perception underpins early scholarly consideration of diaspora by the likes of the sociologist Weber, for example, in his
discussion of pariah peoples (Cohen, 1997: 1012).
Despite his misgivings, Cohens own survey builds upon what the
historian Toynbee (1972) called the Jewish model of civilization to
consider the meaning of diaspora in contemporary social theory. So do
other recent general treatments such as those of Clifford (1994) and Safran
(1991). All acknowledge that the Jewish victim model has a strong
entailment . . . on the language of diaspora (Clifford, 1994: 306). They also
point out that it helps us comprehend various other cases, including the
spread of sub-Saharan Africans through the New World and elsewhere,
principally as a result of the post-Columbian slave trade. Importantly,
though, all these writers also emphasize that the classical Jewish model of
diaspora is too narrow to apply to the range of phenomena now accommodated by the term, including aspects of the Jewish diaspora itself (cf.
Spencer-Wood, 1999). Safran notes in this connection that the terms
diaspora and diaspora community seem increasingly to be used as

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metaphoric designations for several categories of people expatriates,

expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and
racial minorities tout court (Safran, 1991: 83).
Safran proceeds from that observation to proffer a polythetic set of the
crucial attributes of a diaspora, including dispersal, memories or myths of
a homeland, distinction from the host society, an ethic of eventual return to
the homeland, a commitment to the maintenance or restoration of the
homeland and, lastly, a continuing direct or indirect individual and
community relationship with the homeland. Clifford (1994: 30410) and
Cohen (1997: 219) take a similar path. In expanding upon Safrans list,
both reduce the emphasis on forced exile and commitment to a homeland
while retaining dispersal among alien host communities as the central
characteristic of the diasporic condition. From there they differ: Cohen sees
diaspora primarily as a type of society characterized by these attributes
while Clifford sees it more as a social condition produced by experiencing
such attributes.
Cohen furnishes a descriptive typology of diasporas linked by his own
set of attributes and presents exemplars of each of his types. In addition to
considering the classic Jewish case at length, he also includes the African
and Armenian situations as victim diasporas. He goes on to discuss the
Indian labour and British imperial diasporas, the latter being of obvious
interest here, as well as the Chinese and Lebanese trade diasporas and the
Caribbean cultural diaspora. In connection with this, he discusses and ultimately largely disagrees with the stance of Clifford and other postmodernists. This is because they look to the psycho-sociological effects of
diasporic experience. As Anthias (1998: 557, original emphasis) describes it,
Clifford and like-minded postmodernists such as Brah (1996), Gilroy (1993)
and Hall (1990) see diaspora as a social condition and social process. This
condition is structured by movement and the experience of being from one
place and of another . . . where one is constructed in and through difference as well as cultural accommodation or syncretism: in some versions
hybridity (Anthias, 1998: 565, original emphasis).

Indigenous diaspora
Clifford (1994: 309, also 2004 and forthcoming) argues at some length that
in addition to such classic cases as the Jewish and sub-Saharan African situations, Tribal predicaments, in certain historical circumstances, are diasporic. He acknowledges (1994: 308) that this proposition is contentious,
insofar as diaspora discourse, with its focus on migration and the re-creation
of community, is in tension with indigenous, and especially autochthonous,
claims, which stress continuity of habitation, aboriginality, and often a
natural connection to the land. He argues, however, that:

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diasporas are dispersed networks of peoples who share common historical

experiences of dispossession, displacement, adaptation, and so forth . . .
[Thus d]ispersed tribal peoples, those who have been dispossessed of their
lands or who must leave reduced reserves to find work, may claim diasporic
identities. Inasmuch as their distinctive sense of themselves is oriented
toward a lost or alienated home defined as aboriginal (and thus outside the
surrounding nation-state), we can speak of a diasporic dimension of
contemporary tribal life. (Clifford, 1994: 309, original emphasis)

Elsewhere he puts it more simply: Indigenous diaspora is about a sociospatial reality of connectedness-in-dispersion (Clifford, forthcoming: 95).
Even though none of them cites Clifford or vice versa, his perspective
mirrors that of Australian social anthropologists who have been making use
of concepts of diaspora over the last decade in their discussions of continuity of ties to country amongst dispersed Indigenous Australians in the context
of native title determinations. Rigsby (1995: 25), for example, draws attention to the existence . . . of a large category of [Indigenous] people who have
become known as Diaspora people (by comparison with the Jewish people).
Sutton (1995) also uses the term diaspora in much the same manner in the
same publication as Rigsby, but neither spells out the empirical or theoretical basis of his usage. Smith (2000) and Weiner (2002) provide lengthier
treatments, though again without referring to the vast diaspora literature
that has built up since the early 1990s. Like Rigsby, Weiner (2002: 7)
compares the successful maintenance of tradition in exile by Indigenous
people and the Jewish diaspora. He argues that if:
diasporic Indigenous culture in contemporary Australia is not to be seen
only as a debased and incomplete version of something more authentic
which preceded it historically, then, whether it is recognised by the Native
Title Act or not, diasporic native title claim groups understandings of their
connection to traditional land must be considered as a variety of the
contemporary exercise of Indigenous rights in country. (Weiner, 2002: 8)

Smith (2000) comes to a similar conclusion overall, but expands usefully on

some important issues. Central to his exposition is a fact familiar to anyone
who works with Indigenous Australians, namely that the identity claims of
diaspora people can be rejected by other Indigenous people who have
remained on their country in much the same way that such claims are rejected
by a skeptical wider community. Importantly for my stance here, though, he
has found that as the two groups become more familiar with each other in
the process of land claims, it becomes possible for local people to recognise
diaspora people as kin . . . [while] diaspora people begin to revise their understandings of kin relationships and relationships between people and country.
Over time, the two relatively distinct groups, and their understandings, reconfigure each other (2000: 7). He realizes that anthropologists have tended to
play a key role here, with genealogical research establishing links . . .

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recognisable to both groups, but he attributes the regeneration of a more

unitary form of contemporary land tenure primarily to fundamentals shared
between diaspora and local people (Smith, 2000: 7). Building on the work
of Merlan (1998) that Clifford (forthcoming: 96) also cites, Smith (2000: 78)
argues that an historically deep-seated epistemic openness apparent in
Aboriginal connections to country allows these shared fundamentals to be
recognized, and that the two different approaches are not simply matters of
cultural erosion or lack thereof . . . [but instead] represent two distinct
trajectories of cultural continuity articulating with changing contexts.
This general line of reasoning is elaborated by Clifford (1994: 309). He
observes that All [indigenous/tribal] communities, even the most locally
rooted, maintain structured travel circuits, linking members at home and
away and in this way bypass an opposition between rootedness and
displacement an opposition underlying many visions of modernization
seen as the inevitable destruction of autochthonous attachments by global
forces . As he has more recently noted (forthcoming: 96), this insight
accords well with the situation in Australia. Though Clifford cites Merlan
and other scholars, papers in Keens seminal Being Black ((1994)[1988],
especially Beckett, 1994[1988] and Birdsall, 1994[1988]), provide some of
the most detailed and best-known descriptions of circumstances in which
dispersed Aboriginal communities retain ties with traditional lands and/or
reserves and missions onto which they were moved, as well as manage
relationships within and between very large extended family groups, by
regular travel over beats, runs and lines connecting kin groups living in
different places (see Byrne 2004 for a contemporary archaeologically
oriented discussion of like matters).
Clifford (forthcoming: 96) suggests in this connection that in addressing
the spectrum of indigenous separations from, and orientations to,
homeland, village or reservation, we need to complicate diasporic assumptions of distance. I take this to mean that indigenous diasporas need not
involve dispersal over large distances or across major political boundaries.
That may often be true, but in the Australian context it is worth emphasizing how similar the distances entailed in this sort of dispersal can be to the
long-distance and transnational movement encapsulated by conventional
notions of diaspora, even though Indigenous Australians now live within a
single nation-state. Beckett and Birdsall both describe regular travel over
circuits measuring hundreds and in some cases thousands of kilometers,
cutting across a great many pre-European territories. To put the matter in
perspective, the return distance on one run discussed by Birdsall (1994
[1988]: 149) is about the same as the distance West African slaves traveled
to Brazil. One-way it is almost three times the distance of the original
diaspora, the dispersal of the Jews from Jerusalem to Baghdad in 586 BC.
Understanding how and why native people literally go to such extraordinary lengths to maintain attachments to distant family members and

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homelands despite the relentless assault on indigenous sovereignty by

colonial powers, transnational capital, and emerging nation-states
(Clifford, 1994: 310) is critical to understanding the attachment of colonized indigenous people to their cultural heritage under the same conditions.
Traveling to and through country along family beats is both a key symbol
of Indigenous Australian identity and a means of creating or maintaining
that identity in a world that has long been intent on seeing the end of it,
either through frontier violence or later policies of segregation or assimilation (cf. Byrne, 2004). In this, such travel is not unlike the traditional
journeys through country along Dreaming tracks by senior men who
embodied those Dreamings and who were reinforcing their connections to
particular tracts of land (Sutton, 1994[1988]). It is also reminiscent of the
travel over often-prodigious distances that was involved in traditional ceremonial exchange networks (McBryde, 1987). As Clifford (1994: 310) puts it:
If tribal groups survive [today], it is now frequently in artificially reduced and
displaced conditions, with segments of their populations living in cities away
from the land, temporarily or even permanently. In these conditions, the
older forms of tribal cosmopolitanism (practices of travel, spiritual quest,
trade, exploration, warfare, labor migrancy, visiting and political alliance) are
supplemented by more properly diasporic forms (practices of long-term
dwelling away from home).

It is only by grasping these sorts of articulations among different dimensions

of modern and traditional life that the need accepted by Allen in relation
to contemporary Indigenous links with archaeological material becomes
truly apparent as something more than simple special-interest politics.
Attempts to maintain ties with country and kin and attempts to control
access to cultural heritage and knowledge about the past are closely related
aspects of life in a diasporic condition. Ethnographic research makes it clear
that many Indigenous Australians see their history as fundamentally physically constitutive of their distinctive identity, as are attachments to kin and
country. People literally are their history, the latter being read as patterns of
interaction among people and relationships between people and place over
time. Sutton (1994[1988]: 2545), for instance, found that men not infrequently refer in ordinary conversation to [mythic] Dreamings [which govern
proper behaviour and relate people to place] as me, my father, or my
fathers father . . . [and in] the third person they may refer to particular
Dreamings by the names of living people. It is on the basis of this embodiment of history that contemporary Indigenous Australians claim inalienable
attachment to their tangible and intangible historical heritage despite the
fact that they may have been geographically and even to varying degrees
intellectually separated from that history for several generations. Because
history is physically part of them, they see it as theirs to control in the way
that knowledge was/is traditionally controlled through its embodiment in

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particular individuals rather than being an alienable public good in the

Western Enlightenment sense. This leads Sutton (1994[1988]: 261) to
conclude that:
In these terms, [contemporary Aboriginal] history construction is remarkably
similar to the [mythic] Dreaming. The past is also the present, as one of its
aspects. The past is not transcendent or remote, but underpins and echoes
present and continuing reality. Just as the Dreaming is the person, in one
facet of its complex nature, the Aboriginal person is likewise the historical
Aborigine not merely the survivor but the embodiment of the scarifying
processes of conquest, dispossession, resettlement, missionisation and
welfareism.

I suggest this sort of visceral connection between history and identity, rather
than just cynical politics, was behind the pointed question Aboriginal
woman Ros Langford put to the Australia Archaeological Association over
20 years ago, to counter claims that everyone and no-one owns the past:
if we cant control our own heritage, she asked, what the hell can we
control? (Langford, 1983: 4).
It is interesting, in this context of embodiment, to consider an aside in
which Sutton (1994[1988]: 261) describes how the contemporary white
Australian can sometimes also be defined and identified as the historic
coloniser, not merely as their descendent or beneficiary. This means that,
much to their bewilderment, settler-archaeologists can be publicly accused
of personally doing unethical things they did not themselves do or that
archaeologists as a group, rather than, say, medicos or amateur antiquarians, did not do only to be reassured privately by their accusers that they
should not take it personally. This situation is perhaps best illustrated by
the anecdote Sutton (1994 [1988]: 2612) himself uses. He was walking
along the main street of his state capital when he saw a policeman arresting an Aboriginal man following a violent incident. Numbers of young
Aborigines were looking on, and one shouted at the policeman Captain
Cook c[..]t!. Cook was last in Australia in AD 1770, and even then never
came within 1000 kilometers of the locality in question. The youths would
not have considered the policeman literally to be the individual Cook
himself, but by the same token the reference was something more than
metaphorical. The abstract notion of the historic coloniser is commonly
grounded by Aboriginal people in the person of the most iconic of the continents European explorers (Williamson and Harrison, 2002).
To draw this part of the article to a close, I note that using diaspora
theory to comprehend key features of the sociopolitical milieu in which
archaeologists work in settler societies falls under the rubric of what Scham
(2001) calls a heritage recovery approach to the archaeology of the disenfranchised. Her language resonates very strongly with that of the diaspora

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literature, and indeed she specifically draws attention to parallels between

the situation of colonized indigenous minorities and that of both the Jewish
diaspora and the profoundly difficult situation engulfing Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. She reminds us that the clearest distinguishing
factor in colonial disenfranchisement is the effective replacement of an
indigenous past by a narrative that emphasizes the conquest culture, which
inevitably prompts attempts to reassert an original culture usually not
truly lost despite the efforts of the colonizer (Scham, 2001: 188). Permeating such tragic records of the past, she says, is a sense of loss that must
finally translate into material terms. The recovery of a heritage is futile
unless accompanied by attempts to quantify that recovery (2001: 196).
Interestingly, in relation to the debate in Australia and elsewhere concerning the instrumentalist politics of indigenous heritage claims, Scham
contends that recourse for heritage recovery is always through established
legal and political channels . . . Heritage recovery is not just a heuristic
exercise but also a compensatory one. This is why efforts to reclaim the past
are so often misunderstood (2001: 197).

The Anglo-Celtic diaspora(s) in Australia

It is no easy thing to get non-indigenous settlers including politically
sympathetic archaeologists to properly understand their situation vis-vis the colonized indigenous peoples in their societies. Grasping the implications for identity politics of recognizing the diasporic condition of
colonized native minorities is a significant part of the process, but is not all
there is to it. Settlers need to realize that they themselves also live in a diasporic condition, and that it is this condition which is largely responsible for
the patterns and processes of cross-cultural engagement described and
decried in the postcolonial literature. This assertion should not raise any
eyebrows: the post-Columbian imperial diasporas of the major European
powers are well-researched phenomena. Cohen (1997: 6681) describes the
British diaspora at length as an exemplar. He argues that in addition to the
general characteristics of diaspora discussed earlier, one critical feature of
the colonies of settlement established by the British imperium was the
superordination the settlers and their metropolitan backers sought to assert
over the indigenous populations (1997: 68).
Curthoys (1999: 45) takes up this theme in language redolent of
diaspora in a paper drawing explicit parallels between the social condition
of settler Australians and the biblical narrative of Exodus. She states that:
Many non-indigenous Australians have difficulty in seeing themselves as the
beneficiaries of the colonisation process because they, like so many others
from the United States to Canada to Israel and elsewhere, see themselves as
victims, not oppressors . . . Australian popular historical mythology stresses

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struggle, courage, and survival, amidst pain, tragedy and loss. Looked at more
closely, the contest over the past is perhaps not between positive and
negative versions [of colonial history], but between those which place white
Australians as victims, struggling heroically against adversity, and those
which place them as aggressors, bringing adversity upon others.
(Curthoys, 1999: 2, original emphasis)

Curthoys describes how Anglo-Celtic Australians see themselves in terms

of three intertwined victimological myths. The first concerns the convicts
whose expulsion from Britain underlies the nations beginnings. They are
seen in the main as more sinned against than sinning, ordinary people
unjustly transported to the ends of the earth for piffling victimless crimes
against the rich and powerful. Second, though Australia is and has long been
one of the most urbanized societies in the world, there is the myth of
descent from salt-of-the-earth pioneers and later outback Australians who
overcame an alien and relentlessly hostile land of desert and bush. What
were often called the depredations of the blacks are characterized as an
integral part of the unforgiving land, along with drought, fire and flood.
Finally, there is Gallipoli. The convict era is now a very distant memory
and most non-Indigenous Australians long ago came to love what from a
sentimental poem every schoolchild learns to call our wide brown land.
This leaves Gallipoli as the principal victimological story that Australians
tell themselves over and over and cultural analysts recurrently explore
(Curthoys, 1999: 11). Concerning a heavily opposed and ultimately unsuccessful multinational landing against Ottoman forces in Turkey during the
First World War, it is a tale of a young nations trial by fire and of
Australians defiant insouciance in the face of overwhelming force. It now
also encompasses the unspeakable slaughter of Australians on the Western
Front, and their opposition against the odds in various other conflicts from
the Boer War to Vietnam. Gallipoli has a number of subthemes, notably
a strong current of anti-authoritarian anti-Britishness which Curthoys links
with the convict and outback Australian myths. Above all, however, it is
about selflessness and sacrifice. Thus, writes Curthoys (1999: 13), do white
Australians become battlers against enormous odds.
The tribulations of the convicts, achievements of the pioneers and great
gallantry of those at Gallipoli, on the Burma Railway, or at Long Tan
deserve to be remembered. It seems though that there is just too much
dissonance for most settler Australians between memorializing Gallipoli
and the other myths on the one hand and, on the other, conceding any part
of so-called black armband conceptions of Australian history which raise
issues of frontier violence and subsequent racism. At the time of writing,
the highest levels of Australias government were embroiled in controversy
over the disturbance of Australian war dead by Turkish roadworks at
Gallipoli. The works were intended to assist the movement of everincreasing numbers of Australian visitors to the areas beaches to

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Archaeology, diaspora and decolonization

commemorate Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landing on 25 April.

Though on foreign soil, the site is likely to be nominated to Australias
national heritage register in the near future. The countrys quality national
newspaper headlined the story Heritage Listing for Sacred War Sites
(Mitchell, 2005). The deployment of the language of sacred sites in convergence with that used in Indigenous land and heritage claims is intriguing.
Many if not most settler Australians reflexively contest the use of such
language by native people. In this view, Aboriginal sacred sites are usually
just concocted for political or economic purposes. Plainly, though,
Gallipolis status is unassailable: here is a real sacred site!
Indigenous claims are made even harder for non-Indigenous Australians
to bear by the aforementioned tendency of Aboriginal people to identify
the contemporary white Australian . . . as the historic coloniser. A few
years ago this led Pauline Hanson, the now-faded darling of Australias Far
Right, to complain: I draw the line when told I must pay for and continue
paying for something that happened over 200 years ago (cited in Curthoys,
1999: 18). Hanson and her ilk ignore the fact that the last generally acknowledged massacre of Aborigines occurred in 1934 (Curthoys, 1999: 215 fn 3)
and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in her/my home state
were effectively segregated by legislation until the 1970s. This means that
most settler Australians, up to and including the Prime Minister of the last
decade, explicitly prefer a white blindfold conception of the nations past,
a proclivity which has become pronounced since the passage in the 1990s
of federal legislation recognizing native title rights (Windshuttle, 2002, 2004,
2005). It is this tendency that over the longer term has provided archaeologists with the nervous landscapes and deep nations that Byrne (1996,
2003a) and others describe, as it has erased colonized minorities from
Australias historical landscape (Byrne, 2003b).
To return to the theme of diaspora, Curthoys (1999: 17) believes that:
Lurking beneath the angry rejection of the black armband view of history, is
a fear of being cast out, exiled, expelled, made homeless again, after two
centuries of securing a new home far away from home . . . So keenly aware
themselves of being themselves displaced, many non-indigenous Australians
have fiercely taken on their new country as Home.

This is why we heard clear echoes of Ros Langfords question to archaeologists in Pauline Hansons declaration that she is fed up with being told
This is our land. Well, she demanded, where the hell do I go? (cited
in Curthoys, 1999: 17). Paradoxically, this shared language reflects the way
the diasporic conditions in which both colonizer and colonized exist orient
them in such a way that they continually talk past each other.
This impasse is unlikely to be resolved until people on both sides
acknowledge the reality and legitimacy of the others perceptions as
products of an entangled colonial history. Perhaps the most significant

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Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

hindrance here is the received wisdom among settlers that their territorial
claims (and thus other claims that rest on land title) carry greater moral
and legal weight than those of the peoples they colonized. In the Australian
context especially, this complicates attempts to make use of the insights of
diaspora theory to illuminate the situation of native peoples as well as that
of settlers. This is because at the time of British colonization Australia was
inhabited solely by non-sedentary foragers. The absence of settled agriculturalists allowed the colonists to characterize the continent as terra nullius
(no-ones land): it was unowned and therefore available for settlement.
Much the same thing happened in the other colonies of settlement (as well
as in more recent cases, such as Israel), but the authorities in Canada, the
USA and New Zealand all recognized forms of native title through treaties
with at least some native groups. Even if those treaties were later egregiously compromised, they continue to provide Aboriginal peoples in those
nations with legal grounds to challenge actions of the state they deem to
be deleterious to their interests.
In Australia, there were no treaties, and the notion of terra nullius underpinned the complete legal denial of Indigenous land (and, by extension,
other) rights for 200 years. The vision of native peoples as nomads unattached to the land except perhaps in the same way that migratory animals
are ecologically tethered to particular regions remains strong in the narrative of settler authority. If misappropriated in this context, the language of
diaspora, of connectedness-in-dispersion, could further undercut Indigenous claims to land and heritage rather than help people come to terms with
assertions of continuity through its emphasis on connectedness-in-dispersion. In other words, injudicious use of the language of diaspora could make
the colonizers even less inclined than they are now to listen to historical
narratives other than their own. That would raise the ire and opposition of
colonized minorities, perpetuating the spiral of claim and counter-claim that
typifies the identity politics of settler nations around the world. Those of us
who believe that an understanding of the dynamics of diaspora can help
stop colonizers and the colonized from talking past each other thus need
to make certain that the story of continuing Indigenous connectedness gets
the same sort of hearing as that long enjoyed by the story of dispossession,
while at the same time ensuring that settler sacrifices, attachments to land
and fears of displacement are taken seriously rather than simply dismissed
as corollaries of rednecked racism. Archaeology is well placed to help
advance this effort through its emergent focus on cultural continuity as well
as change and on shared histories flowing from colonial entanglement
(Harrison, 2004; Harrison and Williamson, 2002; Lightfoot et al., 1998;
Murray, 1996b, c; Silliman, 2005; Torrence and Clarke, 2000).

Lilley

Archaeology, diaspora and decolonization

Acknowledgements
Uzma Rizvi and Matt Liebmann very kindly invited me to participate in the 2005
SAA symposium on postcolonial archaeology in which a summary of this article
was presented. They also made thoughtful comments at short notice about the
original draft. This journals anonymous reviewers also made me think about a
number of issues I had skated over or around. I thank James Clifford for so generously providing me with his forthcoming and unpublished papers on indigenous
diaspora, as well as for the inspiration his work has given me over the years.

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IAN LILLEY is Reader in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies at

the University of Queensland and Secretary of the World Archaeological
Congress. His interests include the archaeology of Australia and
Melanesia and the place of archaeology in contemporary society. His
most recent book is Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific
Islands (Blackwell, 2005).
[email: i.lilley@uq.edu.au or abilille@bigpond.com]

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