The shell mounds in Weipa are not static.
They are always changing. How then, could you hope to imagine what purpose they served for early humans?
Professor Simon Holdaway and his PhD student Kasey Allely talked to the fact that it is easy to presume that a patch of stones and bones represents a living area for people from the past. Tempting even, to directly correlate clusters of artefacts with human behaviours and early civilisational structures. However, while it is certainly easier to assess an artefact or dig and gather the information that you expect to be useful in uncovering aspects of human behaviours, an archaeologist must learn about everything in the landscape.
For Kasey Alley and her research on shell mounds in Australia and Saudi Arabia, this meant spending hours ‘Netflix and sifting’, because before she could understand what the mounds meant in terms of human behaviour, she first had to understand the mound. I thought this was an interesting issue faced by Simon Holdaway in ‘Designing and Implementing Archaeological Research Projects.’ The quandary of wanting to get a result as expeditiously as possible is an issue applicable to all aspects of society; academically, politically, personally. The question needs to shift to considering causation, over effect – you can’t address its implications before you understand the why and the how. We could apply this archaeological approach to addressing mental health issues in our country and attempt to understand the root of the problem as opposed to only addressing the result.
