Peter Hiscock | The University of Queensland, Australia (original) (raw)

Books by Peter Hiscock

Science, 2019

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, b... more Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth’s transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.

This book is an introduction to the archaeology of Australia from prehistoric times to the eighte... more This book is an introduction to the archaeology of Australia from prehistoric times to the eighteenth century AD. Lucidly written, it shows the diversity and colourfulness of the history of humanity in the southern continent. The Archaeology of Ancient Australia demonstrates with an array of illustrations and clear descriptions of key archaeological evidence from Australia a thorough evaluation of Australian prehistory. Readers are shown how this human past can be reconstructed from archaeological evidence, supplemented by information from genetics, environmental sciences, anthropology, and history. The result is a challenging view about how varied human life in the ancient past has been.

This won the John Mulvaney Book Award:
http://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/book_award/#hiscock

The nominators described this book as being the first wide-ranging overview of problems in Pleistocene and Holocene Australian history for many years. Rather than a bald account of sites and dates, it grapples with the evidence and puts each problem into a coherent, well-argued framework, thus making the book a scholarly, scientific introduction for students and ensuring it will become a starting point for other scholars. Writing from an archaeological perspective, Hiscock argues strongly and cogently, for the need to deal with the archaeological data as free-standing, and the long duree as the basic structure, suitable for the dating methods and accumulative and taphonomic process of most of the Australian record. He doesn’t dismiss ethnography, but recognises its limitations. Stemming from the foregoing, is that Australian history becomes a story of continuous dynamic change and adaptation. Hiscock’s study really shines in the way he views the archaeological record as one which must be seen as partial and incomplete and it is only in understanding the nature of that partiality and incompleteness that we can see beyond it into history. Quellenforschung, the historians call it, source criticism, and it has rarely been better done in archaeology. Through this book we can see where we stand on solid ground, and where the known unknowns lie.

Hiscock, P. and V. Attenbrow 2005 Australia's Eastern Regional Sequence revisited: Technology and... more Hiscock, P. and V. Attenbrow 2005 Australia's Eastern Regional Sequence revisited: Technology and change at Capertee 3. British Archaeological Reports. International Monograph Series 1397. Oxford:Archaeopress. ISBN 1 84171 836 X.

This monograph represents a new step in Australian archaeology. It presents a detailed quantitative, technological analysis of flaked stone artefacts, of a kind not published previously in Australia. The detailed nature of the analysis reflects the measurement of a large number of variables on each specimen, as well as the use of those measurements in an extended study of the archaeological patterns. The detail of these analyses can be judged by the fact that the monograph deals with only one archaeological assemblage: the stone artefacts from Capertee 3, a site excavated in the Blue Mountains immediately west of Sydney. This volume develops and tests models of artefact variation and production to an extent not seen before in Australia. More importantly, the analysis of data involves the statistical interrogation of quantitative measurements and is designed to reveal the magnitude and direction of morphological variation within the assemblage. The technological approach adopted allows for the first time in Australian archaeology an evaluation of the nature of changes in the manufacture of retouched flakes in a sequence spanning the entire Holocene. This evaluation enhances current understanding of cultural change in Holocene eastern Australia by allowing the testing of a number of propositions about the rate and uniformity of change in archaeological assemblages. In particular these analyses initiate a review of models of the Eastern Regional Sequence by creating a record of the stoneworking processes in one of the key archaeological sites that define the purported Eastern Regional Sequence.

Desert Peoples: Archaeological Perspectives provides an issues-oriented overview of hunter-gather... more Desert Peoples: Archaeological Perspectives provides an issues-oriented overview of hunter-gatherer societies in desert landscapes that combines archaeological and anthropological perspectives and includes a wide range of regional and thematic case studies.

* Brings together, for the first time, studies from deserts as diverse as the sand dunes of Australia, the U.S. Great Basin, the coastal and high altitude deserts of South America, and the core deserts of Africa
* Examines the key concepts vital to understanding human adaptation to marginal landscapes and the behavioral and belief systems that underpin them
* Explores the relationship among desert hunter-gatherers, herders, and pastoralists

Papers by Peter Hiscock

Red Queen in Australia, 2023

Change in Holocene Australia is typically depicted as establishing greater control over the envir... more Change in Holocene Australia is typically depicted as establishing greater control over the environment, with heightened prosperity, growth of social complexity, status competition, intergroup congregation, and population. Endogenous social processes altered Australian forager life yielding, on average, increased per capita output. Those claims were named Intensification. We critique that concept, re-evaluate evidence, and conclude there is no evidence for release from environmental constraint or heightened prosperity. Our model is more capable of explaining change in Holocene Australia. This Red Queen model claims cultural changes reflect unfavourable alterations in economic opportunity, driven by coevolution with dingos during worsening environmental conditions. Restructured environments with fewer high ranked foods led to greater diet breadth, expansion into marginal landscapes, and focus on atypical resource rich spots. By increasing their labour groups sought to maintain population size, this strategy reducing the likelihood of neighbouring groups seizing resource hot spots. Foragers responded to tensions with neighbours over resource access by magnifying social defence, offering limited use of resources in return for maintenance of territorial control. Those political negotiations constructed moderately stable alliances. We test the Red Queen model and show it, not Intensification, explains the emergence of ethnographically identified social interactions, economy and settlement systems.

A detailed quantitative analysis of flake retouching at Capertee 3, a site excavated in the Blue ... more A detailed quantitative analysis of flake retouching at Capertee 3, a site excavated in the Blue Mountains immediately west of Sydney, reveals the magnitude and direction of technological change in eastern Australia. Our analyses contain four revelations: i) there are a small number of artefactual classes, ii) morphological variation in retouched flakes is related to the amount of reduction, iii) parallel technological change occurs in different retouching systems, and iv) technological change is complex and multi-directional rather than uni-directional and stadial. These conclusions provide a novel depiction of prehistoric technology and technological change in this region, and offer support to adaptive rather than diffusionist models of technological change in Australia

Ancient Lanka, Dec 8, 2022

Unresolved questions about the nature and coherence of microlithic production in Sri Lanka underl... more Unresolved questions about the nature and coherence of microlithic production in Sri Lanka underlay many discussions about the microlith tradition in this region as well as the origins of those technologies and norms. Previous studies have not examined whether there were changes over time in the form of the microliths themselves, and in this paper, we conduct a geometric morphometric (GM) assessment of the shape differences over time at the Batadomba-lena site in the Wet Zone of Sri Lanka, excavated by Deraniyagala and Perera. We show that there were complex shifts in microlith shapes, with diversification of forms over time. This finding challenges conventional typological depictions of sameness within microliths and introduces a new approach to studying the evolution of microlith form.

Archaeology in Oceania, 2019

A previous use-wear and residue analysis of backed artefacts from Deep Creek Shelter showed that ... more A previous use-wear and residue analysis of backed artefacts from Deep Creek Shelter showed that they had a range of functions and had been used with a variety of raw materials. Were non-backed retouched flakes at Deep Creek used for different purposes? To answer this question, 40 non-backed specimens were selected for microscopic use-wear and residue analysis. Not all of these non-backed artefacts had been used, but we identified that many were scrapers, knives, incisors and saws. These tools were used for bone-working and wood-working, and possibly skin-working and non-woody plant-processing. Some of these non-backed retouched artefacts were hafted. For the first time, these results allow comparison of the tool use of backed and non-backed artefacts in Australia. At Deep Creek, the range of functions for the non-backed component was extremely similar to that of the backed artefacts. Although both artefact categories displayed similar tool use, they are distinguished in one interesting way: non-backed specimens were often single purpose, dedicated to one function, whereas backed artefacts were often multifunctional and multipurpose. These results help us understand the structure of tool use in Australia.

Ancient Lanka, 2022

Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Signalling is a critical capacity in modern human cultures but it has often been difficult to ide... more Signalling is a critical capacity in modern human cultures but it has often been difficult to identify and understand on lithic artefacts from pre-literate contexts. Often archaeologists have minimized the signalling role of lithic tools by arguing for strong form-function relationships that constrained signalling or else imposed ethnographic information on the archaeological patterns with the assumption they assist in defining the signalling carried out in prehistory. In this paper I present a case study for which it can be shown that function does not correlate with form and that the technology fell out of use 1000–1500 years ago. This means that neither presumptions of continuity in social practice nor reference to tool use provide strong explanations for the size, shape standardization and regional differentiation of Australian microliths. Sender-receiver signalling theory is harnessed to motivate a new synthesis of these microliths, and I demonstrate that not only were these ar...

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2018

Normative depictions of reduction created by unquantified studies of core classifi cations often ... more Normative depictions of reduction created by unquantified studies of core classifi cations often lead analysts to infer rigid, linear sequences. Normative depictions of core reduction enable, perhaps even encourage, some researchers to believe that they are observing design. This proposition is evaluated using quantitative measurements of refi tted sequences of core reduction from the Gulf of Carpentaria. The results demonstrate that cores were discarded at similar sizes and shapes even though they began the reduction process in radically different states, and conversely, cobbles of similar sizes and shapes produced distinctly different discarded cores. The inability to predict outcomes in any simple way is a product of the contingency of the complex process of knapping. The existence of situationally-determined (or evoked) shifts in knapping behaviour and artefact morphology may confound inferences about all phases of the manufacturing process based on a simple analysis of end products. This conclusion emphasises the importance of not only studying process rather than static discard products, but also the need to examine the nature and magnitude of variation in reduction rather than developing normative depictions of knapping processes with the presumption that core morphologies reflect predetermined plans in some simple way.

Convergence in stone-tool technology, much like in biology, was likely a recurring phenomenon thr... more Convergence in stone-tool technology, much like in biology, was likely a recurring phenomenon throughout the last three million years of human evolution, where functional and economic constraints exerted strong selection on tool size and form as well as other characteristics of technological systems. Some of the best examples of convergent stone working include the Nubian Levallois method (Will, Mackay, and Phillips 2015); overshot flaking of Solutrean and Palaeoindian points (Eren, Patten, O’Brien, and Meltzer 2013b; chapter 1, this volume); fluting on Palaeoindian and southern Arabian points (Crassard 2009); ground-edge axe technology in Pleistocene Australasia, Japan, and multiple Neolithic societies (Clarkson et al. 2015; Hiscock, O’Connor, Balme, and Maloney 2016; Takashi 2012); pressure blade technology in Mesoamerica and Eurasia (Crabtree 1968; Pelegrin 2003); and punch flaking on Danish and Polynesian adzes (Shipton, Weisler, Jacomb, Clarkson, and Walter 2016; Stueber 2010). Likewise, countless more or less identical tool forms appear around the globe in different times and places as the product of seemingly independent invention to meet local needs, be they burins, end scrapers, blades, or discoidal cores. The question is not whether convergence took place, but whether it was common and widespread or took place only under exceptional circumstances. There are many reasons for thinking it was the former, but providing compelling evidence for independent origins without contact between regions, as well as deriving robust evolutionary explanations, are ongoing challenges for archeology. Multiple lines of evidence are required to test such arguments, and these might typically involve experimentation, modeling selective environments, and developing appropriate means of analyzing archeological and environmental data to determine the context of autochthonous development rather than cultural transmission from other populations. Here we propose that the backing of microliths—applying steep, blunting retouch along one edge—is a highly evolvable trait that emerged many times in different places around the world for the specific advantages it conferred in certain contexts. This view contradicts a popular notion that the microlithic technology emerged once in Africa, then spread as a package with modern humans to neighboring regions of Europe and Southwest Asia and eventually to Asia and Australia (Mellars 2006)—an idea that replicates much earlier attempts to use microliths to track population movements across these continents (Brown 1899). To deconstruct that idea, we briefly review the record of microlith origins worldwide, illustrating that microlithic technology occurs not only on separate continents at vastly different time periods but also among different hominin species. We argue that this is because backing was both highly discoverable and advantageous, and as such the trait evolved into near-identical lithic industries in many parts of the world, despite a lack of any recent historical connections. To better frame this argument, we consider the issue of what is, in fact, advantageous and evolvable about backing. We present experimental results that show the existence of key properties shared by backed microliths that may have been selected multiple times in the past—some of which are functional constraints created by the backing itself, whereas others are desirable properties that likely conveyed certain advantages to their users.

Journal of Human Evolution, 2020

The evolution of heat treatment for stone artefact production is a subject of major interest for ... more The evolution of heat treatment for stone artefact production is a subject of major interest for our understanding of early modern humans. In this study, we examine the evidence from one region in Australia to provide a new record of the antiquity of heat treatment, explore chronological shifts in the frequency of heat treatment, and discuss the implications of these findings for early population dynamics and the technical knowledge early settlers might have brought with them. Until now, Australian heat treatment has only dated back 25000 years. This study of the Willandra Lakes, including Lake Mungo, has identified the oldest systematic evidence of heat treatment yet reported in Australia, dating to~42000 years. We also document time-dependent directional change in the frequency of the practice. At those early times, with over 60% of all silcrete artefacts heat-treated, we hypothesize that the practice was mastered and integrated as a recurrent technical solution to the complexities of knapping silcrete. Over time, the use of heat treatment decreased progressively until less than 10% of the artefacts were heattreated in the terminal Holocene. This trajectory has implications for understanding the antiquity of heat treatment on the Australian continent and for investigating the factors that governed its use.

Taxonomic Tapestries: The Threads of Evolutionary, Behavioural and Conservation Research, May 26, 2015

This monograph represents a new step in Australian archaeology. It presents a detailed quantitati... more This monograph represents a new step in Australian archaeology. It presents a detailed quantitative, technological analysis of flaked stone artefacts, of a kind not published previously in Australia. The detailed nature of the analysis reflects the measurement of a large number of variables on each specimen, as well as the use of those measurements in an extended study of the archaeological patterns. The monograph deals with only one archaeological assemblage: the stone artefacts from Capertee 3, a site excavated in the Blue Mountains immediately west of Sydney. This volume develops and tests models of artefact variation and production to an extent not seen before in Australia. More importantly, the analysis of data involves the statistical interrogation of quantitative measurements and is designed to reveal the magnitude and direction of morphological variation within the assemblage. The technological approach adopted allows for the first time in Australian archaeology an evaluation of the nature of changes in the manufacture of retouched flakes in a sequence spanning the entire Holocene. This evaluation enhances current understanding of cultural change in Holocene eastern Australia by allowing the testing of a number of propositions about the rate and uniformity of change in archaeological assemblages. In particular these analyses initiate a review of models of the Eastern Regional Sequence by creating a record of the stoneworking processes in one of the key archaeological sites that define the purported Eastern Regional Sequence.

Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, 2019

We document long-term evolution in the rate of heat treatment in Eastern Australia and explore th... more We document long-term evolution in the rate of heat treatment in Eastern Australia and explore them as a technological response to dynamic industrial and social contexts that developed in the last 25 millennia. We employed methods previously used in Africa but novel in Australia to infer long-term directional changes in the relative frequency of silcrete artefacts that were heat-treated. Our methods involved independent and crossverifying tests of the presence or absence of heat treatment, employing visual classifications and surface roughness measures. These methods revealed a coherent series of increases over time in the landscapes around Sydney, so that Late Holocene assemblages displayed higher rates of heat treatment than terminal Pleistocene or Early Holocene ones. We hypothesise that the directional trend towards greater frequencies of heat-treated artefacts on Australia's eastern seaboard is explicable in terms of the context of technological shifts towards microlith production superimposed onto an even longer term process of lithic resource depletion, perhaps compounded with the development of political barriers to the redistribution of knappable stone.

Science, 2019

This won the John Mulvaney Book Award:
http://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/book_award/#hiscock

Red Queen in Australia, 2023

Ancient Lanka, Dec 8, 2022

Archaeology in Oceania, 2019

Ancient Lanka, 2022

Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2018

Journal of Human Evolution, 2020

Taxonomic Tapestries: The Threads of Evolutionary, Behavioural and Conservation Research, May 26, 2015

Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, 2019

Australian Archaeology, 2016

We report evidence for the world's earliest ground-edge axe, 44-49,000 years old. Its antiquity c... more We report evidence for the world's earliest ground-edge axe, 44-49,000 years old. Its antiquity coincides with or immediately follows the arrival of humans on the Australian landmass. Ground/polished axes are not associated with the eastward dispersal of Homo sapiens across Eurasia and the discovery of axes in Australia at the point of colonisation exemplifies a diversification of technological practices that occurred as modern humans dispersed from Africa. Ground-edge axes are now known from two different colonised lands at the time humans arrived and hence we argue that these technological strategies are associated with the adaptation of economies and social practices to new environmental contexts.

Australian Archaeology, 2014

Abstract Geographical variation in backed artefact size and morphology has long been recognised i... more Abstract Geographical variation in backed artefact size and morphology has long been recognised in Australia. This paper evaluates a novel measure of symmetry that can quantify regional and continental-scale geographic patterns in backed artefact forms. The result indicates that we can construct new depictions of regional differences in Australian backed artefacts, and that evolutionary explorations of those differences are worthwhile.

Australian Archaeology, 2011

Abstract The distinctive tool called 'tula'is an endemic adaptation, which was ... more Abstract The distinctive tool called 'tula'is an endemic adaptation, which was adopted by Aboriginal people across central and western Australia, encompassing some two-thirds of the continent. The tula is a hafted tool used for working hardwoods as well as other tasks including butchery and plant-processing. The geographic spread of tulas appears to have been rapid and no antecedent form has been identified. The sudden appearance of tulas was coincident with the onset of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions. While we ...

Australian Archaeology, 2013

South Wales. Children from the three traditional tribal groups of the Willandra Lakes walk on the... more South Wales. Children from the three traditional tribal groups of the Willandra Lakes walk on the site of what promises to be the world's largest collection of Pleistocene human footprints in the world (photograph courtesy of Michael Amendolia).

by Dorian Q Fuller, Lisa Janz, Maria Marta Sampietro, Philip I. Buckland, Agustín A Diez Castillo, Ciler Cilingiroglu, Gary Feinman, Peter Hiscock, Peter Hommel, Maureece Levin, Henrik B Lindskoug, Scott Macrae, John M. Marston, Alicia R Ventresca-Miller, Ayushi Nayak, Tanya M Peres, Lucas Proctor, Steve Renette, Gwen Robbins Schug, Peter Schmidt, Oula Seitsonen, Arkadiusz Sołtysiak, Robert Spengler, Sean Ulm, David Wright, and Muhammad Zahir

Science, 2019

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of 5 agriculture,... more Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of 5 agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological 10 expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation through millennia of increasingly intensive land use, challenging the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly recent. 15 One Sentence Summary: A map of synthesized archaeological knowledge on land use reveals a planet transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago.

Authors not found on Academia:
Torben Rick, Tim Denham, Jonathan Driver, Heather Thakar, Amber L. Johnson, R. Alan Covey, Jason Herrmann, Carrie Hritz, Catherine Kearns, Dan Lawrence, Michael Morrison, Robert J. Speakman, Martina L. Steffen, Keir M. Strickland, M. Cemre Ustunkaya, Jeremy Powell, Alexa Thornton.