Peter Hiscock

Australian prehistory

In addition to his work on lithic technology in Australia, Hiscock has contributed to a reinterpretation of the prehistory of Australia. His work on colonization and settlement, with Lynley Wallis, created the 'Desert Transformation' model, which proposed that about 50,000 years ago human colonists dispersed across much of the Australian continent at a time when the deserts were less harsh than today. These early settlers then gradually adapted to the onset of harsher environments that occurred after approximately 35,000 years ago.

His work with Patrick Faulkner also led to a reconsideration of the large Anadara granosa shell mounds of northern Australia. Hiscock was funded with Dr Alex Mackay for an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellowship project titled ‘Technology and behavioural evolution in late Pleistocene Africa, Europe and Australia’ (DP1092445) worth more than A$400,000 in 2010. The aim of this project was to focus on excavations in Africa, making comparisons with other areas of the world including Australia.

His major contribution to Australian prehistory has been a new synthesis of the subject, in a book titled Archaeology of Ancient Australia. In that volume he advanced the view that there was little evidence for directional change in the prehistory of Australia and that the archaeological evidence was better seen as documenting a long series of adaptive changes, perhaps operating in multiple directions, rather than progress towards 'intensification' in the recent past (as espoused by archaeologists such as Harry Lourandos). This view was founded on a strong negative critique of the value of ethnography in the construction of narratives about the deep prehistoric past, arguing that ethnographic analogy had often imposed images of the lifestyle of recent Australian Aborigines on the different lives of their distant ancestors. Brian Fagan has suggested that in doing so Hiscock has attacked the tyranny of the ethnographic record that has dogged Australian archaeology for generations. In this he has disputed the views of archaeologists such as Josephine Flood, who considers ethnographic information can help understand prehistoric behavior.

Hiscock's argument also emphasized the likely failure of much of the Pleistocene archaeological record to preserve, arguing that the apparent simplicity of early eras resulted partly from the poverty of the archaeological evidence. Interpreting the available archaeological and genetic evidence from these view points, Hiscock presented a novel narrative of Australian prehistory, in which population sizes fluctuated through time in response to environmental productivity, the physical characteristics of people varied as climate and gene flows altered, and the economic, social, and ideological systems adjusted to accommodate and incorporate the circumstances of each time period.

Awards

Hiscock received the John Mulvaney Book Award in 2008 from the Australian Archaeological Association for his publication The Archaeology of Ancient Australia, which was acclaimed for its way of dealing "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 also was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) honorary degree at the Australian National University.

Books

Articles and chapters