12:30pm Bryce Barker and Lara Lamb

Ancestral Villages of the Keraho: Motu Hiri pottery trade and the archaeology of the Kikori River Delta

 

The excavation of the Ancestral village of Otoia, in the Kikori River Delta, is part of a wider project initiated by Dr Bruno David of Monash University and Professor Jean-Michel Geneste of the University of Bordeaux. This project aims to archaeologically characterise the settlement of the Kikori River system from the Southern Highlands to the Gulf coast. The Kikori River has been historically described as the western extent of the Hiri Pottery trade, which originated out of the Port Moresby region. The Delta villages of Otoia and Dopima were described as having populations of 1000-2000 people and it is speculated that the size of the villages in the Delta are due to their role as distribution points for the movement of pottery northward, up the Kikori River.  Recent fieldwork in the Delta was designed to test these ideas and to obtain the first archaeological evidence for the antiquity of village occupation in the Kikori River Delta.

 

Bryce Barker and Lara Lamb teach anthropology and archaeology in the School of Humanities and Communication. They have been working in Papua New Guinea on several research projects for the past few years, and this work is ongoing. Preliminary results of this work were recently published by Left Coast Press in the Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, 2008.

 1:00pm Jayson Althofer

Society as Spectacle: Norman Lindsay's Olympian Ideology

 

As a commercial artist and philosopher manqué Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) is a grey eminence of Australia’s martial society of the spectacle. From cynical commitment to ‘the Revolution as a spectacle’ (Nietzsche), through disquisitions on patriarchal, capitalist and cosmic spectacles, to praise for American imperialism’s civilising mission in Vietnam, his oeuvre made vital(ist) contributions to the visual composition of bourgeois hegemony in Australia. This paper outlines a preliminary reconstruction of the aesthetic praxis of Lindsay, a modern rhyparographos – ‘painter of sordid subjects’ – with reference to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

 

Jayson Althofer works at Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery as the Coordinator of Bolton Library Services; he has responsibility for the library materials in the Lionel Lindsay Gallery and Library Collection. He is a member of the Public Memory Research Centre and is researching a PhD on the cultural politics of Lionel and Norman Lindsay.