Port Essington : the historical archaeology of a north Australian nineteenth century military outpost
In 1966 Jim Allen undertook the first professional excavation of a European site in Australia. The 1840s military settlement of Victoria was established at Port Essington, the northernmost part of the Northern Territory and was the end point of Ludwig Leichhardt's epic journey in 1844-45. This settlement was the longest lived of three failed attempts by the British to establish a settlement on the northern coast of Australia before 1850. Its history reflects many of the dominant themes of wider colonial history - isolation, tropical disease, poorly equipped and inexperienced colonists, inept government bureaucracies and relations with the Indigenous population. By looking at both the material evidence produced by archaeological excavation and the written sources, Allen sought to integrate both sorts of evidence to produce an eclectic history that was neither social nor political nor economic in its primary emphasis, but combined all three. When his research was presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Australian National University in 1969 its main theoretical thrust concerned the problems of this data integration and this remains a central issue in the discipline of historical archaeology in Australasia
Print Book, English, ©2008
Sydney University Press in association with the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, [Sydney], ©2008
xvi, 141 pages : illustrations, maps, plans ; 30 cm.
9781920898878, 1920898875
271723265
The problem defined
Excavations and architecture
Married quarters
Store D
Pottery
Earthernware (white clay wares)
Glass
Type A glass
aboriginal artefacts
Type B glass
Metal, stone and bone
The establishment of Port Essington
The political background
Life at Port Essington
First garrison 1838-1844
Second garrison 1844-49
Conclusions