What archaeological projects are you working on at the moment?
I have a linkage grant with DIPNR to record Gamilaraay resources, resource use and resource management with a view to using the results in the development of policy about land management and incorporating more Indigenous values into those policy decisions. Most of the work is done by Maria Cotter, who works closely with Indigenous people in Bogabilla, Tamworth and Walgett. This project was the idea of Steve Porter, a Gamilaraay man working for DIPNR.

I recently spent 10 weeks in the Collegium Budapest with a bunch of animal ethologists and others interested in the relations between human and animal culture. We have a joint paper in press resulting from it, and I have just finished a joint paper with Bill McGrew about the cognitive significance of the earliest stone artefacts. This all arises from my long involvement in the study of language origins.

Tell us about one of your most interesting archaeological discoveries.
My PhD was supervised by Eric Higgs, then a major figure at Cambridge archaeology. He was particularly interested in upsetting preconceptions about the origins of agriculture. I guess we have mostly forgotten about all the good things that came out of that—though the most interesting thing is that it did not change the standard story very much. When I set off to do my first field data collection in Spain, his parting words were “Go and find the domestication of the horse in the Pyrenees, Davidson”. Of course, the thing I am proud of is that I did not find any such thing. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that in Spain there is a species of wild goat, the Spanish Ibex, Capra pyrenaica, and although I ended up studying lots of ibex bones, I am very proud that I ended up showing that there was nothing like an indigenous domestication of it.

Tell us about a funny/disastrous/amazing experience that you have had while doing archaeology.
My first summer in Spain, my Spanish collaborator took me to a lunch with friends of his. The main dish appeared and there seemed to be little other than garlic cloves on the plate. I certainly had more than 30 on mine. Partly as a result of this, and principally because I was not being very careful, I failed to recognise that we were eating wild boar. As a result, the collaborator had no confidence in my ability to identify animal bones. Call that funny, call it disastrous.

The amazing: going to the cave of Parpallo in eastern Spain in 1971, 40 years after the end of the excavations there. The cave is known for the 700 or so painted, engraved, and painted and engraved plaquettes found through the sequence from 20 thousand to 10 thousand years ago. There lying on the surface of the spoil heap was an engraved plaquette that they had missed. I went back a year later and found another—both given to the Museum in Valencia.

What’s your favourite part of being an archaeologist?
Archaeologists make up stories about the past, but not just any stories (good line that, wonder where I read it?) We are constrained by data, but we make up histories that were probably never understood before by any other person because we can see long time scales in ways that others could not. We can know about the relationship between plaquettes in Spain and Namibia, about the fact that the Namibian plaquettes may be of the same age as Venus figurines in Europe, and that there were paintings on the walls of rockshelters in Cape York at the same time. We can construct arguments which put the importance of sea-crossings for the first people to get to Australia into the same sort of context that understands that the first people who got to Tasmania could walk there. We can look at a pyramid and find evidence that makes it unlikely that aliens were involved with making it, because by using archaeological techniques we can write a history of human actions. We can take an impossible question like the origins of language and we can bring to bear evidence from anatomy, stone tools, art, linguistics, semiotics, physical anthropology, psychology, infant development, primatology and ethnography and go beyond the forms of speculation that led the Linguistic Society of Paris to ban studies on language origins. Archaeology, when well done, is about constraining the answers to our questions about how the world came to be by looking at the evidence and being as rigorous as possible about our interpretations. Along the way, we meet wonderful people, visit beautiful places, are inspired by the achievements of our students and drink a lot of red wine (some of it very good).

Follow up reading:
1992 Archaeologists and Aborigines. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 2(2):247-58.
2003 The archaeology of language origins: states of art. In M. Christiansen and S. Kirby (eds) Language evolution: states of the art. pp. 140-157. Oxford University Press.
In press (1 with N.D.J. Cook, M. Fischer, M. Ridges, J. Ross and S.A. Sutton) Archaeology in another country: exchange and symbols in North West Central Queensland. In I. Macfarlane, M.-J. Mountain, and R. Paton (eds) Many exchanges: Archaeology, history, community and the work of Isabel McBryde