The Prehistory of Deep Time

<i>The Prehistory of Deep Time</i> is the first book on the history of human antiquity in Australia and the first to trace the development of the settler understanding of deep history.<br><br>In 1859, European scientists finally agreed on ‘the antiquity of man’ – the idea that human beings had been on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. This moment features in scholarship as the dawn of a new scientific age, but for Australian historians and archaeologists, this intellectual revolution would not be fully realised for another hundred years. While humans as a species may have been ancient, Australia’s deep Aboriginal past was apparently not ‘discovered’ or understood until the professional archaeology and radiocarbon dating of the 1960s. Until then, settlers believed Indigenous Australians had only been on the continent for a few thousand years. <i>The Prehistory of Deep Time</i> tells a different story.<br><br>Instead of something that remained unproven or ignored, between 1860 and 1960, ‘human antiquity’ and ‘Aboriginal antiquity’ became two distinct concepts in the Australian imagination, and they did not always mean the same thing. Australia’s human antiquity was often proven by contemporary science, allowing intellectuals to garner academic clout locally and abroad. Australia’s Aboriginal antiquity became increasingly fluid, going from proven, to not proven, to proven only by specific people groups or cultural objects. Human antiquity was a scientific idea imagined in the minds of Europeans and settler Australians who, at various points and for various reasons, decided whether or not to acknowledge its Aboriginality. This acknowledgement turned on a dime of racial politics and shifting methodologies.<br><br>Our history books claim there was no ‘discovery’ of Australia’s deep Aboriginal history because we lacked the right evidence and expertise. Amy Way reveals a much more insidious process of intellectual dispossession that settler Australia was consciously embroiled in.