Mapping an archaeology of the present: Counter-mapping at the Gummingurru stone arrangement site,southeast Queensland,Australia

Abstract

In 2010 a large project to map the 5ha Gummingurru stone arrangement site on the Darling Downs, southeast Queensland, Australia, was completed; 9368 rocks were plotted and recorded and many of these rocks make up the over 20 motifs on the site. But Gummingurru is a site that is more than rocks. It is part of a large cultural landscape which includes neighboring sites, resource tree plantings, scarred trees, story places and memoryscapes (Lavers, 2010). Current mapping of the site and the associated landscape features has been inhibited by the constraints of two-dimensional mapping. In this article we outline an alternative map for the site and its cultural landscape – the Prezi web-based tool. The Prezi ‘map’ allows the documentation of a fluid and contextual approach to place and is easily updated or modified as data or attachment to place change.

Keywords

archaeological representation counter-mapping cultural landscapes present-past Prezi stone arrangements

Introduction

Heritage places may have been created in the past, but they are given meaning in the present (Byrne, 2005; David et al., 2012; Russell, 2012). As Andrews and Buggey (2008: 66, 69) express it: ‘cultural links to the past exist only in the present … The community holds identity and memory and nurtures them from the past through the present and into the future.’

Maori archaeologist Margaret Rika-Heke (2010: 197) makes a similar observation:

As if to mirror the Maori concept of self, taonga [artefacts] and wahi tapu [sites of significance] represent both physical and spiritual aspects that can be likened to a continuum from the past, to the present and into the future.

Cultural heritage today recognizes this present gaze through which the past is narrated. In fact, modern cultural heritage management practice recognizes that meaning is assigned, and significance determined, by people’s relationships to place in the present (Bender, 2006; Smith, 2006). Although past meanings may inform current attachments, it is in the present that value is assigned.

Presenting the multiple understandings of place to validate their role in place identification and to recognize their part in the generation of management decision-making is a major goal of counter-mapping. Counter-mapping is a technique that recognizes that there are alternative ways of presenting an authentic heritage, particularly when modern meanings assigned to heritage places differ from past understandings of those places (Bender, 2006; Brealey, 1995; Byrne, 2008; Oliver, 2011; Peluso, 1995).

Authenticity is regarded as an essential component of legislative as well as community requirements for place protection and for meeting standards of what is considered heritage (Prangnell et al., 2010; Ross et al., 2010). In general, authenticity involves a focus on the tangible, the past, the unchanging (static) site (Andrews and Buggey, 2008; Byrne, 2003, 2008; Byrne and Nugent, 2004; Clarke, 2011; Ferrier, 2002; Harrison, 2010; Starn, 2002; Williamson and Harrison, 2002). Such notions of authenticity are, of course, flawed. As with every culture, Indigenous cultural heritage is continually changing, with connections, meanings and relationships between people and places, and between people, places and landscapes, changing as well (Russell, 2012; Williamson and Harrison, 2002). Andrews and Buggey (2008: 70) suggest that ‘any test of authenticity, therefore, must recognize, expect, and endorse change’. How then do we as archaeologists address living, present change within a process of representation of an ancient place?

‘Past mastering’ is (perhaps seemingly paradoxically) one method of addressing the present contexts within which the past is embedded and thereby the changes that may exist between the past and the present representations of that past. Past mastering uses the integrated methodologies of anthropology and archaeology to inform archaeological field practice and representations in heritage contexts, while coming to terms with operating within contested and often negative histories (Meskell, 2012: 1–3). Forgetting the past is an effective method of erasing agency, while privileging the past is just as problematic in erasing present authenticity (Meskell, 2009). The practice of mapping a living heritage landscape, for these reasons, requires the inclusion of both the past and the present and is equally obliged to address the political and cultural contexts within which heritage exists in the present (Meskell, 2012). It therefore follows that archaeological documentation of heritage places must integrate a flexible model of representation to show change as an authentic expression of culture and to show that changing cultures create heritage as they go along.

In this article we examine some of the problems that arise when mapping heritage places. We particularly focus on places that have meaning and significance in the present which differ from the meaning and significance of those places in the past. To map heritage using conventional mapping techniques tends to freeze a site, or ‘fix’ it, in a past form and disallows changes that may occur as part of the new meanings that are given to a place in the present.

Living heritage and ‘happening’ places

Phenomenological discourse on the nature of ‘place’ demonstrates that places are geographical locales where things ‘happen’ (Casey, 1996: 13). An archaeology of landscape begins with the complex concept of ‘place’. ‘Place’ is contingent on defined space and the events, memories, tasks and journeys that occur in that space (1996: 14). Space becomes place after it changes from being a purely physical medium (such as a site) and is transformed by social beings into conceptual understandings, histories and narratives (Casey, 1996; Russell, 2012: 415). Thus, whether preserved or destroyed, places are remembered, discovered, constructed and lived within a continuum of human experiences (Casey, 1996; David et al., 2012; Gosden and Head, 1994; Ingold, 1993). A site, the connections it has to ‘place’ and the sense of dwelling in place that is thus generated are a complex intertwining of phenomena that, when recorded, reconstructed and represented as landscapes, become codified, lived and living places of attachment and significance (Andrews and Buggey, 2008; Byrne and Nugent, 2004). This landscape approach seeks to rectify a history of looking at isolated sites by emphasizing the relationships between the intertwining phenomena emplaced in the landscape (Casey, 1996: 33; Ross et al., 2011; Solomon and Forbes, 2010: 223).

Places become through people developing attachments to them (Brown, 2004: 18–19; Cummings et al., 2002: 68) and through creating socially constructed meanings about, and engagements with, places by dwelling in them (Byrne and Nugent, 2004: 189; Knapp and Ashmore, 1999: 20–21). Dwelling in the landscape, being-in-place and developing attachments to places and landscapes are intimately linked to the phenomenological experience of place – the living experiences of personal and community engagement ‘anchored in bodily physicality’ in place (Joyce, 2005: 120). These experiences of being-in-place create place (Joyce, 2005; cf. Casey, 1996; Clarke, 2011; Lavers, 2010; Lourandos, 2011; Romano, 2008). Merlan (1998: 211–212) has argued that it is important that we recognize the contemporary agency of ‘place’. She argues for the vision of place as ‘phenomenal body’ imbued with ‘cultural patterns and actions’ rather than as a ‘passive, abstract, or homogenous arena or backdrop on which things happen or within which social structures are merely contained’. Places, for Merlan, are fluid constructions of contemporary action, and we agree.

Ingold (1993, 2000) uses the concept of the ‘taskscape’ to explain this phenomenon, while Harrison (2011) uses the terminology ‘story-trekking’. Both concepts involve the role of story-telling and memory in creating an understanding of the past in the present. David et al. (2012; see also Russell, 2012) similarly use story-telling as a mnemonic for the resurgence of knowledge about places that no longer exist in a physical sense. Places can also exist in memory.

These notions of story-telling and memory that link place to past and present human activity (tasks, journeys, etc.) evoke a sense of movement through space and time. Harrison (2011: 4) sees this as place providing the point of intersection between history, event, people and landscape: ‘The “ways-of-doing” … form part of the collective experience from which [people] … constitute their collective identity, and sense of place … It is an entanglement of genealogies, a place where past, present, and future collapse.’ In this way, events and memories are as much a part of a place as are the artifacts and the tangible structures of a site. Consequently, it is vital that when archaeologists construct (and hence document) an encoded landscape, particularly in a heritage management context, they include the knowledge of that place held by Traditional Custodians (Bender, 2006; Clarke, 2011: 11; Nabokov, 2002). This knowledge may be entirely different from the archaeologists’ own understandings of that place. Counter-mapping is a tool that allows these two ways of knowing to come together in heritage documentation. The Gummingurru Aboriginal stone arrangement site provides a case study for the application of counter-mapping in cultural heritage management.

The Gummingurru stone arrangement site

The Gummingurru Aboriginal stone arrangement site complex lies on the Darling Downs north of Toowoomba, close to the township of Meringandan, in inland southeast Queensland (Figure 1). The site is in the traditional country of the Jarowair Aboriginal people, who are one of the many Aboriginal groups associated with the Bunya Mountains (or Boobarran Ngummin) and the (usually) triennial feasts and ceremonies held there in pre-contact and early contact times (Jerome, 2002; Morwood, 1986; Petrie, 1904; Rowlings-Jensen, 2004; Sullivan, 1977). The ‘Bunya Gatherings’ (Whincop et al., 2012) brought together Aboriginal people from across southeast Queensland and northeast New South Wales to feast upon the ripe and highly nutritious bunya nuts when they were in abundance. The availability of large quantities of food allowed large numbers of people to meet to perform a range of ceremonies (including initiation and marriage), to trade and to form and/or maintain important political alliances (Whincop et al., 2012).

Figure 1.

Location of Gummingurru in southeast Queensland (Ross, 2008).

Gummingurru was originally a secret, sacred male initiation site that people would visit en route to the Bunya Gatherings. In Aboriginal Australia, initiation ceremonies involved the admission of young men into adulthood via a range of body modifications, including scarification (Bowdler, 1999), which was the major man-making component of initiation at Gummingurru (Brian Tobane, senior Jarowair Traditional Custodian, pers. comm., 2009). Initiation also provided young men with important knowledge for their futures, including instruction in natural resources management, advanced law for the social group in which they lived and the promotion of vital political and social alliances (Brian Tobane, pers. comm., 2009; see also Bowdler, 1999, 2005; Ross, 2008). The transmission of such knowledge in the past was an oral communication that was emplaced, contextual and part of intertwining matrices of social, cultural, political, geographical and natural resources knowledge (Ingold, 2011; Sheehan and Lilley, 2008).

Places like Gummingurru, therefore, were central locales of knowledge. Journeys to such sites were essential in the education of a society. As part of their initiation at Gummingurru, initiates were assigned totems (known locally as yurees) and the motifs that make up this site reflect many of these yurees – including a turtle, carpet snake, emu, bunya nut and catfish (Brian Tobane, pers. comm., 2009; Gilbert, 1992; see also Gaiarbau’s recollections of similar places in this cultural landscape, as told to Winterbotham, 1959; Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Some of the motifs at the Gummingurru stone arrangement site.

The Gummingurru stone arrangement is part of a local cultural landscape that includes men’s and women’s ceremonial places, campsites, art sites, scarred trees and at least one ochre quarry. It is also part of a much wider cultural ‘memoryscape’ (Lavers, 2010) that contains the physical remains of memories in the form of locales of events from the deep past as well as from recent history and even the present day. This memoryscape contains evidence of many past journeys to and from Gummingurru and the Bunya Mountains. Casey (1996) and Ingold (1993), among others (Byrne and Nugent, 2004; David et al., 2012; Gorring, 2011; Russell, 2012; Ulm et al., 2010), argue that heritage sites and landscapes incorporate activities, cultural performances and memories associated with places. Such taskscapes (Ingold, 1993) retain the knowledge of the performances of past actors in the form of stories and remembered histories of and about the people who animated the cultural landscape (Gorring, 2011).

Once European settlers arrived on the Darling Downs, use of Gummingurru ceased. Aboriginal connection to this site was not re-established until 2000 when the Jarowair Traditional Custodians (members of the Wakka Wakka nation) were given management control of the site. Jarowair site managers recognize that few memories of ancient times have survived and they have therefore assigned new, current meanings to this site. As a consequence, Gummingurru is now a place of reconciliation and education where all people can come to learn about Aboriginal heritage. Today, knowledge transmission is somewhat different from that in the past, being largely based on computer packages and published papers. Nevertheless, there does remain an oral component to the delivery of information about the site as school and other groups visit to listen to stories about Aboriginal culture generally, and the Gummingurru site in particular, from the Traditional Custodians. In addition, the knowledge itself remains embedded in the social, cultural, political, geographical and natural resources context of the ancient knowledge systems (Ross, 2008). It is also a place of renewal of connections to country, of dwelling in the cultural landscape and of resurrection of past memories. In this way, many of the original purposes of this place of initiation, as reported by Bunda (see below; also Gaiarbau in Winterbotham, 1959; Ross, 2008) – education, sharing of knowledge, attachment to country, political alliance formation and maintenance, and so forth – continue into, and inform, the present-day uses of the site (Ross, 2008). Many of these ostensibly ancient activities have a modern expression, such as those seen in the ongoing management of the site.

Brian Tobane, the senior Traditional Custodian, has spent much of the time since the Jarowair returned to the property in reviving the site through lifting buried rocks and revealing the motifs that were once on the surface (Ross, 2008, 2010). Using the original map of the site prepared in 1959 by Bartholomai and Breeden (1961), Tobane has spent the years since reoccupying the site in clearing grass, prodding the soil to locate buried rocks and then lifting these buried stones directly onto the surface, without altering their orientation or horizontal placement (Ross, 2008, 2010). The patterns thereby revealed have been interpreted based on the knowledge of the site held by Bunda, a senior Aboriginal man who was a child at the time of the last initiation at Gummingurru (c.1891) and who is therefore recognized as the last traditional holder of knowledge about the site. Bunda was Tobane’s maternal great uncle and he passed on much of his knowledge to Tobane and to the white property owner, Ben Gilbert (subsequently published in Gilbert, 1992). Ben Gilbert and Bunda were childhood friends, having both grown up in the vicinity of the site. Bunda had even ‘initiated’ Gilbert and given him an Aboriginal name. It was this close association that sanctioned Bunda’s handing on of important Aboriginal information to a white man, and Gilbert’s subsequent retelling of this information to Bunda’s descendants.

In addition to the vertical lifting of buried rocks, Brian Tobane has used the most recent mapping of the site (completed in 2010; see below) to maintain some of the stone arrangements. For example, in August 2009 Tobane rearranged the rocks of the ‘Initiation Ring’. Having been distorted for over 100 years through the impacts of grazing and site flooding, all the rocks in this motif were moved by Tobane to create a ring, with clear entry and exit pathways.

The Jarowair term these revitalization activities ‘resurrection’, to symbolize their actions in regaining knowledge about the site and re-engaging with its living traditions. As a consequence of these resurrection activities, the site is constantly changing and it is these changes that give the site its present-day meaning. Today, Gummingurru is no longer used for initiation and it is no longer regarded as a place restricted to senior men and young males entering adulthood. It is now a place of education and cultural sharing for all peoples regardless of age, gender or race. School groups visit the site as part of reconciliation programs supported by the federally formulated Australian National History Curriculum. In the Visitors’ Centre, constructed to the south of the site, there is a range of resources, including copies of archival documents, educational games and activities, historical images and hundreds of Aboriginal artifacts collected from the site and the local area. All these activities, which are also linked to the Gummingurru website,¹ encourage Australia’s youth to learn about Aboriginal cultures generally and to understand the place of Gummingurru in the Bunya Mountains social catchment specifically.

These ongoing changes to the site inform the present narrative of this place (cf. David et al., 2012), and it is this shifting narrative that provides the challenge for the archaeological recording of the site. How can we, as archaeologists and heritage managers, document a site that is undergoing such constant reshaping and even reforming?

Documenting the site

In 2010 an Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)-funded project to map the site was completed (Figure 3). The mapping strategy recorded detailed position and condition information about all rocks larger than 10x10cm. Each stone was flagged and assigned a unique field identification number (G#) and its position plotted using a Nikon Pulse Laser Station NPL-332 (for further details, see Ross and Ulm, 2009). Each stone was also measured in three dimensions and photographed in plan view with a Canon EOS 400D high resolution digital camera.

Figure 3.

The Gummingurru stone arrangement site, as recorded by Ross and Ulm, 2010.

The problem with this technique, of course, is that it provides only a snapshot of the site at the time it was documented. The 2010 map is quite different from the map published in 1961. Bartholomai and Breeden’s map (1961) documents only the western part of the site. The eastern extent of the site was not identified at that time, as all the motifs in the east were still buried. The 2010 map is an expansion of this original depiction of the site, yet even the most recent map was out of date on the day it was finalized. On that day, Brian Tobane asked, ‘How many rocks?’ ‘9368,’ we replied. ‘I bet you didn’t find those four rocks at the far end that I dug up yesterday, did you?’ Of course we had not!

Since completing the 2010 map, further modifications to the site by Tobane and others have occurred. Although the site was revisited so that the reshaped Initiation Ring could be replotted, the constant mapping required to keep up with the ongoing resurrection activities by the Jarowair owners is beyond the scope of conventional archaeological activity (and funding!). An alternative form of site documentation is required.

Counter-mapping Gummingurru

Maps are constructs that both represent and create reality (Byrne, 2008; Fox, 2002). A map is a fabrication of a landscape that encourages a reading that valorizes a geographically fixed, rather than socially defined, space; a space which, in phenomenological terms, is unoccupied and without activity. Spaces of this kind lack associations between people and events; between people and landscape; between past and present; and between activity and memory.

The processes of site recording and archaeological representation of places, like much geographical mapping, usually prioritize and capture features of the past (and the present) which are interpreted through the gaze of an archaeologist (Bender, 2006). As most archaeologists have been trained in a western paradigm, this interpretive gaze is, consequently, normally set within western scientific ontology and epistemology, which underpin the selection of features considered to be the significant elements of the documented site or landscape (Sheehan and Lilley, 2008). This is where the intersection of counter-mapping and representational archaeological methodologies is most important; it is where the practice of mapping archaeological sites makes heritage and Indigenous knowledge visible (Rouse, 2006; Sheehan and Lilley, 2008). The interpretation of Indigenous knowledge and archaeological data, and the integration of these two datasets into a representation, is undertaken by individuals within specific cultural milieus (David et al., 2012; Lydon, 2009; Meskell, 2009; Rouse, 2006). This is the ‘present-past’, a dynamic, individual understanding and interpretation of the past, necessarily reflexive on the part of the practitioner and continually changing as knowledge and understanding change; it is, therefore, unstable (Bender, 2006: 311; Clarke, 2011; Lourandos, 2011; Meskell, 2012). The process of acknowledging the frameworks and biases inherent in the present-past archaeological gaze is hermeneutic (or iterative and reiterative, or constantly re-evaluating) and must be a formative part of the archaeological practice of undertaking the unfixed mapping and representation of place (Ingold, 1993; Tilley, 2000).

The fixity of place creates a sense that ‘places’ only exist in one past moment in time. When sites are fixed in a recording or on a map, they are fossilized and thereby made unchanging. Yet sites, places and landscapes are not fixed, they are happening (Casey, 1996). Places like Gummingurru are continually being reformed and resurrected, with meanings and relationships that are continually changing. In this sense, sites are living entities.

Cultural heritage management practice (although not the relevant legislation; see Ross, 2010) in Australia has changed over the last 20 years, from once privileging the scientific, fixed, tangible components of sites in constructing interpretation, representation and, most importantly, conferring authenticity onto sites, into what is now an integrated process of investigating the tangible and the intangible, wherein the changing, emic Indigenous present understandings of sites inform the investigation of place (Andrews and Buggey, 2008; Byrne, 2003; Byrne and Nugent, 2004; Harrison, 2011; Ireland, 2003; Knapp and Ashmore, 1999; Ross, 2008, 2010; Sullivan, 2008). It is these integrated quantitative and qualitative, tangible and intangible, methodological components that now underpin the process of constructing representations in archaeology and in the broad field of heritage management (Godwin and Weiner, 2006).

Counter-mapping is a method that addresses many of the problems of the fixity of representation. Counter-mapping was a term first coined by Peluso (1995), working in the paradigm of environmental anthropology. Her concept of ‘counter-mapping’ has since been adopted by a number of disciplines, including archaeology, which is the context in which we use this term here. Counter-mapping is used to describe the process of constructing a map that could be used to authenticate local understandings of a landscape and customary claims to resources. The process of counter-map construction relies on both quantitative information (the ‘where’ and the ‘what’) and qualitative knowledge (the ‘how’, the ‘who’ and the ‘why’) held by the Traditional Custodians of that landscape. By integrating both these aspects of the mapping process, Peluso was able to construct a mapped representation of a landscape that conformed to the standard required by the state (cf. Byrne, 2008), but also allowed the knowledge and practices of the community to be represented in the process of decision-making about the ownership and use of that landscape.

Counter-mapping, as its name implies, aims to counter the limitations of conventional mapping. The key element of a counter-map is its ability to capture the culturally nuanced nature of geographical space and to represent an emic understanding of how people relate to space as ‘place’ and move ‘through a three-dimensional reality rather than across a two-dimensional surface’, in order to ‘apprehend their environment from within’; the way people (Byrne, 2008: 613). In counter-mapping, oral histories and archaeological recording techniques have been combined to generate constructions of place representation that are alternatives to point data mapping (cf. Byrne, 2008; Byrne and Nugent, 2004; Harrison, 2011). However, these representations still tend to fix places in time and space (Casey, 1996).

Byrne and Nugent (2004) pioneered counter-mapping efforts in Australia. Their maps of ‘attachment’ in Taree and Forster on the central coast of New South Wales were generated using a range of data to construct maps that represent places and activities in a broad cultural landscape. Byrne and Nugent collected oral histories, stories of camping and associated events, identified locales of both past and present resource exploitation and collected information about a range of activities and site-based knowledge. Using this data, they produced maps that were an amalgam of the experiences of their Aboriginal informants. Their approach verges on the phenomenological in that the stories are about being in place and moving through the landscape as part of the ‘happenings’, ‘events’, ‘taskscapes’ and ‘embodied experiences’ that have informed these cultural and socialized landscapes. However, the final product remains a two-dimensional fixed map. Although the ‘sites’ are polygons, rather than points, they remain, nevertheless, as geographical locales fixed in space and time.

The same critique can be leveled at others who have generated counter-maps. Harrison (2010, 2011), for example, also used a range of place-based data, stories, journey descriptions and oral histories to create alternative expressions of the mapped landscapes of Kunderang and Dennawan in northeastern New South Wales. But the final result remains a two-dimensional map that fixes data in space (place) and time.

How, then, can counter-maps that genuinely avoid fixing knowledge in space and time be achieved in practice?

To address this problem we considered Lavers’ (2010) analysis of the Gummingurru site in its wider cultural landscape context. Lavers demonstrated that Gummingurru is part of a complex cultural landscape that is made up of a range of archaeological sites, story and memory places, activity areas and the knowledge and journey pathways that connect all these elements. This is similar to Harrison’s (2011) ‘story-trekking’. The Gummingurru cultural landscape is rather like the ripples on a pond, with an immediately ‘adjacent taskscape’ (within approximately 100 m of the site) that contextualizes the Gummingurru site itself (the stone arrangement, marker trees and adjoining campsites); a ‘local cultural landscape’ (within a 5 km radius of the site) that includes other related places and activity areas (such as the location of women’s ceremonial activities, the main campsite, bunya plantings and the ochre quarry); and a ‘regional cultural landscape’ (extending 100 km or more from the site) that includes a vast number of sites, scarred trees, the Bunya Mountains, quarries, other ceremonial places, locales of historical events and geographical features created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming (see Lavers, 2010). This understanding of the complexity of the Gummingurru site as part of a taskscape in the past and the present, as part of a local and regional cultural landscape, and as central to a vast memoryscape, provided the framework for our choice of counter-mapping design.

Clearly, the cultural landscape elements of the memoryscape can be mapped, but, as with Byrne and Nugent’s (2004) and Harrison’s (2010, 2011) representations, the resulting maps are still maps – conventional images with sites and data points overlain on topography. The issue, then, is the medium of the map and the conceptualization of the concept of ‘map’. While we continue to use two-dimensional (or even three-dimensional) fixed representations of spaces on paper – representations that can be published conventionally, and hence conveniently – the results will always be linear, pictorial or other representations of spaces in dot point data form or as polygons. And these sorts of representations, by their very definition, are fixed in time and space. There is no opportunity to capture the ongoing (or even future) ‘happenings’ that make the mapped spaces into ‘places’ (Casey, 1996).

Our aim was to find a genuine alternative form of ‘mapping’ that would allow the memoryscape of Gummingurru to be represented as a phenomenological experience of landscape and a journey through both time and space. To this end we used the technique of the ‘Prezi’ presentation.

The Prezi

According to prezi.com, Prezi is a freely available software program that allows a focus on story-telling in which the ‘listener’ is able to navigate through a story by following either predetermined or random pathways through a body of given information. Text, maps, images, film and sound can all be incorporated into the Prezi presentation medium. Being web based, the Prezi can be updated, modified or completely changed whenever required. Furthermore, being freely available and easily adopted, Prezi lends itself to the development of collaborative presentations that incorporate both scientific and local knowledge. These features of this program make it a perfect tool for the creation of a counter-map of Gummingurru.

The Gummingurru Prezi² places the Gummingurru site into a social and cultural landscape and journey framework. It begins with a focus on the Bunya Mountains triennial gatherings, which provides the rationale for the existence of Gummingurru and other ceremonial sites in the Bunya Mountains social catchment. It then expands outward to place Gummingurru and the Bunya Mountains into their wider cultural landscapes by considering the role of both these landscapes in the southeast Queensland social and cultural catchment generally (Figure 4). Related places, such as Maidenwell and Challawong (Morwood, 1986), are introduced and their relationships to Gummingurru and to the Bunya Mountains are explained. In particular, the existence of these sites on the major journey-routes to the Bunya Mountains is shown.

Figure 4.

Screen capture of the extent of the Gummingurru and Bunya Mountains cultural landscapes within the southeast Queensland cultural landsacpe covered by the Gummingurru Prezi presentation.

After a brief setting for Gummingurru in the complex of language groups of southeast Queensland, the Prezi then takes the viewer on a virtual journey from the coast to the Bunya Mountains via Gummingurru. The viewer is first taken to Challawong, along the pathway that the Aboriginal traveler would have followed in traditional times. Challawong is a significant art site – the only known rock art site in southeast Queensland – and excavation in the 1980s revealed its occupation for over 4000 years (Morwood, 1986). Oral history indicates that this was a major site visited by Aboriginal people en route from Moreton Bay to the Bunya Mountains.

The viewer then travels to the Gummingurru site, where the 2010 archaeological representation of the stone arrangements forms the central image, but it is surrounded by images of the original and recently emerged motifs and their accompanying interpretations both in traditional times and today (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Screen capture of the representation of the Gummingurru site on the Gummingurru Prezi.

The next stages of the Prezi situate Gummingurru within its adjacent, then local and finally wider cultural landscapes (Lavers, 2010). The adjacent landscape shows those components of the site that are immediately related to Gummingurru, such as the marker trees, resource areas and adjacent artifact scatters. The local landscape includes nearby campsites, the ochre pits, bunya plantings and the women’s ceremonial area (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Screen capture of Gummingurru local landscape from the Gummingurru Prezi presentation.

The wider landscape incorporates other major sites such as Maidenwell, Challawong and Warmga (the northern and western equivalents of Gummingurru, respectively), along with other important places in the social catchment of the region. The viewer finally travels to the Bunya Mountains, echoing traditional journeys of the past.

Discussion

The Prezi counter-map is, of course, a map. It is a two-dimensional representation of sites in space. As we argued earlier, almost all counter-maps that have been promoted as examples of alternative mapping strategies are, still, maps. The point about a counter-map is that it does not need to be other than a map, but it does need to recognize the political and social context within which mapping has occurred (Brealey, 1995; Fox, 2002; Oliver, 2011). The key difference between conventional maps and counter-maps is that counter-maps take account of the complex interactions between people and the socialized geography that frames their ontology, while conventional maps do not.

The advantage of the counter-map presented here is that it not only situates Gummingurru in its social and cultural landscape; it also provides a sense of movement through that landscape – a sense of journeying (Ross et al., in press) through the past into the present via ‘story-trekking’ (Harrison, 2011). The Prezi allows the viewer to move through the landscape and pause at significant places along the pathway to the Bunya Mountains, in simulation of the actions of the Aboriginal traveler in ancient times – and as some Aboriginal people aspire to do today in recreations of the ceremonial journey to the Bunya Gatherings (Whincop et al., 2012). The Prezi map is also able to show the present-day narrative of the Gummingurru site by Jarowair Custodians and the other places to which they hold attachment today.

A further advantage of the Prezi is that although it is a published counter-map – available on the Gummingurru website – it is not permanently fixed. Because it is a web-based tool, rather than a published map in a paper-based journal or book, it is easy to update and modify whenever the Traditional Custodians request that changes be made, or whenever there are changes to the site that necessitate its re-recording to meet legislative requirements. In this way the Prezi allows archaeologists and Traditional Custodians to act collaboratively as authors of the mapping and recording process.

Furthermore, the Gummingurru Prezi counter-map goes some way towards addressing the concerns that arise with respect to shortcomings of conventional maps, which freeze the heritage values of place. In the Prezi, the sociality of the geography of Gummingurru is demonstrated. We have used archaeological, anthropological, geographical and cartographical techniques to produce our counter-map. The authors of the counter-map can incorporate ongoing changes to the physicality and sociality of the place. In this way the Prezi map demonstrates the living heritage connection to place that is encapsulated in the concept of ‘mapping an archaeology of the present’.

In the mapping of Gummingurru, the act of the Prezi map creation was undertaken using a phenomenological engagement with the landscape. The key to understanding phenomenology is knowing that it is embodied experience that drives understandings of place (Casey, 1996: 18–19; Cummings et al., 2002: 57–58; Dornan, 2004: 28; Merlan, 1998; Tilley, 1994: 34). Place is always experienced in the present, by people embedded in a current cultural and social context with multiple life experiences (Andrews and Buggey, 2008; Barrett and Ko, 2009; Brück, 2005: 57; Clarke, 2011; David et al., 2012; Russell, 2012). Integral components of experiencing landscape are the physical senses of vision, smell, sound, touch, time and movement (Hamilton and Whitehouse et al., 2006: 33; Joyce, 2005: 147–148); it is ‘the interanimation of the living body and place with each other’ (Romano, 2008: 16) coupled with memory that forms experience. This methodological approach is particularly useful for the practice of mapping at Gummingurru through the integration of recorded archaeological data and Indigenous emplaced knowledge – phenomenologically experienced on-site by both the Traditional Custodians and the archaeologists working with them to document the site in accordance with Jarowair wishes. This form of experience on the site and in the local landscape reifies the traditional methods of transmission of Indigenous knowledge.

Conclusion

Heritage places have meaning both in the past and in the present. Their present meanings can often be of greater relevance to current custodians than ancient, sometimes lost, meanings so often valorized by archaeologists (Byrne, 2005; David et al., 2012).

Cultural heritage practice must recognize the importance of this present gaze through which the past is narrated (Bender, 2006). One way to achieve this is through the adoption of site-recording techniques that recognize the significance of both ancient and present-day narratives of place and thus avoid forcing Indigenous custodians into accepting oppressive legal frameworks that insist on promoting ancient connections to place as the sole (or at least primary) basis for native title or other land rights claims, or involvement in heritage management (Meskell, 2009; Prangnell et al., 2010; Ross et al., 2010).

Current techniques of site documentation adopt methods that ‘fix’ a place into a single snapshot in time and space, thus denying Indigenous custodians the opportunity to change the nature of their connection to, or use of, a place (and in the case of Gummingurru, to change the place itself) to suit modern requirements needed for political, social, legal and/or cultural purposes. The maps that conventional archaeological and heritage recordings create are often regarded as ‘authentic’ representations of an ancient and unchanging heritage. But it is clear that, in the modern world, recording techniques that recognize an ‘archaeology of the present’ are a better characterization of Indigenous aspirations for management of their heritage.

In this article we use the concept of ‘counter-mapping’ to demonstrate one way in which site recording can be made more fluid, by recognizing the ongoing ‘past mastering’ of heritage that forms the basis of modern approaches to Indigenous heritage management. Although the Prezi technique that we promote is only one step removed from a conventional map, it is an improvement on current methods. While it is still a map, and therefore does still ‘fix’ the past in a way, it is a map that accommodates a sense of movement through landscape and varied attachment to places in that landscape. Both tangible and intangible elements of heritage can be represented, and information can be updated and modified whenever change occurs.

Other forms of counter-mapping are currently being developed (e.g. Bradley, 2010; Kearney, 2011; Thomas, in prep.) and will act to inform new and exciting options for animating the past and the present. But these new techniques are still in the development stages. Prezi is available, free and easy to use. We argue that it is a genuine alternative to conventional mapping and can act to promote a modern and vibrant approach to heritage management and archaeological representation in the twenty-first century.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Jarowair Traditional Custodians and the Gummingurru Aboriginal Corporation for their continued support of the research, especially Brian Tobane, Conrad Bauwens and Annette Riley. The research was funded as part of an Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Research Grant. We particularly thank Sean Ulm for his ongoing assistance and research advice. Jane Lavers and Steve Brown were early readers of the manuscript and were invaluable in preparing this document. Elena Piotto has participated in many hours of engaging discussion of the ideas presented here. Four anonymous referees provided sound criticisms that have been incorporated into the article and improved its argument.

Notes

Author Biographies

E. Jaydeyn Thomas is a postgraduate research student in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. Her research interests are varied, including forensic archaeology, landscape archaeology and principally the representation of the past using computer-based graphics. Her thesis focuses on the archaeological representation of the past using information technology to animate the past into the present.

Anne (Annie) Ross is a social archaeologist and cultural heritage manager with research interests in Indigenous knowledge relating to natural and cultural resources management, both in the past and in the present. She has worked on the Gummingurru stone arrangement site for more than a decade and is particularly interested in finding ways to represent this important place in a modern cultural landscape context.

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