ETHNOGRAPHY AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN AUSTRALIA

After a review of ethnographic approaches to Australian archaeology, t his paper discusses food exchanges as an example of how Aboriginal soc iety organizes production and social reproduction in gender specific t erms. This goes well beyond the orthodoxy that men hunt and women gath er. Evidence that food and other exchanges are reflected in the contem porary archaeological record is presented together with an outline of a debate between Gould and Binford about this issue. The structuring o f production and exchange along gender lines in Aboriginal society is so pervasive that some form of patterning along these lines is to be e xpected. This is the case even in archaeological sites of long occupat ion where the original layout of household structures may have been de stroyed. Exchanges at the individual and household level should also b e preserved in the form of reduction sequences, stone raw materials an d small refuse items such as chipping debris and bone fragments. (C) 1 996 Academic Press, Inc.