Jiigurru or Lizard Island is a continental island on the Great Barrier Reef 250km north of Cairns and 30km from the mainland. The archipelago of islands forming an arc between Jiigurru and Cape Flattery on the mainland are traditionally owned by Dingaal people. The island is tightly enmeshed in a long and complex history of trade and exchange along the western margin of the Coral Sea which remains poorly understood. A richly storied cultural landscape including Dingaal histories, stone arrangements, shell middens, rock art and 19th and 20th century sites allow us to begin to engage with aspects of these histories in association with Dingaal. Here we outline preliminary results of a new phase of archaeological research on Lizard Island that commenced in 2012.

Biographies

Sean Ulm is Deputy Director of the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. His research focuses on persistent problems in the archaeology of northern Australia and the western Pacific where understanding the relationships between environmental change and cultural change using advanced studies of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental sequences are central to constructions of the human past. His priority has been to develop new tools to investigate and articulate co-variability and co-development of human and natural systems. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an Honorary Research Fellow of the Queensland Museum, an Honorary Fellow of the The University of Western Australia and a Fellow of the Cairns Institute. His publications include more than 100 articles on the archaeology of Australia and 5 books. Sean has conducted research in Australia, Honduras, Chile, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.

Ian is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage and Professor of Indigenous Archaeology in Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Society of Antiquaries London. He specialises in the archaeology of Australian Indigenous coastal societies. His archaeological research is transdisciplinary and heavily informed by anthropology, history, and close working relationships with Indigenous communities. His books include Goemulgaw Lagal: Cultural and Natural Histories of the Island of Mabuyag, Torres Strait (Queensland Museum, 2015), Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (Altamira, 2005), and Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser's Shipwreck (Leicester, 1998).

^{Image courtesey Philip Morton | flic.kr/p/5xjx4N}