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A Context for Concealment: The Historical Archaeology of Folk Ritual and Superstition in Australia

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Abstract

Are there traditions of folk ritual practice in Australian historical contexts, and are they observable in the archaeological record? Studies from the US and UK have documented a range of practices suggesting the persistence of British and European traditions of folk magic well into the twentieth century and previous historical work has identified numerous examples of ritual concealments in Australian buildings. In examining over 4,500 Australian historical archaeological sources, however, we found very few examples of possible folk ritual practices. This raises the question of why such practices are not being captured by current archaeological recording methods. As counterpoint, a general model is constructed from US, UK and Australian work that raises intriguing possibilities for the situating of superstitious behavior in Australian historical archaeology, including the contexts in which people might be more prone to practise such behaviors and how they might be materially identifiable.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ian Evans for making us think about these issues in the Australian context and June Swann for analysing and dating the Mitcham boots. Thanks also to the many community members associated with the Mitcham Police Station project and Baker’s Flat for sharing their knowledge and providing support, especially the late Maggy Ragless (for Mitcham), and Simon O’Reilley, Peter Swann, David Pumpa and Dale Hampel (for Baker’s Flat). Comments by C. Riley Augé and Amy Gazin-Schwartz have helped to refine this paper and its ideas.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA, 5001, Australia

    Heather Burke, Susan Arthure & Cherrie de Leiuen

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  1. Heather Burke
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Correspondence to Heather Burke.

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Burke, H., Arthure, S. & de Leiuen, C. A Context for Concealment: The Historical Archaeology of Folk Ritual and Superstition in Australia. Int J Histor Archaeol 20, 45–72 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-015-0318-1

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