General Monthly Meeting
Broadbeach Revisited
Dr Tony Collings, CSIRO Division of Telecommunications and Industrial Physics, Sydney
Date: Wednesday, 1st May, 2002
Time: 6:00 for 6:30 pm
Venue: Search & Discover Room, Australian Museum,
Collins St., Sydney (William St. entrance)
The accidental discovery of an Aboriginal burial ground at Broadbeach, the Gold Coast, Queensland, in the early 1960s and the pressure of land development necessitated a rescue excavation. This was led by a young Swedish archaeologist, Laila Haglund, and effected largely through the labour of enthusiastic University of Queensland students. The excavation yielded an almost bewildering mass of data and confirmed that the burial ground had been used continuously for more than 1000 years. The mass of data and the circumstances under which it was obtained afforded only limited conclusions and indicated the need for more detailed analysis.
The computer classification of the Broadbeach data for some 111 burials that were considered sufficiently complete and intact for reliable analysis will be discussed. The integrity of the analysis has been evaluated by intercomparing several numerical taxonomic programs and the agreement lends a high degree of confidence. Patterns in the data become evident and are clues to the local culture and burial practices.
The history of the Broadbeach excavation will be reviewed, as will what has taken place in the intervening years and why this was so. Results will be compared with the sparse archaeological records and other Aboriginal burial grounds.
Dr Collings is a biophysicist in the CSIRO Division of Telecommunications and Industrial Physics, researching problems of human blood flow and the uses of biosensors. He also has an active interest in the application of modelling programs in the analysis of spatial data. He has strong associations with the Australian Institute of Sport and has been closely involved in the management of Australian and international university sports associations.
Report on the General Monthly Meeting
Reported by Dr E.C. Potter
Your reporter initiated his fascination with extremes when he was a kid. Discovered as fleet of foot before reaching ten, he learned by heart whatever were the current world running records. Imagine his delight, therefore, when Dr. Tony Collings spoke to our Society on this topic at the time of Sydney's 2000 Olympics.
Little did your reporter know that already Tony had almost concluded researching a totally different activity (one that had through extremes of family misfortune occupied your reporter since late infancy), namely, cemetery data logging. Obviously, Tony Collings could count on your reporter's rapt attention when he addressed the Society at its 1106th Monthly Meeting on 5th June last at the Australian Museum, his theme being "Broadbeach Revisited". This brings us to the subtitle (above) to this report.
The point is that in the early 1960's Laila Hagland (Swedish archaeologist) procured a teeming of student diggers from the University of Queensland to help her research into early Australians interred from about 900AD until the 20th century at a resting place now called Broadbeach. Finding that spades were a girl's best friend, the diggers helped produce huge amounts of data from 200 burials, of which 111 were much later judged suitably undisturbed and amenable to computer analysis. Meanwhile, from at least 1980 Tony Collings had been expressing grave concern that Hagland's profuse data still lacked analysis.
With Hagland's help and using computer classification to aid numerical taxonomy, Tony Collings then set about sorting recorded details of the interred individuals, including likely closeness of their family relationships. Dating burials was mostly done by stratigraphy, carbon dating being unaffordable on such a scale. Cultural factors were assessed through detection of commonalities among the interments (10 different styles were found), including evidence on orientation or clustering of burial pits, skull features, charring, gender, and estimated age at death. Tribal elders had been consulted on the use of red ochre and occurrence of missing bones, (red was traditional for mourning. and wearing of bones was practised by the bereaved). The meaning of double funerals was also clarified (first a farewell to the spirit during tree exposure and later an incorruptible earthly return for the skeleton).
Trials of various candidate computer programs resurrected some electronic snares. For example, one program would find clustering of data that did not exist, but another usefully illustrated branching of individual attributes and its frequency. After the discovery of a near-equal bifurcation of the 111 burials, four unequal major groupings emerged from the computer, all in excellent accord with expectation from the known tribal regulation of marriage between kindred individuals. This late unearthing of a 1000 year tidiness of the burials finally ended in publication in 2001.
At question time Tony Collings enlarged on the stratigraphy, revealed an absence of data for cause of death, and confessed that a computer had been essential for success. In his vote of thanks, Dr. Lake referred to the speaker's adroit tenacity in pursuing the almost unknowable to an almost irrefutable conclusion after around 30 years of effort.