Engaging and Designing Place: Furnishings and the Architecture of Archaeological Sites in Aboriginal Australia

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sites are commonly thought about as ‘natural’ locations onto which people variously undertook activities. This chapter argues and shows that sites are architectural constructs, built through a combination of design (preplanning), bricolage (improvisation), and engagement. Sites are artefacts whose cultural modes of construction are amenable to archaeological investigation. By employing a chaîne opératoire approach to the study of sites as landscape-scale artefacts, how and when they were built can be worked out, offering new insights into the cultural history of peoples and places.