Combined, they map the development of the field and encourage a dialogue between science and the humanities. Each has been chosen because it is a pithy summation of an issue. The entries are drawn from letters and journals, histories and poems, newspapers and novels.

Woven in amongst these quotations is the story of how, as a nation, we are coming to terms with ancient Australia. As Griffiths notes, Australians or at least those who arrived in the past 240 years have an uneasy. It is a meditation on science and place, culture and politics, deep time and the Dreaming and it is steeped in an appreciation of good writing and a well-turned phrase. It is this Australian journey that Billy Griffiths takes us on in Deep Time Dreaming. This book is a guide to the catchphrases of the discipline. But the first Australians were voyaging into the unknown. In this elegantly written book, Billy Griffiths explores both the history of Australian archaeology and how non-Aboriginal Australia thought about that deep. A dense cloud of migrating birds may have pointed the way. Smoke billowing above the sea spoke of a land that lay beyond the horizon.

Australian archaeology has been involved in a great enterprise over the last sixty years, uncovering the deep past of a desert continent and the history of its first people. People would have known about Australia before they saw it. In this original, important book, Griffiths investigates a twin revolution- the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century.

Deep Time Dreaming by Billy Griffiths