Billy Griffiths’ award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (2018) brought the history of Australian archaeology to the attention of a broad audience. This article surveys what has been written on the history of Australian archaeology to date, the different approaches used, and some possibilities for further research. It shows that Deep Time Dreaming, while undoubtedly significant, cannot be considered the final word on the history of Australian archaeology—there is still more to be written.

Dermot Casey is known in Australian archaeology, if he is known at all, as someone who assisted the premier prehistorian of Australia, John Mulvaney, in his excavations of the late 1950s and 1960s. But when Casey began his collaboration with Mulvaney he was already 58 years old and had already had a continuing and significant archaeological career, working in England and South Asia with Mortimer Wheeler, as well as in Australia.

In 1935, the Reverend A. H. Voyce from New Zealand, gave French Marist priest Father P. O’Reilly an archaeological collection consisting of pottery and the remains of lithic tools. Voyce was a Methodist missionary in Bougainville and O’Reilly was in the region on a scientific mission sponsored by the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Exploring the history around their encounters, their interpretations of these remains in relation to the peopling of Bougainville Island, and establishing that Reverend Voyce was one of the very few missionaries to conduct archaeological excavations in the Pacific at the time, this paper offers a narrative that transcends national and imperial borders: a transnational history of Pacific archaeology.

Working in the 1960s, Robert Edwards was a seminal figure in the development of research into Australian rock art. He was one of the first rock art scholars to attempt a quantitative and comparative survey of rock engravings in south and central Australia. In this paper we explore the development of Edwards’ approach to rock art in the context of his interests in art, museums and heritage.

When Europeans first encountered Maori culture they were surprised at how different it was from that of its presumed Polynesian ancestors. Speculation began with British explorer James Cook in the eighteenth century and has continued ever since. Debates on this issue among New Zealand archaeologists, discussed here, illustrate both the strengths of the archaeological scientific method and the difficulties experienced in trying to capture the changing nature of Maori history.

Warning  Aboriginal and Torres Strait readers of this article are warned that it may contain images of ancestral remains. Compiling a history of archaeology is critical for evaluating the current state of the discipline. While oral histories provide valuable accounts of important people, events and decisions through time, they have played a limited role in historical narratives of the discipline. This paper provides an important case study of how oral histories can assist with archiving this discipline.