ABSTRACT
Anthropology in the 1890s was a discipline very different from the one it would become in the 20th century. Under the influence of founding fathers such as Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan, much of the effort of the early anthropologists went into collecting informal accounts of primitive people and translating them into more formal statements that might elucidate earlier forms of society, and ultimately be used in arguments about social evolution. This chapter presents a research about the archaeology of a relatively small part of the region that Walter Roth worked in, documenting hundreds of archaeological sites in the area, recently synthesised by Malcolm Ridges. Archaeological evidence shows that the hatchets were traded from quarries in North West Central Queensland and reached as far as Cape York in the north and Adelaide in the south. The ethnography and ethnohistorical accounts are never complete records of the lives of societies, any more than historical documents are.
