ABSTRACT
Colonial ethnographers commenced compiling records on Australian indigenous shelters and camps from the 1870s and this work was extended into more complex settlement models by a small number of anthropologists and archaeologists in the mid-twentieth century. An exception in the 1930s and 1940s was anthropologist Donald Thomson who executed significant research in Cape York and Arnhem Land, finding that different architectural types were contextualised within complex models of indigenous knowledge. Architect Peter Hamilton was one of Rapoport’s earliest postgraduate students at the University of Sydney and was the first to engage in empirical architectural anthropology in Aboriginal Australia, living in a remote traditional camp of Yankuntjatjara people at Mimili in the early 1970s. The type of architectural anthropology developed in the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre was then drawn from theories and practices sourced from social anthropology and the evolving field of “people–environment studies”.
