THE EMERGENCE OF AN ARCHITECTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA: THE WORK OF THE ABORIGINAL ENVIRONMENTS RESEARCH CENTRE

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. Building on this earlier work, a distinctive architectural anthropology has been developed and practised by researchers at the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre (AERC) based at the School of Architecture, University of Queensland, since the 1970s. The broad focus is on the nature of people-environment relationships of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but the resulting theories and methods may contribute to ongoing developments in the field internationally. This paper (with the aid of a case study) demonstrates how various research tools in the AERC theoretical frame have been incorporated into design processes, including the constructs of the "intercultural", "recognition space", "personhood", and "cultural landscape".