Heritage and empowerment: community-based Indigenous cultural heritage in northern Australia

This paper reports on the transformation from an archaeological research project to one that focused on Indigenous cultural heritage. The ultimate outcome was the development of a community-based approach for northern Cape York (Australia) that emerged from a partnership between researcher and the indigenous community. The paper particularly focuses on notions of landscape, sites and artefacts and the ways in which archaeological and indigenous perspectives of these are both different and similar. It challenges the idea that artefacts are only central for archaeologists, presenting a case study illustrating that they can also be important within Indigenous frameworks. These insights emerged from a deeper understanding of Indigenous local heritage that was only possible within a community-based approach.