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Peter Dixon Hiscock (born 27 March 1957) is an Australian archaeologist. Born in Melbourne, he obtained a PhD from the University of Queensland. Between 2013 and 2021, he was the inaugural Tom Austen Brown Professor of Australian Archaeology at the University of Sydney,[1] having previously held a position in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University.
Hiscock specialises in ancient lithic technologies and has worked in Australia, France and Southern Africa. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Museum. His research includes work in lithic technology, archaeology of Indigenous Australia, global dispersion of modern humans and the study of the hominin species Homo neanderthalensis.[2]
Hiscock has been an advocate for quantitative, materialist approaches to lithic analysis.[3][4] He has produced major works developing and refining indices of reduction for retouched flakes.[5][6]
In addition to his work on lithic technology in Australia, Hiscock has contributed to a reinterpretation of the archaeology of Indigenous Australia. His work on colonisation and settlement, with Lynley Wallis, created the "Desert Transformation" model,[7] which proposed that about 50,000 years ago human colonists dispersed across much of the Australian continent at a time when the deserts were less harsh than today. These early settlers then gradually adapted to the onset of harsher environments that occurred after approximately 35,000 years ago.
His work with Val Attenbrow and Gail Robertson re-evaluated the timing, spread and function of backed artefacts within ancestral Indigenous Australian societies, arguing that the proliferation of backed artefacts along the east coast of Australia was a technological response to increasingly variable climatic conditions brought about by the onset of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation during the mid-Holocene.[8][9] Subsequent work has argued that proliferation of back artefacts is a form of social signalling and that shape variation reflects rehafting events.[10][11]
His work with Patrick Faulkner also led to a reconsideration of the large Anadara granosa shell mounds of northern Australia.[12] Hiscock was funded with Dr. Alex Mackay for an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellowship project titled "Technology and behavioural evolution in late Pleistocene Africa, Europe and Australia" (DP1092445) worth more than A$400,000 in 2010. The aim of this project was to focus on excavations in Africa, making comparisons with other areas of the world including Australia.[13]
His major contribution to archaeology of Indigenous Australia has been a new synthesis of the subject, in a book titled Archaeology of Ancient Australia.[14] In that volume he advanced the view that there was little evidence for directional change in ancient Australian societies and that the archaeological evidence was better seen as documenting a long series of adaptive changes, perhaps operating in multiple directions, rather than progress towards "intensification" in the recent past (as espoused by archaeologists such as Harry Lourandos). This view was founded on a strong critique of the value of ethnography in the construction of narratives about the deep past, arguing that ethnographic analogy had often imposed images of the lifestyle of recent Indigenous Australians on the different lives of their distant ancestors. Brian M. Fagan[15] has suggested that in doing so Hiscock has attacked the tyranny of the ethnographic record that has dogged Australian archaeology for generations. In this he has disputed the views of archaeologists such as Josephine Flood, who considers ethnographic information can help understand prehistoric behavior.[16]
Hiscock has written on the development of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs and the impact that the British invasion of 1788 and the introduction of Christian belief system had on them.[17][18]
Hiscock's argument also emphasized the likely failure of much of the Pleistocene archaeological record to preserve, arguing that the apparent simplicity of early eras resulted partly from the poverty of the archaeological evidence. Interpreting the available archaeological and genetic evidence from these view points, Hiscock presented a novel narrative of Australian prehistory, in which population sizes fluctuated through time in response to environmental productivity, the physical characteristics of people varied as climate and gene flow altered, and the economic, social, and ideological systems adjusted to accommodate and incorporate the circumstances of each time period.[19]
Hiscock has also written about the depiction of archaeology and archaeologists in popular media.[20]
Hiscock received the John Mulvaney Book Award in 2008 from the Australian Archaeological Association for his publication The Archaeology of Ancient Australia, which was acclaimed for its way of dealing "with the archaeological data as free-standing, and the long duree as the basic structure, suitable for the dating methods and accumulative and taphonomic process of most of the Australian record".[21] He also was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) honorary degree at the Australian National University.
