Goyder and the Ancient Aboriginal Shell Mounds of Virginia

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, as George Woodroffe Goyder, South Australia's renowned SurveyorGeneral, surveyed the land around the newly established Port of Darwin, he came across a mound of shell. His discovery came before the first formal archaeological and anthropological studies in north Australia (Fredericksen et al. 2005:1), at a time when scholars were just beginning to recognise these ancient remains as resulting from the activities of Aboriginal people.