Bücher von Graham Connah

This book is an analysis of nineteenth and early twentieth-century farm buildings dating from Australia's rural pioneering period. Based on field recording during the 1980s, its historical value is now particularly significant because similar buildings in Australia have since often deteriorated or vanished completely. Construction techniques, the use of materials, mainly timber as slabs or weather boarding, and of galvanized corrugated iron, including the role of recycling, and the ways in which the buildings were adapted to economic and social changes in agricultural production are examined. In particular, the distinctive Australian tradition of making do with whatever was available is considered. The result is a study of humble, utilitarian buildings that have been given less attention than grand houses of the past or public buildings. Nevertheless, they played a vital role in Australia's past development, and they deserve close consideration.

The Lake Chad region of Nigeria is an extreme environment. Professor Connah traces the story of human adaptation to and exploitation of this unusual environment from prehistoric to modern times.

African Archaeology, Volume 91This book is an original study of very large pots in parts of Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria. Found in excavations and surface fieldwork, they have been attributed to the So, a group of pre-Islamic inhabitants of the area before the sixteenth century AD, who have become mythologised as giants. Originally for burial, in some cases the pots have been dug up by villagers and reused: for brewing beer or as dye pits for indigo cloth. The book focuses on a group of these pots that survived until the late twentieth century in villages in a small part of Borno, north-eastern Nigeria. With the passage of time and terrorist activities in the region, their fate is now unknown and the photographs from 1963 to 1993 reproduced in this book have become a major archive of an unusual pottery group.

The material world of European settlement in Australia has been uncovered not only by historians but also by the work of archaeologists. This book, previously published in hardback under the title Of the Hut I Builded, now in paperback, presents many of the findings of Australian historical archaeology.