Within the Australian context, hand stencils are a familiar graphic made by Aboriginal people. The red-orange colour in our logo is indicative of the iron rich natural pigments used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This colour is reflected throughout our report templates.
A few years later we added an agricultural wheel as an historical symbol of post- invasion settler society. Abandoned wheels such as this can still be found in country areas in farm sheds and paddocks, silent witnesses to the past. Indeed, if you visit our Canberra office a similar battered and rusted wheel from an early twentieth century quarry machine will be one of the first things you see after walking through our door.
The squares over the images represent the processes of analysis - description, recovery, and interpretation. They could represent an archaeologist’s excavation pit or objective recording. In life the material within an excavation square is not always the whole story as the traces of the past inevitably extend beyond the edges of the excavation. The verticality of the squares, as well as the arrangement of our name are a reference to the layers in excavations and archaeological deposits.