Paper short abstract:

This paper describes the concept and application of the forensic technique of spatio-temporal kinship network analysis (stKNA), used as an evidentiary tool in the negotiation and litigation of Indigenous land rights in Australia's Federal Court, under that country's National Native Native Title Act.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between social anthropology and geography has been mediated by anthropology's specialised subfield of kinship analysis since the discipline's foundation in the 1870s. As this specialisation evolved with the incorporation of more formal modelling and analysis techniques from the 1960s, and especially with the incorporation of computing from the 1990s, both kinship analysis and geographic information systems have become more precise, with corresponding datasets growing to very large sizes. During the same period in Australia, social anthropology has been adopted by Commonwealth, state, and territory governments as a forensic discipline in the negotiation and litigation of Indigenous land rights via the Federal Court. This turn of events has spurred the development of the new methodology of spatio-temporal kinship network analysis (stKNA), a computer-based technique for modelling Indigenous kinship-based population networks as three-dimensional structures distributed over real geographic space and historical time. Using this methodology, forensic social anthropologists are able to demonstrate the kinship-based cohesion of Indigenous communities over large time-scales, together with their systemic association with the particular geographic regions to which they assert traditional ownership. This paper outlines the methodology of stKNA and its application in Australia.