Signs of the times: Archaeological approaches to historical and contemporary graffiti

The papers in this themed section on historical and contemporary graffiti derive in part from a two-day workshop, That was Then, This is Now: Contemporary Archaeology in Australia, that we (Clarke and Frederick) organised at the University of Sydney in February 2012. The Editors of Australian Archaeology invited us to submit a set of papers from the workshop to showcase some of the Australian research in the field of contemporary archaeology. We agreed that a section on contemporary and historical graffiti would make an interesting and timely contribution to the growing international literature on this topic. The papers by Crisp et al., Frederick, and Ralph and Smith in this themed section were all presented at the workshop, while those by Casella, Fyfe and Brady, Agutter and Lewis were invited to provide further examples of the range and scope of approaches to this topic.