Abstract After a review of ethnographic approaches to Australian archaeology, this paper discusses food exchanges as an example of how Aboriginal society organizes production and social reproduction in gender specific terms. This goes well beyond the orthodoxy that men hunt and women gather. Evidence that food and other exchanges are reflected in the contemporary archaeological record is presented together with an outline of a debate between Gould and Binford about this issue. The structuring of production and exchange along gender lines in Aboriginal society is so pervasive that some form of patterning along these lines is to be expected. This is the case even in archaeological sites of long occupation where the original layout of household structures may have been destroyed. Exchanges at the individual and household level should also be preserved in the form of reduction sequences, stone raw materials and small refuse items such as chipping debris and bone fragments.