Holocene Australia Research Articles

Red Queen in Australia

Change in Holocene Australia is typically depicted as establishing greater control over the environment, with heightened prosperity, growth of social complexity, status competition, intergroup congregation, and population. Endogenous social processes altered Australian forager life yielding, on average, increased per capita output. Those claims were named Intensification. We critique that concept, re-evaluate evidence, and conclude there is no evidence for release from environmental constraint or heightened prosperity.Our model is more capable of explaining change in Holocene Australia. This Red Queen model claims cultural changes reflect unfavourable alterations in economic opportunity, driven by coevolution with dingos during worsening environmental conditions. Restructured environments with fewer high ranked foods led to greater diet breadth, expansion into marginal landscapes, and focus on atypical resource rich spots. By increasing their labour groups sought to maintain population size, this strategy reducing the likelihood of neighbouring groups seizing resource hot spots. Foragers responded to tensions with neighbours over resource access by magnifying social defence, offering limited use of resources in return for maintenance of territorial control. Those political negotiations constructed moderately stable alliances. We test the Red Queen model and show it, not Intensification, explains the emergence of ethnographically identified social interactions, economy and settlement systems.

Lithic utility and risk: Examining mid to late Holocene stone points from Australia with a utility model

Archaeological evidence of technology reflects myriad influences on past life, including economic contexts and mobility, which remain at the forefront of archaeological science. Given that forager groups needed to anticipate future technological needs and often had to transport tools, provisioning was necessary to enhance foraging success. Scheduling of production ensures suitable tools were available, maintained, and transported to where they were needed. This study investigates these fundamentals of interpreting past technological organisation via a critical examination of transport utility measures detected amongst bifacial points of late Holocene Australia. By focussing on one widely adopted model of these utility measures, we offer a new perspective on quantifying tool provisioning and interpreting forager mobility. These bifacial points were systematically geared to produce small and light specimens with low utility. Thus, foragers employed a strategy that sacrificed the benefits of extended utility in risky economic contexts. In return, they benefitted from having small points capable of being hafted to composite tools, enhanced the performance of those composite tools, and were light enough to permit multiple composite tools to be carried across the mid to late Holocene landscape of north Western Australia.

Retouched, rejuvenated, recycled and occasionally hafted as projectiles: stone points of Holocene Australia

ABSTRACTMacroscopic evidence for projectile use of stone points across the Kimberley region of northern Australia is examined using archaeological assemblages from the mid to late Holocene. There is scant evidence to support more than occasional projectile use. High rates of rejuvenation, recycling and continuous resharpening contribute to the low frequency of impact damage. The extent and location of edge damage, interpreted as probable use‐wear, is demonstrated to have distribution patterns consistent with multipurpose functions. Projectile use was merely one, albeit infrequent function of these versatile tools. This study uses use‐wear data to engage with technological organisation theory and discusses rates of use, resharpening, rejuvenation and recycling. Standardisation and an emphasis on maintainability provide the best explanation as to why people produced these tools during the Holocene.

Identity signalling in shields: how coastal hunter-gatherers use rock art and material culture in arid and temperate Australia

This paper explores inter-group signalling behaviour of hunter-fisher-gatherers living in arid and temperate coastal regions in Holocene Australia. We examine shield designs in the rock art of two visually similar engraved art provinces on opposite sides of the Australian continent: Port Hedland and Sydney. We explore the question of inter-group social signalling behaviour in arid versus fertile environments by testing the stylistic heterogeneity of shield designs in both art provinces. We examine the stylistic diversity of historically-collected and illustrated shields from both regions, and compare these with the engraved repertoires of the two style provinces. One of the precepts of information exchange theory (IET) is that publicly-displayed items/artefacts will provide the best vehicles for projecting cultural identity information. We assume that shields, as items of material culture which are carried publically, would have been ideally suited to signal individual, local and broader group identity. In more fertile areas it is usually argued that hunter-gatherers demonstrate increased territoriality and social boundedness as a result of demographic packing and focused resources, compared to groups in arid areas where there are widely ramified social networks. We test the hypothesis that a greater degree of stylistic heterogeneity should be displayed by engraved Sydney shields compared with those found in Port Hedland. However, our analyses demonstrate the reverse of this prediction. We suggest some alternative explanations for how style has been used in the arid coastal Pilbara, and suggest refinement is needed of some expectations in information exchange theory in arid zones where there is focalised resource availability and extreme language hybridity.

Dingoes and Aboriginal social organization in Holocene Australia

Dogs are perhaps the most widespread domesticated animal and the species that forms the closest bonds with humans. Placental dogs (dingoes) appear in the Australian record in the mid to late Holocene and, at European contact just over 200years ago, tamed dingoes were observed to be living with Aboriginal people. These dingoes were used as companions, protectors and as hunting dogs. In addition, differences between women's and men's relationships with dingoes have been observed. There is evidence in the archaeological faunal record that such relationships between people and dingoes began soon after the initial arrival of dingoes. We conclude that dingoes were an important technology for Aboriginal people and that their rapid incorporation into Aboriginal societies re-organized gender roles in economic life after the mid-Holocene in Australia.

An ecological regime shift resulting from disrupted predator-prey interactions in Holocene Australia.

The mass extinction events during human prehistory are striking examples of ecological regime shifts, the causes of which are still hotly debated. In Australia, human arrival approximately 50 thousand years ago was associated with the continental-scale extinction of numerous marsupial megafauna species and a permanent change in vegetation structure. An alternative stable state persisted until a second regime shift occurred during the late Holocene, when the largest two remaining marsupial carnivores, the thylacine and devil, disappeared from mainland Australia. These extinctions have been widely attributed to the human-assisted invasion of a competing predator, the dingo. In this unusual case, the simultaneous effects of human "intensification" (population growth and technological advances) and climate change (particularly increased ENSO variability) have been largely overlooked. We developed a dynamic model system capable of simulating the complex interactions between the main predators (humans, thylacines, devils, dingoes) and their marsupial prey (macropods), which we coupled with reconstructions of human population growth and climate change for late-Holocene Australia. Because the strength of important interspecific interactions cannot be estimated directly, we used detailed scenario testing and sensitivity analysis to identify robust model outcomes and investigate competing explanations for the Holocene regime shift. This approach identified human intensification as the most probable cause, while also demonstrating the potential importance of synergies with the effects of climate change. Our models indicate that the prehistoric impact of humans on Australian mammals was not limited to the late Pleistocene (i.e., the megafaunal extinctions) but extended into the late Holocene.

‘Complexity’ and the Australian continental narrative: Themes in the archaeology of Holocene Australia

Accounts of long-term cultural change in Australia have emphasised the late Holocene as the period when ‘complexity’ emerged amongst foragers in Australia, associated with increased economic productivity, reduced mobility, population growth, intensified social relations and cosmological elaboration. These reconfigurations have often been interpreted as the result of continent-wide trajectories which began in the mid-Holocene, often termed ‘intensification’. These approaches have been found wanting as they homogenise diverse records of human adaptation into a single account which inexorably leads to the ethnographic present. The archaeological record tells a rather different story with fluctuating occupational intensity and even regional abandonments featuring in well-documented archaeological records. Instead, variability documented in the ethnographic and archaeological records can be understood as a product of local adaptations reflecting the operation of historically situated systems of social organisation in diverse environmental settings.

The impact of the dingo on the thylacine in Holocene Australia

The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was one of Australia's largest predators, but became extinct in mainland Australia soon after the arrival of a new predator, the dingo (Canis lupus dingo) around 3500 bp. Evidence implicating the dingo in the thylacine's extinction has been equivocal, largely because thylacines are thought to be considerably larger than dingoes. Thus, other concurrent factors, such as shifts in human technology and population increase as well as climate change, have been cited to explain their extinction. Here we present new morphological evidence that female mainland Holocene thylacines were actually smaller than dingoes. We discuss these findings against archaeological and contemporary ecological evidence concerning dingoes' environmental impacts, and provide evidence that, as novel predators, dingoes induced a trophic cascade that had dramatic impacts on the fauna and economy of Holocene Australia. We suggest that dingoes, owing to their larger brains and body size, were likely a primary agent for the extinction of the thylacine from mainland Australia.

Constraints on the Development of Enduring Inequalities in Late Holocene Australia

Conditions in Late Holocene Australia, including variable and unpredictable environments, reliance on a wide array of food resources, relatively low population densities, some degree of mobility, and shared access to land and waters, contrast sharply with those posited as conditions for the emergence of complexity among huntergatherer societies such as those of the Northwest Coast of North America. Nevertheless, Aboriginal societies varied considerably in a number of ways, including resources of male power. In particular, the article contrasts features of reproductive power in the high and veryhighpolygyny societies of the north coast of Australia with those of other regions of the continent. High to very high polygyny developed in areas with relatively high population density and certain forms of kin classification and engendered considerable inequality among patrigroups, but various social and environmental conditions imposed constraints on the development of enduring hierarchy.

Risk and economic reciprocity: An analysis of three regional Aboriginal food-sharing systems in late Holocene Australia

AbstarctThis paper is a theoretical examination of food-sharing systems and archaeological theory. The specific aim is to assess the archaeological indicators of three different foodsharing systems, with the variable relationships between riskmanagement, social regionalisation, economic reciprocity and exchange. It is suggested that the Bogong moth (Agrotis infusa) festivities in the southern highlands of New South Wales, the Bunya nut (Araucaria bidwillii) gatherings in southeast Queensland and the seasonal food-sharing along the riverine corridors of the Lake Eyre Basin form a continuum between positive and negative reciprocity.

30,000 years of fishery in western New South Wales

AbstractTwo hundred and sixteen open midden sites from the lower Darling River area of western NSW demonstrate that people have fished for many aquatic resources in diverse hydrological environments since about 30,000 years ago. Some of the earliest of these sites, which have been interpreted as single foraging expeditions, contain evidence of highly organised food collecting strategies which at times allowed large gatherings of people. There appears to have been little change in these strategies or in the importance of the main waterways in the region since this time. However sites dating from about 7000 years ago are larger, more complex and contain a greater range of fauna. This suggests a change in camping practice resulting either from a change in economic strategy, where Pleistocene base camps were only located away from rivers and lakes, or from the development of more permanent base camps. This evidence is a regional example of adaptive and efficient exploitation in Pleistocene and Holocene Australia.

Technological responses to risk in Holocene Australia

It has long been recognized that the Australian archaeological record documents alterations in settlement and technological strategies in the middle of the Holocene. Discussion of the cause of those changes has been restricted largely to suggestions of the arrival of new technologies, presumably from southeast Asia, without exploring their advantages for humans occupying the continent. The model outlined here proposes that during the mid-Holocene exploitation of the landscape involved significant risks, and at that time new forms of stoneworking were adopted as an aid in reducing risk. Risk was associated with environmental change, high mobility, and colonization of previously unoccupied landscapes. Archaeological evidence reveals these processes to be associated with the adoption of toolkits that minimize risk.

The Transition Between Hunting and Gathering and the Specialized Husbandry of Resources: A Socio-ecological Approach [and Comments and Reply

The Transition Between Hunting and Gathering and the Specialized Husbandry of Resources: A Socio-ecological Approach [and Comments and Reply