Diesel and damper: Changes in seed use and mobility patterns following contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia

Zeanah, David; Codding, Brian F.; Bird, Douglas W.; Bird, Rebecca Bliege; Veth, Peter

doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2015.02.002

Cited by 26 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…This period saw the introduction of numerous technological innovations, most likely resulting from a combination of demographic packing (in-filling of the landscape through population density increases) and long use-life implements such as the Tula adze during the early-to mid-Holocene, restricting residential mobility patterns employed previously in the Pleistocene. Some responses probably include greater use of thermoplastic resins for hafting composite, more elaborate (and possibly efficient) hunting toolkits, an increasingly diverse suite of wooden implements associated with logistical mobility, and a broadening of diet to accommodate lower calorific foods most evident through the proliferation of ground-stone assemblages for plant and seed processing (Veth, 1993;Veth et al, 2011, Smith, 1986bZeanah et al, 2015;cf. Gorecki et al, 1997).…”

Section: Interiormentioning

confidence: 99%

A continental narrative: Human settlement patterns and Australian climate change over the last 35,000 years

Williams

Veth

Steffen

et al. 2015

Quaternary Science Reviews

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, we consider the effects of climate systems on past human settlement patterns and inferred demography. We use 5,044 radiocarbon dates from ~1,750 archaeological sites to develop regional timeseries curves for different regions defined in the OZ-INTIMATE compilation as the temperate, tropics, interior and Southern Ocean sectors to explore human-climate relationships in Australia over the last 35,000 years. Correlations undertaken with improved palaeoclimatic data and archaeological records indicate that the regional time-series curves are robust, and can be used as a proxy for human behaviour. However, interrogation of the datasets is essential with artificial peaks and taphonomic over-correction being critical considerations. The time-series curves are interpreted as reflecting population growth, stasis and even decline in phase with terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene climatic fluctuations. This coupling, however, decreases during the last 5,000 years, most likely due to increased population levels, greater territoriality, technological solutions to stress, and social and ideational innovation. Curves from all sectors show exponential population growth over the last 5,000 years. We identify future research priorities, highlighting the paucity of archaeological records across several parts of Australia (<1 dated site/4,000km 2 ), especially around the fringes of the arid zone, and the need for improved taphonomic correction techniques. Finally, we discuss how these time-series curves represent a first-order framework, not dissimilar to global climate models, which researchers can continue to test and refine with local, regional and continental records. KeywordsTime-series analysis, archaeological radiocarbon data, hunter-gatherer behaviour, Aus-INTIMATE, OZ-INTIMATE, human-environment interaction, palaeoenvironment Highlights  Comparison of radiocarbon time-series techniques with other archaeological indices  We demonstrate robust relationship between radiocarbon data and demographic change  Our results suggest past demography was coupled with climate until mid-Holocene  Mid-Holocene social/technological innovation effected a de-coupling of relationship  We provide future directions for Australian archaeological and time-series research 3

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Section: Interiormentioning

confidence: 99%

A continental narrative: Human settlement patterns and Australian climate change over the last 35,000 years

Williams

Veth

Steffen

et al. 2015

Quaternary Science Reviews

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“…Extrapolating these insights over archaeological time scales, the interplay of climate or environmental change, technological changes, population change, and changes to the abundance of resources can all affect the resilience of particular subsistence attractors and, thus, subsistence transitions. The key is that controlling variables, like residential mobility (67,68) and resource seasonality (69), may have a much greater affect on an attractor's resilience than others and so even subtle changes in them could lead to punctuated change.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a theory of punctuated subsistence change

Ullah

Kuijt

Freeman

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Discourse on the origins and spread of domesticated species focuses on universal causal explanations or unique regional or temporal trajectories. Despite new data as to the context and physical processes of early domestication, researchers still do not understand the types of system-level reorganizations required to transition from foraging to farming. Drawing upon dynamical systems theory and the concepts of attractors and repellors, we develop an understanding of subsistence transition and a description of variation in, and emergence of, human subsistence systems. The overlooked role of attractors and repellors in these systems helps explain why the origins of agriculture occurred quickly in some times and places, but slowly in others. A deeper understanding of the interactions of a limited set of variables that control the size of attractors (a proxy for resilience), such as population size, number of dry months, net primary productivity, and settlement fixity, provides new insights into the origin and spread of domesticated species in human economies.complex adaptive systems | subsistence change | origins of agriculture | social-ecological systems R ecent work highlights that the transition from foraging to farming was nonlinear and heterogeneous (e.g., refs. 1-7). That is, rather than an inevitability, early shifts to food production were only one of many possible outcomes that could have been reached for a given set of dynamically interacting social and ecological variables. Although the forager-farmer transition is one of the most fundamental changes in human evolution, our understanding of the forager-farmer transition is theoretically fractious (1,(3)(4)(5)(6), with scholarly discourse dominated by the assumption that the forager adoption of domesticates was driven either by subsistence necessity or because domesticates provided a desirable opportunity or assurance. Given our adaptive flexibility, however, it is clear that both options are possible, depending on the situation. The challenge is distinguishing the contextual settings in which adoptions were linked to necessity versus opportunity. Simply put, there is currently no sufficient theory to explain the nonlinear and contingent worldwide transitions from foraging to farming.In this paper, we use concepts from Dynamical Systems Theory (SI Text S1) to model subsistence variation among contemporary ethnographic groups from an evolutionary perspective. We focus on a critical question: How can researchers use the concepts of attractors and repellors-so integral to understanding many nonlinear dynamical systems-to describe variation in the subsistence strategies of human societies? This framing provides general insights into why transitions from foraging to farming, at a global scale, exhibit nonlinearity and heterogeneity, and why the shift was sometimes gradual, and other times punctuated. Drawing upon comparative ethnographic case studies, we formalize the use of cross-cultural data in a theory-backed methodology to ascertain how the attractor/repel...

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“…Anthropogenic landscapes reduce the cost of accessing such patches by rescaling habitat structure. Foragers in an anthropogenic landscape have a 96% chance of being able to find a patch within 3 km; in regions far from Martu influence, the chances of finding such patches nearby drop to 82% (Zeanah et al 2015). Essentially, an anthropogenic landscape rescales resource patch density to reduce the cost of accessing a wider range of resources.…”

Section: Contact History and Ecological Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Landscape Architecture of Fire

Bird

Codding

et al. 2016

Current Anthropology

Self Cite

105

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Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia's Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinctive pyrodiversity of anthropogenic landscapes are where Martu insist that they and their estates are conceived. These estates are transgenerational storehouses of relational wealth that operate in a delayed-return ritual economy. These storehouses were ransacked by colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, precipitating a collapse in the anthropogenic fire regime and a decline and extinction of many endemic species. Since returning to their homelands in the 1980s, Martu have reestablished a tight patchwork of vegetative succession and rescaled the landscape mosaic. Previous work has shown how the emergent ecological consequences of foraging and burning interact to create greater local diversity, increase landscape patchiness at massive spatial scales, and buffer against climate-driven ecosystem disturbance. In this paper we explore how the rescaling of patch diversity through anthropogenic fire operates as a form of dynamic cultural and ecological niche construction shaping systems of sociality among people and their interactions with other species.

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Diesel and damper: Changes in seed use and mobility patterns following contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia

Cited by 26 publications

References 38 publications

A continental narrative: Human settlement patterns and Australian climate change over the last 35,000 years

A continental narrative: Human settlement patterns and Australian climate change over the last 35,000 years

Toward a theory of punctuated subsistence change

A Landscape Architecture of Fire

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