Mapping Tasmania's cultural landscapes: Using habitat suitability modelling of archaeological sites as a landscape history tool

Abstract

Aim Understanding past distributions of people across the landscape is key to understanding how people used, affected and related to the natural environment. Here, we use habitat suitability modelling to represent the landscape distribution of Tasmanian Aboriginal archaeological sites and assess the implications for patterns of past human activity. Location Tasmania, Australia. Methods We developed a RandomForest ‘habitat suitability' model of site records in the Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage Register. We applied a best‐effort bias correction, considered 31 predictor variables relating to climate, topography and resource proximity, and used a variable selection procedure to optimize the final model. Model uncertainty was assessed via bootstrapping and we ran an analogous MaxEnt model as a cross‐validation exercise. Results The results from the RandomForest and MaxEnt models are highly congruent. The strongest environmental predictors of site occurrence include distance to coast, elevation, soil clay content, topographic roughness and distance to inland water. The highest habitat suitability scores are distributed across a wide range of environments in central, northern and eastern Tasmania, including coastal areas, inland water body margins and forests and savannas in the drier parts of Tasmania. With the exception of coastal areas much of western Tasmania has low habitat suitability scores, consistent with theories of low‐density Holocene Tasmanian Aboriginal settlement in this region. Main conclusions Our modelling suggests Tasmanian Aboriginal people occupied a heterogeneity of habitats but targeted coastal areas around the whole island, and drier, less steep and/or open forest and savanna environments in the central lowlands. The western interior was identified as being rarely used by Aboriginal people in the Holocene, with the exception of isolated pockets of habitat; yet whether this is a true reflection of Aboriginal‐resourceuse demands increased archaeological surveys, particularly in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Ecosystem transformation following the mid-nineteenth century cessation of Aboriginal fire management in Cape Pillar, Tasmania

“…1). Archaeological surveys suggest the region was frequently used by the Tasmanian Aborigines (Jones et al 2019), likely for hunting seal colonies that are common at the base of sea cliffs. The visit to Cape Pillar by European James Calder in 1848, as part of his Tasman Peninsula survey, indicates a relatively easy access to the cape (Calder 1985).…”

A decade of restoring a temperate woodland: Lessons learned and future directions

“…The Tasmanian Midlands is a cultural landscape (Jones et al . 2019) where woodland communities are each adapted to a particular fire intensity, frequency and seasonality (Close et al . 2009) in harmony with fire management regimes applied by Tasmanian Aboriginal people over millennia (Gammage 2012).…”

“…By the time Europeans arrived in Australia over 200 years ago, the grassy Eucalyptus woodlands of the Midlands were cultural landscapes (Jones et al . 2019). Since European settlement, more than 70% of the native vegetation has been cleared for agriculture production focused on intensive livestock grazing and irrigated cropping (Davidson et al .…”

Fire, herbivores and the management of temperate Eucalyptus savanna in Tasmania: Introducing the Beaufront fire – mammalian herbivore field experiment

“…For example, there are large pieces of charcoal in sediments from the last interglacial (c. 110,000 years ago) in the Punchbowl Reserve on the east coast of Tasmania, and bands of fine charcoal particles in lake sediments > 70,000 years old from Clarke Island in Bass Strait (Haberle, Bowman and others unpublished; Shine 2017). The arrival of Aboriginal people into Tasmania around 40,000 years ago (O'Connell et al 2018) unquestionably altered fire regimes and vegetation cover such that by the time of European invasion, much of Tasmania, and particularly the Eucalyptus savannas, were cultural landscapes (Jones et al 2019).…”