Serpents Glen (Karnatukul): New Histories for Deep time Attachment to Country in Australia’s Western Desert

McDonald, Jo

doi:10.5334/bha-624

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Most of the sites in the study area are within daily travel range of the remote communities and are still utilized for both short-term foraging camps and longer multi-day camping trips. While the earliest use of most of these sites (ethnohistoric and archeological) is not known, the depth of Martu ancestral ties in this region is profound, with occupation of these landscapes extending well into the Late Pleistocene as far back as 48k years ago 30 , 95 . The sample of sites in this analysis were all in use prior to Martu exodus from their homelands in the 1960s, meaning that all have had at least some use within the last 70 years, and many still continue to be used in the course of regular foraging activities.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

Bliege Bird,

Bird,

Martine

et al. 2024

Nat Commun

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Commensal relationships between wild plants and their dispersers play a key ecological and evolutionary role in community structure and function. While non-human dispersers are often considered critical to plant recruitment, human dispersers have received much less attention, especially when it comes to non-domesticated plants. Australia, as a continent historically characterized by economies reliant on non-domesticated plants, is thus a key system for exploring the ecological role of people as seed dispersers in the absence of agriculture. Here, we utilize a controlled observation research design, employing ecological surveys and ethnographic observations to examine how seed dispersal and landscape burning by Martu Aboriginal people affects the distribution of three preferred plants and one (edible, but non-preferred) control species. Using an information theoretic approach, we find that the three preferred plants show evidence of human dispersal, with the strongest evidence supporting anthropogenic dispersal for the wild bush tomato, Solanum diversiflorum.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

Bliege Bird,

Bird,

Martine

et al. 2024

Nat Commun

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“…While this complex adaptive system has deep legacies in arid Australia (Smith, 2013) and has likely interacted with climate change through much of the arid interior for up to 48 000 years (McDonald, 2020), today, both practice and climates are changing rapidly. Partly as a result of increases in seasonal extremes of rainfall, and partly as a result of social and economic shifts in remote communities leading to reduced foraging and hunting effort, lightning‐dominated landscapes are increasing in scope.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia: The firestick farming hypothesis

Bird

2020

American J Hum Biol

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Objective: Climate change has long been recognized as a significant driver of dietary diversity and dietary quality. An often overlooked aspect of climate change are shifts in fire regimes, which have the potential to drastically affect landscape diversity, species distributions, and ultimately, human diets. Here, we investigate whether the fire regimes shaped by Indigenous Australians change landscape diversity in ways that improve dietary quality, considering both the diversity and the quantity of traditional foods in the diet. Methods: We use structural equation modeling to explore two causal models of dietary quality, one focused on the direct effects of climate change and resource depression, the other incorporating the dietary effects of landscape diversity, itself a product of fire-created patchiness. We draw on a focal camp dataset covering 10 years of observations of Martu foraging income in the Western Desert of Australia.Results: We find strong support for the hypothesis that fire-created patchiness improves diet quality. Climate change (cumulative 2-year rainfall) has only an indirect effect on dietary quality; the availability of traditional foods is mediated primarily through the landscape diversity shaped by fire.Conclusions: Our model suggests that the loss of the indigenous fire mosaic may lead to worsening availability of traditional foods, measured as both caloric intake and diet diversity. Because the effects of rainfall are mediated through landscape diversity, increased rainfall may not compensate for the recent changes in fire regimes resulting from the loss of Aboriginal fire from the landscape.

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A Nation for a Continent vs Rail Networks for Its States: The Staggered Creation of Australia’s Transcontinental Transport Links

Jones,

Christensen

2024

Geography of Time, Place, Movement and Networks, Volume 4

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Serpents Glen (Karnatukul): New Histories for Deep time Attachment to Country in Australia’s Western Desert

Cited by 5 publications

References 46 publications

Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia

Climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia: The firestick farming hypothesis

A Nation for a Continent vs Rail Networks for Its States: The Staggered Creation of Australia’s Transcontinental Transport Links

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