Australia: The Land Where Time Began |
||||||||||||||
The Fire-Stick Farming Hypothesis For a long time burning by Australian Aboriginal people has been
believed to be a strategy for managing food resources, though this
hypothesis has never been tested by quantitative analysis. In this paper
the authors combine contemporary ethnographic observations of Aboriginal
hunting and burning with analysis of satellite images of anthropogenic
and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes by which
the vegetational diversity of the arid-zone is shaped by Aboriginal
burning. A greater diversity of successional stages is contained in
anthropogenic landscapes than under a lightning fire regime, differences
being in scale rather than kind. According to the authors the scale of
the landscape is linked directly to foraging for small prey that
burrows, such as monitor lizards, which is a specialty of Aboriginal
women. Small animal hunting productivity is increased by the maintenance
of small-scale habitat mosaics. There are implication of these results
for understanding the unique biodiversity of the Australian continent,
through time and space. Anthropogenic influences on the habitat
structure of palaeolandscapes, in particular, are likely to be localised
spatially and linked to less mobile, “broad-spectrum” foraging
economies.
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
Author: M.H.Monroe Email: admin@austhrutime.com Sources & Further reading |