![]() But early applications together with Aboriginal knowledge of plant use has revealed dramatic new insights into how Aboriginal people moved important species such as black bean Castanospermum australe around the landscape and cultivated them. The wild precursor of corn, for instance, looks almost nothing like what we molded it into through selection.Ĭombining these approaches is only in its infancy in Australia. But around the world, combining plant genetics with archaeology has dramatically changed our understanding of how people used plants, how they moved them about the landscape and how they changed these plants into forms better suiting our use. You also need reference collections of seeds to be able to identify them from fireplaces. In south-west Asia, archeobotanists have long used fine mesh sieves to recover ancient seeds. Most seeds used by Aboriginal groups were less than 1mm in radius. The problem? Many of the sieves used were not fine enough to capture the tiny seeds of vital plants such as native millet. By excavating gunyah sites and fireplaces where food was prepared, we can recover seeds by sieving dirt and ash to find out which plants people used. These settlement sites are vital to gaining a better understanding of how people lived. For instance, many Aboriginal groups lived semi-permanently in gunyah (bark hut) villages, as Dark Emu demonstrates by quoting colonial observers. Aboriginal food production was enormously varied. In part, this is a failure of terminology. While we accept Papuan food gardens, Australian archaeologists have been less eager to embrace this idea for Australia. We are by no means the first to point to the lack of appropriate methods as a reason why this has proved hard.Īrchaeobotanists Anna Florin and Xavier Carah have observed that food production systems in northern Australia are very similar to those in Papua New Guinea. Here's how.įor decades, archaeologists have grappled with the task of understanding ancient food production. In our new research published in the Archaeology of Food and Foodways, we argue that to better understand millennia-old systems, archaeologists must engage deeply with fields such as plant genetics, ethnobotany, archaeobotany and bioarchaeology as well as listening more carefully to the views of Aboriginal people. For many Aboriginal people, the terms "farming" and "hunter-gatherer" do not capture the realities of 60 millennia of food production. After all, Australian landscapes differ markedly, from tropical rainforest to snowy mountains to arid spinifex country. The debate has drawn in everyone from academics to Aboriginal communities invested in food futures to shock jocks claiming it is a warping of history.įor our group of archaeologists and First Nations people, the fact this debate has raged so long suggests there are shortcomings in how we think of food production and how we investigate it in Australian archaeology.įarmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production.
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