Geoarchaeology of Aboriginal Landscapes in Semi-arid Australia

Chapter 1

Geoarchaeology

Every archaeological problem starts as a problem in geoarchaeology

(Renfrew 1976:2)

In this book, we present the results of a geoarchaeological investigation of Australian Aboriginal landscape use in the past in the form of an extended case study of material remains (in particular, stone artefacts and hearths) from the Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station in western New South Wales, Australia. We consider the implications of a dynamic Australian environment that was intimately connected with the lives of Aboriginal Australians. Contemporary geoarchaeology provides a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the relationships between people and the environments in which they lived. Following Renfrew’s reasoning, the research problem that we consider is: how were Aboriginal people so successful in dealing with the ecology of Australia – an ecology that has intrigued environmental scientists because, compared with the rest of the world, it is formed from a unique combination of processes active in a geologically ancient continent (Stafford Smith and Morton 1990; Morton et al. 2011). If Australian ecology is unique, then there is an equally unique opportunity to study the Aboriginal cultural interrelationships with this ecology (Holdaway et al. 2013).

There is a long history of interaction between geoscientists and archaeologists working in Australia, which was continued by the collaboration between the authors of this book: one (Simon Holdaway, SH) an archaeologist and the other (Patricia Fanning, PF) a geomorphologist. Yet despite this history, both archaeologists and earth scientists still need to overcome the temptation to weight environmental over cultural explanations of human behaviour, and vice versa. As illustrated in the case study presented in this book, a geoarchaeological approach provides the means to move away from such single dimensional characterisations of either the environment or culture and, instead, to consider the interaction of multiple processes, both natural and cultural, operating over different temporal and spatial scales. A ‘four-dimensional’ geoarchaeological approach (Brown 2008) allows us to focus attention on three critical determinants of variability in the material record Aboriginal Australians left at Fowlers Gap: how the record was preserved; the time period over which it accumulated; and what it can tell us about Aboriginal use of landscape, particularly their mobility.

This book is therefore not structured in the same way as other accounts of Aboriginal history (e.g. Veth 1993; Attenbrow 2004; Smith 2006). Because we are interested in the interaction of multiple natural and cultural processes, we have endeavoured to dispense with typological approaches to the material record. In the analyses here, we do not describe functional artefact tool types or kits, functional site types or the operation of synchronic settlement systems. Indeed, our approach does not even include the results of a conventional site survey, the ‘bread and butter’ of cultural heritage management in Australia. Instead, we seek to understand why we can today see the material remains of past Aboriginal activities in some locations and not others (preservation), why these material remains vary in age (time) and what they have to say about a people who had learned to deal so successfully with the unique Australian ecology (mobility).

Geoarchaeology as a framework for archaeological investigation: the global context

Interaction between the geosciences and archaeology goes back to the early 19th century, when geology and prehistoric archaeology developed essentially in parallel (Pollard 1999). However, as an identified discipline, geoarchaeology only developed in the 1960s as part of a growing perception that the data and perspectives of the sciences had to be incorporated into archaeology more systematically. The geoarchaeology of this time therefore focussed more on the application of geoscientific techniques to answering research problems in archaeology (Butzer 1982; Pollard 1999) rather than on changing the conceptual apparatus through which archaeological research was conducted (Wilson 2011). Other terms such as archaeogeology, archaeological geology and archaeometry were used in the same context and, although the differences in meaning between them are considered to be trivial (Herz and Garrison 1998), the distinguishing feature of geoarchaeology is that it now includes studies of the archaeological record of human behaviour in its dynamic environmental context, much like the way it was originally envisaged by Butzer (1971) in his seminal work Environment and Archeology: An Ecological Approach to Prehistory. In this way, it is similar to other initiatives adopted by archaeologists, such as ecodynamics (Kirch 2005; McGlade 1995). Contemporary geoarchaeology therefore is not simply geologists helping out archaeologists, but a coherent discipline with dedicated practitioners devoting themselves to deciphering the natural world and the ways in which humans interacted with it in the past (Wilson 2011).

Geoarchaeology has flourished over the last 20 years, especially in the UK where it has been supported by funding for projects in river and floodplain management (Brown 2008). Coupled with technological advances, such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), ground penetrating radar (GPR), resistivity and geographic information systems (GIS), and a revolution in direct dating techniques, particularly optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon determinations, this has enabled geoarchaeologists to develop what are essentially four-dimensional models of sections of the surface of the Earth in a variety of contexts and at a variety of scales as a basis for reconstructing the changing topography, living conditions and ecology of human habitats. Stratigraphy reveals, delimits and contextualises artefacts and provides the basic data for archaeological interpretations (Brown 2008). With the addition of the new techniques, four-dimensional models have the ability to provide information about the processes of site creation, preservation and destruction, and allow the integration of these processes with independent data sources concerning human adaptation to changing environments. Butzer (2011) further proposes that the diachronic approach taken by geoarchaeology monitors the processes and ‘feedbacks’ of historical change that are essential to understanding contemporary synchronic patterns and to anticipate future contingencies.

Geoarchaeology in Australia

Strong interdisciplinary activities have characterised Australian archaeology since its foundation, with geologists, geomorphologists and pedologists making important site-specific contributions to several ‘classic’ studies of archaeological research (Hughes and Sullivan 1982; Shawcross and Kaye 1980). However, to this day, geoarchaeology has had little recognition as a distinct subdiscipline of either archaeology or geology in Australian universities, with most archaeology being taught in social, rather than natural, science faculties. Despite this, many contemporary archaeological studies in Australia incorporate geological and geomorphological investigations of archaeological materials and their landscape settings.

The first Australian text focussing on human–environment interactions was published in 1971, the same year as Butzer’s Environment and Archeology. John Mulvaney and Jack Golson brought together geologists, geomorphologists, biologists and archaeologists in the volume Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia to discuss relationships between humans and the environment. The result was a series of papers on aspects of palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and chronology. Few papers, however, dealt specifically with the integration of environmental and archaeological data in ways consistent with geoarchaeology today. As Jim Allen (1992) commented some 20 years later, most of the participants limited themselves to discussion of their own discipline, grappling with the combination of a human presence in Australia that was then thought to be at least 20 000 years old, and a range of new techniques that were changing the nature of their own specialisations, as well as bringing their subject matter closer to that of interest to archaeologists.

In reviewing Australian geoarchaeology for the proceedings of the first Australasian archaeometry conference held at the Australian Museum in 1981, Hughes and Sullivan (1982) identified two main groupings of studies:

•studies drawing on the methods and theories of geomorphology, geology and pedology that were largely site-specific in approach, such as investigations of the stratigraphy and chronology of rockshelter sites, the nature and sources of raw materials for stone artefact manufacture, and rock art conservation studies

•studies with a regional focus, such as the palaeoenvironmental and chronological investigations of places such as Lake Mungo (Bowler 1971, 1978; Bowler et al. 1970) and the impact of Pleistocene and Holocene environmental changes. These studies more closely reflected the way in which Butzer’s (1971) Environment and Archeology, was interpreted in Australia.

In the Naive Lands volume published 20 years after Mulvaney and Golson (Dodson 1992), theoretical changes in archaeology had moved the more ecologically minded archaeologists closer to the concerns of scientists. Levels of integration between archaeology and natural science had increased dramatically, as had the body of knowledge concerning the Quaternary era (the last 2 million years of Earth history, including the evolution of humans). Pan-continental models of cultural change were replaced by a concern with more local sequences, evidenced most clearly in archaeology by the rejection of universal typological schemes for stone artefact classification. The debate concerning human occupation of Australia was no longer about a 20 000 year sequence, but one at least twice that length. Yet, in summing up the Naive Lands volume, Jim Allen (1992) noted that the various disciplines still continued to maintain their own theoretical positions, methodologies and intellectual agendas. Although archaeologists were more interested in environmental explanations than was apparent in the Mulvaney and Golson volume, Allen felt that natural scientists were less inclined to seek cultural explanations for their data, maintaining an interest in the environment as the locus of change.

Today, there is ample evidence that natural scientists seek out human, as well as natural, explanations for environmental changes. Two of the important debates about human–environment interactions in Australia – the cause(s) of megafaunal extinction (e.g. Dodson et al. 1993; Trueman et al. 2005; Wroe and Field 2006; Wroe et al. 2013) and the human use of fire to modify the environment (e.g. Head 2000; Horton 1982; Kershaw et al. 2002) – continue to receive attention. To these debates may be added a renewed interest in the effect of global environmental change on regional human adaptations, seen most clearly in the work on climate drivers such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (e.g. Bourke et al. 2007; Haberle and David 2004; Turney and Hobbs 2006). However, disciplinary differences between explanations of human behaviour derived from natural sciences (i.e. environmental impacts on human behaviour) and from social sciences (i.e. human conceptions of the environment) remain and, although explanations now incorporate new data, disciplinary differences would likely still be recognisable to the authors of chapters in both of the previously mentioned volumes from the early 1970s and early 1990s (Holdaway and Fanning 2010).

In the arid regions of Australia, it is clear that geoarchaeological approaches are needed to understand the archaeological record of Aboriginal presence and what it can tell us about their use of the landscape in the past. Many natural processes disperse or concentrate artefacts, or leave them visible only in patches, making the identification of sites – and therefore settlement patterns that solely reflect human activity – problematic (Holdaway and Fanning 2008). The absence of artefacts need not imply the absence of people, because the preservation of the archaeological record varies from place to place depending on the geomorphic dynamics and landscape history. Not all archaeological records survive, so it is important to understand the relationship between the age of a land surface and the age of the archaeological record that lies upon it. Land-surface ages are often quite variable depending on the geomorphological history of the landscape: some places preserve ancient land surfaces and therefore have the potential to record an ancient occupation history, while other land surfaces are recently formed and therefore will not show a prolonged temporal record of human presence (e.g. Wells 2001; Barton et al. 2002; Bettis and Mandel 2002). In a similar way, studies of artefact assemblage formation have changed the way that we understand what archaeological sites represent. We no longer conceive of most sites simply as the equivalent of brief occupations – ‘dinner-time’ camps and the like. Most concentrations of artefacts are now understood to form as a complex interplay of repeated human activity at one location influenced by a variety of post-depositional processes (e.g. Wandsnider 1996).

Issues of temporal scale are particularly apparent in the interpretation of human–environment interactions during the Holocene in Australia. Older studies that sought to demonstrate stable adaptations to the environment, where temporal change was effectively ignored (e.g. Gould 1980), were replaced by arguments about demographic increases or the development of social complexity involving cultural changes unrelated to environmental variability (e.g. Lourandos 1983; Lourandos and David 1998). However, both types of argument made use of sets of evidence with markedly different chronological resolution, and interpretations that emphasised stability or, alternatively, slow accumulative directional change (Frankel 1988). Both sets of arguments were therefore prone to the essential problem created when sets of evidence with different temporal precisions were mixed: that all explanation must default to the chronology with the coarsest age estimates. The perception that resulted, of either stable adaptations or of cumulative progressive change, was at least in part a function of the coarseness of the measurements. The scales of behavioural explanations need to match the scales at which the data are resolvable (Allen and Holdaway 2009) because there is little to be gained from applying behavioural or natural interpretations that result in explanations that are so generalised that they are apparently similar in all times and places (Holdaway and Wandsnider 2006).

Similar issues are found in studies of Aboriginal material culture. The change in emphasis from artefact function to assemblage formation that occurred in the last two decades of the 20th century in Europe and North America was slow in coming to Australia. Late 20th century studies of Australian stone artefacts emphasised function, obtainable by considering ‘usewear’ (damage on the edge of artefacts indicating how they might have been used), rather than correlations between activity and artefact form (Holdaway and Stern 2004). Where function could not be directly determined, tool technology (i.e. how the artefacts were made) seemingly provided an alternative route to determining the nature of activities represented by the accumulation of artefacts at individual locations. Most recently, studies that demonstrate tool re-use have been emphasised as a means of investigating technological organisation (see, for example, papers in Clarkson and Lamb 2005).

Artefacts obviously functioned in the past, but this function was often only indirectly related to what went on at a particular place. Writing in the Golson and Mulvaney volume discussed above, Peterson (1971) noted that much of the apparent conservatism in Australian stone artefacts might reflect the fact that they were used to work wood and bone. Because there are only a few techniques available to work these materials, one would not expect a particularly varied tool kit. More importantly, Peterson argued that artefacts deposited at a particular location might have been used to form other artefacts used at different places to where they were made. It might also be true that the bulk of the use of an artefact occurred somewhere other than the place where it was deposited. Therefore, artefacts found at a particular location might not necessarily inform on what went on there. Recent developments in stone artefact analysis have helped to confirm Peterson’s suggestions (e.g. Douglass 2010; Douglass et al. 2008; Holdaway et al. 2008c) and, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, artefact assemblages can provide an indication of not only what was abandoned at a particular location but also what was transported away and not returned. But rather than try to identify all the places people occupied as an indication of landscape use, it is possible to draw inferences about the spatial and temporal dynamics of occupation and abandonment from what was left behind at just a few of those locations (Holdaway et al. 2008b; Holdaway et al. 2012).

Using our research at Fowlers Gap as a case study, we outline in this book how the type of landscape approach to archaeological record interpretation that Peterson envisioned can be developed using a geoarchaeological framework. Temporal dynamics are emphasised over static behavioural interpretations, but the temporality of these processes need not all be the same. Chapters deal separately with geomorphology (preservation), geochronology (time) and archaeology (mobility), but seek to emphasise the interrelatedness of all three lines of inquiry.

The Fowlers Gap study area

Location

The Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station is located 112 km north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales (NSW) (Plate 1). The Station occupies Western Lands Lease No. 10194 (an area of 38 888 ha) held by the University of New South Wales as a ‘lease in perpetuity’. The mission of the Station is to further understanding of the functioning of the arid zone of NSW through research, teaching, interpretation and knowledge diffusion in a pastoral context. Some parts of the Station have been monitored, and data collected continuously, for over 30 years (University of NSW 2009) providing an invaluable record of environmental change in the recent past. These studies provided us with the environmental context in which we could apply a geoarchaeological approach to understanding the archaeological record extant on the Station.

Geological setting

Fowlers Gap Station extends across the eastern edge of the Willyama Block, part of the ancient continental basement rocks, into the Bancannia Trough, a structural depression filled with at least 2000 m of Devonian, Cretaceous and younger deposits. At the contact of these two structural units, Upper Devonian rocks are exposed. Accordingly, the western part of the Station consists of rugged uplands or rolling lowlands on Upper Precambrian and Devonian sedimentary rocks and the eastern part of low-lying plains on Quaternary alluvium (Ward and Sullivan 1973). The oldest bedrock in the study area consists of Neoproterozoic Adelaidean metasediments of the Farnell Group (Cooper et al. 1978). These include moderately deformed, low-grade metamorphosed marine sediments including quartzite, phyllite, limestone and dolomite. Late Devonian Nundooka Sandstone of the Mulga Downs Group, consisting mostly of quartzose arenite with some kaolinitic finer grained units, forms prominent ridges in the north–centre of the Station. The Adelaidean and Late Devonian bedrock are juxtaposed by the Nundooka Creek Fault, which forms a major SSE–NNW trending zone through the area (Hill and Roach 2003). Unconsolidated to weakly lithified Early Cretaceous fine sandstones and siltstones (Ward and Sullivan 1973) of the Telephone Creek Formation have also been identified. A mixture of Quaternary alluvial, colluvial and aeolian sediments have accumulated within the area, particularly associated with broad valley systems in the west and the slopes and plains of the Bancannia Trough to the east.

Physiographic setting

Mabbutt (1973) divided the Station into three physiographic sections trending north–south with the regional strike. In the west is an undulating lowland with low ridges, mainly between 180 and 240 m above sea level and typically with between 10 and 30 m relief. A central belt of ranges and foothills with up to 100 m relief locally, and attaining 294 m above sea level in the north, form part of the Barrier Range – they are called the Faraway Hills in the south and the Nundooka Ranges in the north. The eastern section of the Station consists of alluvial plains that descend eastwards towards Bancannia Lake (Plate 1), from ~170 m to 140 m above sea level. With the exception of a very small area in the north-west, which drains towards Lake Frome, the Station falls entirely within the Bancannia Lake basin, a small interior drainage basin defined by Tertiary earth movements in the south of the Great Artesian Basin. In the south of the Station, drainage is to Fowlers Creek, which rises to the south-west, traverses the ridges of the Faraway Hills in two water gaps, of which the downstream one has given the Station its name, and then floods out on the plains to the east and north-east. The drainage in the north of the Station has two components: Sandy Creek drains to the east in a gorge through the Nundooka Ranges, and the upper part of Nundooka Creek flows north beyond the Station boundary (Mabbutt 1973).

Vegetation

The vegetation of Fowlers Gap Station is low, open and woody, and is representative of the shrub–steppe of southern arid Australia (Burrell 1973). Low open shrublands dominated by bladder saltbush (Atriplex vesicaria) and bluebush (Kochia sp.) are the most common vegetation communities. Lesser amounts of tall open shrublands, dominated by prickly wattle (Acacia victoriae) or mulga (Acacia aneura) are also present, the former along the drainage tracts of the plains to the east, while the latter is restricted to the western ranges. Mulga may have been either denser and/or more extensive in the past, but it was commonly cut for fence posts and other uses in the early days of pastoralism in the region, including being cut for stock feed during droughts. Stands of Casuarina sp. are also found in the Faraway Hills in the south and the Nundooka Ranges and Gap Hills in the north.

A prominent feature of