The spread of artifacts showed us that while Tasmanian Aboriginal people occupied every type of habitat, they targeted coastal areas around the whole island, and drier, less steep, environments of the central lowlands.įew archaeological materials from the last 10,000 years of the Holocene have been found in the wet, rugged western interior. We then mapped all parts of the island that shared the environmental characteristics associated with artifact sites. The model identified the environmental characteristics of 8,000 artifact sites in the Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage Register, including features such as altitude, slope, aspect, soil type, pre-1750 vegetation, distance to the coast and distance to fresh water. Where Tasmanian Aboriginal people probably spent most of their time over the last 10,000 years based on environmental features associated with over 8,000 artefact sites. Bill Gammage's Biggest Estate on Earth, Billy Griffiths' Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, and Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu have all helped us read the country as a cultural landscape that Aboriginal people managed intensively-shaping it intelligently over tens of thousands of years through fire, law and seasonal use. In recent years, a series of books have examined Aboriginal land management over at least 50,000 years.

This has big implications for conservation today. The way Tasmanian Aboriginal people hunted, gathered and used fire had a major influence on the structure, function and distribution of today's plant and animal communities. It's important to understand how people used, affected and related to the natural environment. They show that Aboriginal people also inhabited Tasmania's forests, in particular wet sclerophyll forests. This eye for the open parts of the Australian landscapes likely contributed to a view that Aboriginal people, too, almost exclusively preferred open vegetation types such as woodland and grasslands.īut findings from our recently published study of archaeological records challenge this notion. They sowed seeds to create pasture for sheep and cattle and opened up areas to cultivate crops brought from the northern hemisphere. They modified the landscape to suit their domesticated plants and animals. The same can be said of the first Europeans in Australia.

Billy griffiths deep time dreaming