Quote:The assumption that indigenous Australians did not develop agriculture is highly contestable, with a body of evidence revealing that they developed food production systems and in some cases lived in large villages.
It is a commonly held view that indigenous Australians in traditional circumstances never engaged in food production, specifically in terms of developing or adopting agriculture. Based on this assumption there has been extended debate on the supposed reasons for this (AS, March 2010, pp.19-21).
Such debates are meaningless if the initial premise is incorrect. And it may well be. Furthermore, if that assumption is incorrect it has significant implications for theories on the origins of agriculture.
Agriculture is a form of primary economic specialisation that developed at about the same time as fishing and pastoralism. In south-west Asia and China, the earliest cradles of agriculture, herding of sheep, goats and pigs and the development of fish hooks, fishing nets and fish traps accompanied the development of agriculture.
But such developments didn't spring up overnight, and hunting and gathering continued to provide a significant part of subsistence until well into the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (see box). Moreover, the crops that were being grown as part of this Neolithic revolution emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, rye, lentils, rice and millet were wild, undomesticated crops for at least 1500 years.
Higher levels of sedentism, underwritten by intensive and specialised exploitation of a few key resources such as fish, nuts and grass seeds, was already evident by the Natufian. A contemporaneous pattern was also found in China and repeated in Neolithic revolutions elsewhere.
In the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), Chinese Early Neolithic and Mesoamerican Early Formative periods, sedentism developed to the point where permanent settlements (of at least several years duration) were established. These were comprised of permanent dwellings that were occupied on a seasonal basis, and possibly throughout the year.
Settlements of 50-60 people had developed by the PPNA, comprised of rudimentary but seemingly permanent, single-roomed circular or oval dwellings with dimensions of 3-8 metres. At PPNA Jericho in Israel, for example, "beehive-shaped" abodes predominated, with some evidence of internal partitioning into rooms. Even in the PPNB, habitations were only simple wattle and daub, such as those at Tell Aswad in Syria, although more rectangular structures were becoming the norm by then. Individual dwellings would have housed four or five people at PPNA/PPNB Nahal Oren in Israel, or up to ten at an "unusually large" PPNA habitation at Jericho.
The size of settlements increased in the later PPNA and PPNB. The larger ones, such as PPNB Jericho and Mureybit and Tell Aswad in Syria, had populations of 230-330.
If one considers comparable evidence from Australia a similar pattern emerges, with traditional indigenous groups in some parts engaging in food production, including agriculture, living in large villages made up of permanent abodes, exhibiting high levels of sedentism and having the same characteristics as Neolithic societies elsewhere. Historical accounts, oral traditions and ethnographic observations reveal that at the time of the British colonisation of Australia at least 19 different species of plant were being cultivated by at least 21 different identifiable indigenous groups.
These included species of yam, sweet potato and its relatives (such as the "bush potato"), "native millet", ngardu, "bush tomatoes" and "bush onions". But some of these species weren't just planted; in some instances they were the principal source of sustenance.
When explorer George Grey first entered the Victoria District of the central west coast of Western Australia in 1839, he noted yam fields of square kilometres in extent. One tract "extended east and west as far as we could see". Further south he recorded that "the whole of this valley is an extensive warran [yam] ground".
A few years later Augustus Gregory, a surveyor who later became a famous explorer and Surveyor General of Queensland, stated that the local Aboriginal population "never dug a yam without planting the crown in the same hole so that no diminution of food supply should result".
Another colonial explorer, Lt. Helpman, commented in 1849 that the Nhanda and Amangu "are a fine race of men but seem to depend entirely upon warran and gum, of which they have great abundance".
Grey also reported four villages in the region, two of which he observed at Hutt River the day after encountering the yam fields. He wrote: "In this distance passed two native villages, or, as the men termed them, towns". These villages comprised dwellings that were "very nicely plastered over the outside with clay, and clods of turf," and which Grey thought "were evidently intended for fixed places of residence".
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