The Emergence of Dreaming Landscapes: Indigenous Disturbance and Representation of Ecological Homelands in Australia’s Western Desert

Summary

Martu are Traditional Owners of expansive estates in Australia’s Western Desert. They maintain distinct networks of social interaction, mobility, and economic organization through which emerge novel ecosystemic relationships. Such networks in the Western Desert involve trophic interactions between people and many other species, and are sustained in patterns of consumption and renewal, especially anthropogenic disturbance via landscape burning for the purposes of hunting and sharing small game. Martu homelands are constructed in the weave of these interactions, and are represented in patterns that have clear archaeological signatures. Here we illustrate ways that Martu hold and represent their ecosystems and archaeological landscapes, especially in values of disturbance and consumption. We attempt to show how some notions of "conservation" (defined in terms of archaeological heritage or otherwise) can work at cross-purposes with values of disturbance maintained by many remote-living Martu. We then discuss broader implications of Indigenous ecological representation for the ways in which our discipline typically investigates diachronic changes human-environmental interaction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20882