Building a Novel Archaeobotanical Framework to Investigate the History of Plant Foods in Aboriginal Australia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With a wide variety of biomes and extreme fluctuations in water availability, Australia’s Channel Country saw Indigenous Australians develop a unique suite of subsistence strategies to live in this environment. Ethnohistoric accounts report combinations of semipermanent habitation and seasonal mobility, intensive seed collection, storage and grinding, leading to claims that Channel Country saw the development of agriculture. Determining the nature of precolonial Indigenous food production has potential to rewrite understandings of subsistence regimes across the continent, but an understanding of plant exploitation in Australia has been largely ethnographic in the past. Archaeobotany is rarely utilized; there is widespread belief that plant remains are not preserved in Australia. In this presentation we discuss a research project in which flotation and dry sieving are being used to extract plant remains from gunyahs (houses) and open-air camps, from a range of biomes across Mithaka Country in southwest Queensland. We aim to identify food taxa present, and develop a framework for empirically distinguishing plant collection, management, cultivation, and domestication in precolonial Australia. Drawing on the macrofossil record, this paper presents our preliminary results, including a predictive approach for identifying forms of plant use and the first results of seed analysis from the gunyahs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39072.0