One of the most interesting things going on in Australian archaeology is the idea that Aboriginal food production systems may have involved domestication of some plant species. Was there some level of food production going on in Aboriginal groups that goes well beyond hunter-gathering?
Plant geneticists haven’t been working on these sorts of questions in Australia – and that’s largely because we’ve assumed Aboriginal groups operated under hunter-gatherer systems.
I’m currently involved in research out in Mithaka country – the Channel country of southwest Queensland. Last year we published a large regional survey of the landscape, and we recently received a grant to continue that, bringing in plant geneticists, archaeobotanists, ethnobotanists, geomorphologists and palynologists (who study pollen cores to reconstruct environmental change). We aim to make a proper assessment of these landscapes and see if we can recover signatures of intensified plant use. We’ve called it “Testing the Dark Emu hypothesis”.
