Plant exploitation on Sahul: From colonisation to the emergence of regional specialisation during the Holocene

Abstract

Archaeobotanical evidence for plant exploitation in Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) and Near Oceania (Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands) is reviewed for pre-20 ka BP sites. The Sahul evidence for colonisation, settlement and plant exploitation provides an analogue for understanding the diffusion of modern humans eastwards from Africa across southeast Asia and Indo-Malaysia. The patterns of behaviour exhibited by Sahulian colonists suggest that diffusion occurred across land masses, including rapid adaptation to and occupation of diverse climo-biogeographic environments of interior locales. A model is developed to understand how generalist practices and patterns of behaviour throughout the Pleistocene became more regionally specific during the Holocene, primarily from the mid-Holocene. The model focusses on how specific, or constituent, practices were variously bundled, or occurred together, in different places and times in the past. Different forms of plant exploitation recorded in the recent past across Australia and New Guinea are shown to have emerged from compounded differences of emphasis, cumulative effects and attendant transformations through time.