Technological provisioning and assemblage: variation in the Eastern Victoria River region, northern Australia: a Darwinian approach

Abstract

This thesis documents systems of stone artefact provisioning, or the strategic organisation of procurement, manufacture, transport and consumption of stone artefacts, on the edge of the semi-arid zone in northern Australia, and from an evolutionary perspective. Advances in lithic studies have developed synthetic concepts, largely derived from processual and behavioural archaeology and evolutionary ecology, which help model the optimal design and assembly of technical systems in relation to resource structuring and changing levels of risk and mobility. Applying these concepts to the explanation of assemblage variability in Wardaman Country offers new insight into the reasons for Holocene technological change in this region. This explanation emphasizes natural selection acting on stimulated cultural variation as potentially a key process bringing about a shift in the nature of implement production and technological provisioning. Directional technological change is seen as potentially the result of partially successful attempts to track optimality through feedback between proximate goals and current selective forces. Methods are developed to examine the effects of these processes on stone artefact assemblages. Foraging practices and technological responses are first modelled in relation to the environmental structuring of the region using optimal foraging theory. Consideration is then given to the likely changes in resource structure that took place over the last 15,000BP, and the likely effects on foraging and technological provisioning strategies. The derived hypotheses are tested against assemblage data from 293 open sites and 4 stratified rockshelters. The results indicate apparent major changes in technological provisioning and land use that may have been caused by delcines in the abundance and predictability of resources and resulting in increased subsistence risk following the onset of ENSO-driven climatic variability after 5,000BP, and reaching their greatest severity between 3,500 and 2,000BP. The results have important implications for an understanding of Northern Australian prehistory, including the potential causes of broadly similar technological changes across large regions of the top end, the timing of increased inter-regional contact and the spread of new technologies, as well as the importance of tracking historical continuity as a means of understanding social procsses connected to regional technological change.