A continent of hunter-gatherers?

Abstract

In the popular Western imagination the nineteenth century unilineal social evolutionary theories of Tylor, Morgan and Spencer are often still commonly held in which ‘hunter-gatherer’ is essentially a metaphor for primitive in which – to quote Hobbes – life was ‘... nasty brutish and short’. The idea that hunters and gatherers lived a perilous existence – eking out a living, teetering on the brink of existence, desperately seeking the next meal – is a powerful trope in the Western imagination with the idea that it is only when we became farmers that we truly ‘progressed.’ That ‘cultivation’ was seen as one of the colonial benchmarks for ‘civilised’ is recorded from the very earliest contact between Aboriginal people and Europeans. Joseph Banks recorded in his journal: ‘Since we have been on the coast we have not observed those large fires which we so frequently saw in the Islands and New Zealand made by the Natives in order to clear the ground for cultivation: we thence concluded not much in favour of our future friends’ (Joseph Banks 28 April 1770, cited in Mundle 2013:188). Even today, many world ‘pre’-history textbooks continue to be organised in a unilineal – ‘simple’ to ‘complex’– hierarchy from hominid evolution, hunter-gatherer societies, early farmers culminating in civilisations. In academia, famous ethnographic studies such as those carried out by anthropologists Richard Lee and Lorna Marshall with Kung San foragers of southern Africa became the template for ‘classic’ hunter-gatherer lifeways in which hunter-gatherers were portrayed as egalitarian and highly mobile, with low density populations – contrasting a ‘simple’ indigenous foraging system with our own complex food producing/technological society. It is not surprising, then, that this idea of a ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer lifeway so deeply permeates the thinking of non-Indigenous and in some cases First Nation Australians and how they might view traditional Aboriginal society in what is essentially a colonial trope. Pascoe does not explicitly state that he thinks hunting and gathering is ‘primitive’; indeed he states that it is ‘[A]rchaeologists and prehistorians who have constructed the archaeological record to scientifically vindicate the colonialist notions of savagery and staged progressivism to leave little doubt that Indigenous peoples, particularly ‘hunter-gatherers,’ represented primordial man.’ He thus invokes a long defunct, nineteenth century version of Australian archaeology and it seems that implicit in his attempts to make pre-European Aboriginal Australians ‘farmers’ is the idea, that hunters and gatherers were indeed ‘primitive’ effectively buying into a colonial narrative. Whether this was his intention or not, it seems – based on the popularity of his book and subsequent media coverage – that this view has been embraced by a certain section of society, as if middle Australia has finally, to its great relief, found someone who has ‘shown’ that Aboriginal people were indeed ‘farmers’ after all, and therefore just like us: ‘civilised.’ However, for those of us who have spent whole careers researching, recording, and documenting Indigenous cultural heritage, nearly always in collaboration with communities themselves, the archaeology of Indigenous Australians shows hunting and gathering lifeways as part of a clinal continuum which encompasses highly mobile foraging to sedentary foraging/horticultural societies. It has long been acknowledged – at least in archaeology that Aboriginal Australians were not just passive entities reactive to external environmental forces but sophisticated and active managers of their country and in this context could be included in a definition of manager/cultivators at one end of the hunter-gatherer spectrum (cf. Lourandos 1997). What form this took, and the degree of complexity involved, very much depended on a range of factors including what the environment would allow, exchanges of ideas, population size and a myriad range of different cultural practices. What we do know through oral tradition and the archaeological record is that hunting and gathering as a way of life was