EVENT: Archaeology Seminar Series

The current paradigm of arid zone landscape use in Australia during the late Holocene focuses on the opportunistic exploitation of ephemeral resources by flexibly sized social groups. This generalized model of landscape use has been adapted to explain human behaviour patterns in a wide variety of different ecological zones. I argue that further refinement of this generalized theory is possible on a regional scale and intend to illustrate this through innovative use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to model landscape use from an ecological perspective. By quantifying the habitats of economically important species, I intend to spatially depict places of energy exchange in the landscape that do not necessarily manifest in the archaeological record. This will enable the elaboration of information available for an area lacking in other more traditional information sources. The “Ideal marriage” between GIS and archaeology envisaged more than 20 years ago remains unrealised in an Australian context. Of the uses to which GIS can be put in archaeology, until recently only questions of “where” have been addressed in Australia rather than using GIS as a tool to explain questions of “why” and “how”. By spatially articulating idealized notions of landscape use from Optimal Forager Theory and Human Behavioural Ecology I intend to investigate the contrast between the ideal and the real as observed in the archaeological record. This will highlight cultural behaviours and practices that have not been accessible in other ways. Using this approach, “the whole, will indeed, be more than the sum of its constituent parts”.