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Lifting the veil: pyrogeographic manipulation and the leveraging of environmental change by people across the Vale of Belvoir, Tasmania, Australia

Fletcher, Michael-Shawn; Romano, Anthony; Nichols, Scott; Henriquez Gonzalez, William; Mariani, Michela; Jaganjac, Diana; Sculthorpe, Andry

Lifting the veil: pyrogeographic manipulation and the leveraging of environmental change by people across the Vale of Belvoir, Tasmania, Australia Thumbnail


Authors

Michael-Shawn Fletcher

Anthony Romano

Scott Nichols

William Henriquez Gonzalez

Diana Jaganjac

Andry Sculthorpe



Abstract

Humans undertake land management and care of landscapes to maintain safe, healthy, productive and predictable environments. Often, this is achieved through creating spatial and temporal heterogeneity in a way that leverages the natural world; both amplifying natural trends and, in some cases, driving shifts counter to natural processes. However, a persistent paradigm governing the understanding of proxy evidence of past human activity on the environment is that human agency is only recognized in proxy data when trends oppose what are expected to occur naturally. Framing research in such a way ignores the fact that people have, continue to, and will always leverage the environment in ways that both compliment and diverge from “natural” trends. Doing so masks, or erases, people from the histories of their territories and continues to perpetuate myths such as “wild” and “wilderness”, particularly in places that have in fact been shaped and maintained by people for long periods of time. Here, we synthesize geographical, dendrochronological, palaeoecological, archaeological and palaeoclimatic data to demonstrate how Palawa people (Tasmanian Aboriginal people) in Lutruwita (now known as Tasmania, southeast Australia) leveraged climatic change to convert unproductive forest vegetation to open forest and grassland to support higher occupation levels. The fine-scale heterogeneity we have identified reflects the diversity of ways in which, and the spatial scale that, the Palawa engage with their land. We caution against adopting coarse spatial scale (i.e., continental, regional, etc.) methodologies to reconstruct the influence of past societies over landscape evolution as they assume homogeneity of human cultures and of human influence on landscapes. We also reinforce calls for those researching past landscape change to abandon tropes of human agency acting only in opposition to the natural world. Such approaches are couched within a narrow cultural understanding of human-environment interactions and result in the erasure of Indigenous and local peoples' role in maintaining healthy, biodiverse and safe landscapes.

Citation

Fletcher, M.-S., Romano, A., Nichols, S., Henriquez Gonzalez, W., Mariani, M., Jaganjac, D., & Sculthorpe, A. (2024). Lifting the veil: pyrogeographic manipulation and the leveraging of environmental change by people across the Vale of Belvoir, Tasmania, Australia. Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 3, Article 1386339. https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2024.1386339

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 17, 2024
Online Publication Date Jul 5, 2024
Publication Date Jul 5, 2024
Deposit Date Sep 3, 2024
Publicly Available Date Sep 3, 2024
Journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology
Electronic ISSN 2813-432X
Publisher Frontiers Media
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 3
Article Number 1386339
DOI https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2024.1386339
Keywords Indigenous Australia, fire, palaeoecology, Tasmania, dendrochronology, cultural landscapes
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/37593044
Publisher URL https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeology/articles/10.3389/fearc.2024.1386339/full

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