A Pleistocene tradition : Aboriginal fishery on the lower Darling River, Western N.S.W.

Abstract

The economic life of the early colonisers of semi-arid western New South Wales is represented by many small open sites mainly preserved within sand dunes. Preservation of organic materials in this environment has been dependent upon rapid deposition of overlying sediments to protect them from erosion and degradation. Once uncovered, fragile material such as freshwater crustacea carapace and fish bone rapidly decays, shell fragments and disperses, while other materials such as fish otoliths and clay hearthstones survive much longer. An understanding of this problem has allowed analysis to proceed to the following results: 1. The 232 recorded archaeological sites containing faunal remains and associated with the water channels and lakes of the lower Darling River region in western New South Wales span a period of 27,000 years BP to the present. However preservation of materials within this time span is uneven both spatially and temporally. The distribution pattern of these archaeological sites in time and space is largely a reflection of past geomorphological processes rather than past cultural preference of campsite positions. 2. By noting the condition of the site materials it is possible to determine their contemporaneity to some extent. Typically a well- preserved Pleistocene site in the lower Darling River region consists of a single concentration of bivalve remains but species other than shell fish dominate some of the other Pleistocene sites. Sites dominated by other species, however, resemble the shell middens in that they characteristically consist of a single cluster of faunal remains. Species other than the dominant species are rare or absent. This suggests a foraging strategy in which collectors targeted a single species for each foraging expedition. 3. The large numbers of individual animals in some of the sites which represent such single expeditions indicate that the gathering of aquatic species was not incidental to basic survival strategies. In addition, the large numbers of fish present in such sites coupled with the size distribution of the fish represented in the sites suggests the use of nets to capture the fish. Thus the Darling River material represents the oldest evidence in the world for systematic exploitation of aquatic resources. This and the associated fibre technology may well be a tradition seated deep in Pleistocene Asia