@SteeleRedux,

Re-reading, my response remains the same.

In terms of your post:

Abstract: Wurdi Youang is an egg-shaped Aboriginal stone arrangement in Victoria, Australia. Here we present a new survey of the site, and show that its major axis is aligned within a few degrees of east-west. We confirm a previous hypothesis that it contains alignments to the position on the horizon of the setting sun at the equinox and the solstices, and show that two independent sets of indicators are aligned in these directions. We show that these alignments are unlikely to have arisen by chance, and instead the builders of this stone arrangement appear to have deliberately aligned the site on astronomically significant positions.

Take note of the use of the words' appear' and 'unlikely.' as I am sure you know archaeology is largely conjecture and this is simply more conjecture.

Also, the major axis is aligned within a few degrees of east-west. It is within a few degrees and it is not accurate. Astrology does do mathematical accuracy.

But, as I said before, most stone-age peoples, plenty of time for star-gazing, managed such things.

Hi Paul,

Being a slow learner and thinker, it didn't occur to me to put 2 + 2 together, and try to understand why there is this sudden claim that Aboriginal people here were not hunters and gatherers, but farmers.

As it happens, one implication of early farming societies is that they tended to strengthen their boundaries against neighbours and certainly strangers, developing their languages not as foraging languages as before, but as farming, cultivating, and herding languages, as well as retaining much of the earlier foraging languages - after all, even now, peasant farmers are also hunters, fishers, penning and shearing and slaughtering animals and harvesting forest products. So the unique languages would have developed independently, borrowing little from each other. After all, as you point out, it is blatantly untrue

'That there is only one, and there ever was, only one Aboriginal culture. Not true.'

In that sense, the sovereignty of the clan-controlled land of foragers could easily morph into very jealously-guarded clan-based farmland, once farming took hold, and would have helped to emphasise the boundaries between clans. In New Zealand, they even have a name for that: rahui. Check it out.

So if farming ever occurred in Australia, and even if it didn't, boundaries between multiple sovereignties would have been jealously guarded: cultural differences would have been accentuated between sovereign clan territories, with - like everywhere else in the world in such circumstances - constant wars and vendettas being waged between closed-off groups. The sovereignty of the clan would have been accentuated under farming, not diminished.

That's how it seems to have developed in Africa too:

[continued]

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C. K. Meek, in his key text on colonial land policy in Africa and elsewhere (available on my web-site: www.firstsources.info , on the Land Matters Page) goes into beautiful detail about the recognition of tribal, clan and family lands and how changes were dealt with: the key issue being that he/she who cultivated the land was its 'owner', within the context of family, clan and tribe - and all periodically reshaped. Again, a bit like New Zealand: definite whanau, hapu and iwi powers and responsibilities :)

So whether foraging or farming had priority over much of Australia, many thousand sovereignties would have been the rule. After all, no group would ever do what some neighbouring group tried to dictate: even now, that antagonism is a major stumbling-block in trying to bring about self-determination in 'communities'. No group dictated to any other: no elder had any authority to dictate to anybody but his own kin, give or take. So 'sovereignty', if one could use that term, could extend only within one's clan boundaries.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe, is someone saying that ALL Aboriginal people were NOT hunter/gatherers, if so its my opinion they are wrong. I believe many, if not all Aboriginals were expert hunter/gatherers. Were some Aboriginal people farmers, from the evidence presented I say in the purest sense of the word, yes, but certainly not to the same degree that modern western style farming is undertaken today. Those Aboriginals that conducted farming more than likely, almost certainly were "multitasking", hunting and gathering at the same time. What is coming to light is the past incorrect assumption that ALL Aboriginal people were exclusively hunter/gatherers.

@Paul1405,

I don't recall anyone suggesting that the many different Aboriginal peoples did nothing else but hunting and gathering, although the evidence is that they mostly were nomadic hunters and gatherers and not farmers in any sense of the word over thousands of years.

All stone-age peoples set fish traps. All stone-age peoples where yams were found, established or extended yam fields. That is not farming.

Let us be realists, although I fail to see why some want to pretend Aboriginal peoples were other than they were, as if there were something shameful about being hunter-gatherers - the way all humans began and all humans lived at the stone-age level.

Even real farmers through the centuries multi-tasked and throughout Europe and Asia where people had developed through bronze and iron ages, people would still hunt and gather, game, wild herbs, berries, mushrooms and indeed many still do. However, real farming meant the hunting and gathering was minimal and additional as opposed to forming the foundation of survival, as it did, for Aboriginal peoples found here in 1788.

Paul.

I suppose it depends how you define 'farming': define it out of all sensible recognition and- hey presto ! - some Aboriginal groups were farming. Stick to standard definitions and they were not.

Let's clarify:

* . fish traps are not farming, they're an imaginative combination of both hunting and gathering;

* . setting fire to the bush is not farming;

* . all sorts of explanations can be devised to 'explain' a vast field of grasses looking like it had been 'stooped', and the ground churned up - a mob of dopey emus running willy-nilly through the grass during a violent thunder-storm, for example. It sounds as likely as 'farming', given that that's what emus do, and that no farming implements have ever been found.

Is that it ? That's the 'evidence' ? Even the Tooth Fairy has more than that.

It's interesting that Major Mitchell did not actually see anybody 'farming', or looking like they were about to gather in the 'stooks' (presumably women), nor have any harvesting tools ever been found.

You're right that foraging and farming can (and very often do) co-exist - one group providing the protein (the hunters) and the other providing the carbs from their wonder-grain.

Some societies are much more complicated than that, with itinerant traders exchanging goods for meat, fishermen exchanging fish for grain and bush-meat, and so on. Southern African Bushmen and local cattle herders and farmers around their territory have been exchanging what they produce for maybe a thousand years.

Peter Bellwood has edited a fascinating book on "The Austronesians", available on

https://webmail.internode.on.net/index.php/mail/viewmessage/getattachment/folder/INBOX/uniqueId/3054/filenameOriginal/austronesians.pdf

and Chapter 13 goes specifically into these relations between different sorts of producers. It won't cost nothing to have a look :)

Joe