/cont

3. Stone houses. Pascoe is convinced that most of those circular stone structures are the remains of stone houses constructed by sedentary natives. But the evidence for that is really only in his imagination. Most of those structures which are less than a meter high were probably wind breaks and blinds. Even when covered with bark or suchlike, they weren't permanent houses. There's more than enough evidence for that from the early settlers and current archaeologists. Additionally, early Europeans also built stone windbreaks and blinds and some of them have been confused with aboriginal erections. Finally most of these stone structures occur in places where wood was hard to access. So the suggestion that it is all over the continent was obviously made-up.

4. In comparing aboriginals to Amer-Indians, Pascoe says Liz Warren is a POC. That is now shown to be wrong.

OK I made that last one up just to trigger SR who so very much wants to forget that he even knows anyone called Warren.

Give the Academic Historians another 50 years & they'll credit the Aborigines with inventing nuclear power. That is as long as the Guilt industry hands over funding at the present rate.

I have examined Aboriginal spears with glass blades, obviously, the local aboriginals knew how to smelt glass.

Dear mhaze,

Well done. See couldn't have been too hard after all.

Do you mind if we tackle one at a time? Less confusing that way.

Right, you take issue with Pascoe's map because it covers a greater area than Tindale's original saying “The book carries a map which purports to be one prepared by archaeologist Norman Tindale”.

No mate it doesn't. It clearly states “After Tindale” and includes more areas unknown to him.

Here is a paper titled Native grasses make new products – a review of current and past uses and assessment of potential from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation.

“It is more than likely, according to Tindale, who utilised recordings of grinding stones as inferring the use of grains, that the deliberate harvesting of grass seeds (and potentially also wattle tree seeds) was widespread throughout a very broad swathe of Australia. Tindale described a large area, now known as ‘Tindale’s Arc’, where grinding stones were considered as prevalent. The map, taken directly from Tindale (1974) “Aboriginal tribes of Australia” shows the area he considered where a reliance upon grass seeds as a source of food was evident. Both contemporary and older evidence (Hiatt, 1968) suggests that grinding stones are much more widespread than reported by Tindale and as such, the use of grass seeds for food is likely to have been more widespread than suggested in this map.”

“The locations of a number of the ethnobotanic studies that have been undertaken fall well outside Tindale’s Arc suggesting that the food use of native grasses by Aboriginals was even more prevalent than was first considered.”

http://www.agrifutures.com.au/wp-content/uploads/publications/15-056.pdf

A couple of months ago I was holding an aboriginal grinding stone from a farm in the Colac district. Not included within the original Tindale map but certainly with Pascoe's. I'm not sure why this is an issue.

What else ya got?

Okay, back again.

The point missing fro this discussion is that, if farming happened in Australia on a fair scale, there would be evidence, so much of it that nobody could destroy it all. Villages, towns, cemeteries, rubbish heaps, houses with evidence of specialised occupations.

Another thing: the main reason that Africans were taken to the Americas, to work on plantations - as farmers, in a sense - was because they had been farmers for thousands of years in their African homelands. Captured by other Africans, usually Muslim, and taken to the European forts and distribution centres and ports on the coasts, by the way. In other words, they had farming traditions, which could be exploited brutally by slave-owners.

In the Americas, the native populations were usually not farmers, but hunters and gatherers (although there were major farming populations in both North and South America). So they were not amenable to work on plantations, certainly not as slaves. So African slaves did all of the work, for three hundred years. I remember when the last slave-born bloke died in Cuba, where slavery was legal until about 1900.

So when people had farming traditions, they could be more easily fitted into later farming cultures, as Australia's was - well, up until now, really. If Aboriginal people here had had farming traditions, the early settlers would have far more easily incorporated their labour into their economic systems. But that didn't happen easily, or at all in many places. Even now. Farming culture and foraging culture are drastically different, people can't just flip from one to the other.

So I hope that this myth collapses soon, and the real foraging culture can be given more value, as the most appropriate sort of culture - pre-Occupation - for Australia, and basically the only way to make use of the Australian environment with the range of plants and animals that were available.

Joe

Joe,

Does this help:

http://press-files.anu.edu/downloads/press/p72891/pdf/article0118.pdf