Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory (review)

Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory. By Harry Lourandos. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xvii + 390 pp., figures, tables, preface, acknowledgments, glossary, notes on dating methods, references, index of archaeological sites, general index. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Aboriginal Australian societies have often been held up as classic examples of hunter-gatherer societies, sometimes used as models of Pleistocene existence, or at times considered to be either unique or odd. In this book Harry Lourandos exposes the myths and stereotypes depicting aboriginal cultures, demonstrating that they all were not produced from the same mold. Rather, they show an impressive degree of variation. Furthermore, in many fundamental respects they resemble contemporary groups elsewhere in the world. Hardly static vestigial evidences of the human past, Lourandos portrays these hunter-gatherers in terms of dynamic processes and ongoing change.

He characterizes as oversimplified what he calls the “traditional approach” to Australian prehistory: a static model (308) that considers the environment to be the major determinant of hunter-gatherer existence, that sees aboriginal groups as relatively homogeneous, and that posits relatively few significant economic and demographic changes in aboriginal history. Lourandos illustrates this by twice quoting Joseph Birdsell, who wrote: “It is now realised that these economically simple peoples . . . live in fact in a skillfully regulated state of homeostasis. Such people were in equilibrium with their environment and this balanced condition was maintained, despite some fluctuations, by a rather complex series of actions, beliefs and traditions.”

With a sweeping survey of hunter-gatherers to stress their variation in time and space, Lourandos sketches a dynamic picture of Australian prehistory. To ensure dispatching the “traditional approach,” he takes on another of Birdsell’s early assertions, that “a hunting and collecting economy of the most generalised sort was present throughout the entire continent and the material culture on which extractive efficiency was based showed only minor regional variations.” Here Lourandos is at his best, providing an ethnographic overview of broad regions, including the tropical north, the arid zone, the semiarid zone, subtropical Australia, temperate southern Australia, and Tasmania. His descriptions clearly demonstrate a wide range of variation in sociocultural and subsistence practices throughout the continent. To provide a detailed picture of both Pleistocene and Holocene transformations, Lourandos then reviews in greater detail the tropical north (including New Guinea and associated islands), arid and semiarid zones, temperate southern Australia, and Tasmania.

These surveys lead him to characterize Australian aboriginal societies in the more humid, fertile zones as “relatively sedentary, populous, and with broad-based hunter-gatherer-fisher economies, including specialization of both plant use and fishing practices, and land and resource management procedures” (324). In harsher environments population densities were lower and displayed less sedentary patterns. Even in arid zones, however, complex socioeconomic patterns were evident, with labor-intensive practices such as processing and storing food; activities that correlate with intergroup activities such as feasting and exchange. Throughout the continent competition between groups for access to land, resources, and labor sparked the development of extensive alliance systems. Although Tasmanian populations in similar environments were smaller and less dense, Lourandos rejects the idea that Tasmanians had an arrested development and argues that they developed along different lines during their Holocene isolation. In general, Tasmanian economies were broadly based, lacked fishing practices, and had relatively “open” and less complex social networks.

Just as Tasmanian societies are customarily contrasted with those of the Australian mainland, Australian hunter-gatherer groups are often opposed to New Guinean hunter-horticulturalists. An interesting point that emerges from Lourandos’s broad survey is that neither of these divisions finds support in the prehistoric evidence. Instead, subsistence types found in Tasmania and parts of New Guinea appear as particular regional strategies not much at variance with expected patterns. For example, Australian societies in humid, fertile regions often overlap with New Guinea societies in terms of population sizes and densities, hunting-gathering-fishing practices, land and resource management, and social formations...