PM - Monday, 13 December , 2004 18:46:00
Reporter: Annie Guest
MARK COLVIN: There's been a new development in the so-called history wars. Archaeologists believe they're uncovering elements of Tasmanian history which they think will disprove the controversial theory that Aborigines survived more because of good luck than good management.
Preliminary research has shown that Aborigines living in ancient caves in Tasmania up to 20,000 years ago used advanced planning to manage land use. The Latrobe University academics are now planning research at Australia's biggest remaining Aboriginal campsite.
They expect that, counter to claims by the historian Keith Windschuttle, they will be able to prove that Aborigines were as sophisticated as their Northern Hemisphere counterparts.
Annie Guest reports from Hobart.
ANNIE GUEST: During the last ice age, Tasmanian Aborigines lived in a highland world covered in permanent ice and a lowland environment of snow. Their homes were limestone caves, in what are today dense rainforests in the state's southwest.
And with those caves now a living museum of ice age history, archaeologists are building a case that Aborigines strategically targeted Tasmania during winter. The temperature was minus 15 degrees.
Latrobe University senior lecturer, Doctor Richard Cosgrove says it's part of some significant findings in preliminary research.
RICHARD COSGROVE: Surprisingly, we found some rather confronting results. Over 75 per cent of the wallaby jaws showed people killing these wallabies between autumn and early spring, in fact totally counter-intuitively during the middle of winter, during the absolute coldest time of the year.
ANNIE GUEST: And what's the significance of this?
RICHARD COSGROVE: Well, it shows that people were much more adept at planning and having forward thinking, that is planning land use patterns, whereas often people think of these early colonists as being sort of pushed from pillar to post by the environment.
Well, what this says was that these people moved up into these valleys in quite a planned way, going to hunt these wallabies in their sort of best condition, that is they had the highest fat content, they had the thickest fur.
ANNIE GUEST: Why is it important to know this?
RICHARD COSGROVE: One of the interesting things is that some controversial historians, like Keith Windschuttle, have talked about that the colonists in Tasmania owed more to good fortune than to good management, and you know, their near extinction was a result of sort of internally dysfunctional societies.
Well, this quite clearly demonstrates that these people weren't in any way dysfunctional, they were planning their approach to the environment and looking at things in a much more structured way than we gave them credit for.
ANNIE GUEST: Doctor Richard Cosgrove will soon build on his preliminary work with a major project at Australia's biggest Aboriginal campsite, Kutikina Cave on the Franklin River.
He'll be collaborating with postdoctoral student Jillian Garvey, who says she'll begin by examining hundreds of thousands of bone fragments and stone tools.
JILLIAN GARVEY: Although Aboriginals didn't build Roman streets or pyramids, they did have a very important cultural heritage that's been left behind, such as stone tools, and also remnants of what they ate and how they butchered, and so hopefully my research will show that Aboriginals were just as sophisticated as people in the Northern Hemisphere.
MARK COLVIN: Latrobe University post-doctoral student Jillian Garvey, ending that report from Annie Guest in Hobart.