Interesting piece in The Conversation (6 October) by Kathryn Allen, Alison O'Donnell, Benjamin I. Cook, Jonathan Palmer and Pauline Grierson, "Megadroughts helped topple ancient empires. We’ve found their traces in Australia’s past, and expect more to come". The article includes a link to a 2016 paper that I had not seen that attempts to construct a 1013 year rainfall chart for the Williams River in the Hunter Valley - Carly R. Tozer, Tessa R. Vance, Jason L. Roberts, Anthony S. Kiem, Mark A. J. Curran and Andrew D. Moy, "An ice core derived 1013-year catchment-scale annual rainfall reconstruction in subtropical eastern Australia", Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 1703–1717, 2016, www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/20/1703/2016/ doi:10.5194/hess-20-1703-2016.
Attempts to reconstruct Aboriginal history over the long period of human occupation of Sahul then the later Australian continent including my own for the broader New England tend to focus on broader trends such as the impact of the Last Glacial Maximum and the subsequent emergence of the Holocene. While this is inevitable, it is easy to ignore the significant impact on Aboriginal life of major changes within periods including long mega droughts and subsequent wet periods.
If we take the Murray River as an example, I'm working from memory here, Mulvaney notes the evidence of periodic malnutrition in skeletal remains. Here we have relatively small territories with substantial populations dependent upon drought exposed riverine resources. On New England's western slopes and plains the pattern of life seems clearly affected by periodic droughts.
I haven't worked all this through. For the moment, this is just a note for further thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment