Читать книгу Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker - Страница 23

Kangaroo Island lies off the south coast of Australia. It had once been inhabited by Aborigines, but they left or died out long before European contact. The woody vegetation had become a virtually impenetrable thicket, while the nearby mainland with the same climate supported an open, grassy woodland. This comparison gives us some understanding of the extent of Aboriginal control over the vegetation. To this day, if areas are uninhabited for an extended period, the woody vegetation thickens up, and the Aborigines find the landscape uncomfortable and spiritually dangerous (Chase, 1989). After repeated burnings, the land again shows the stamp of human occupancy and the Aborigines feel more comfortable and spiritually safe. The Aborigines have more or less domesticated the landscape by skillful use of fire and complain that the white man lets the land get “dirty” (Lewis, 1989). Jones (1969) called it “firestick farming.”

The Aborigines did more than clear land by burning. They diverted water to flood forests in the dry season: “We like to see plenty of water in the jungle all the time, for birds of all kinds gather near it, and the food plants that we like grow better” (Campbell, 1965). They constructed water‐spreading devices for the rainy season (Lourandos, 1980), and they ditched to increase the supply of eels and other fish (Walters, 1989). In the course of digging up wild root crops, they churned up large areas to the point they resembled plowed fields. Sir George Grey wrote (1841):

In the Province of Victoria, as already stated, I have seen tracts of land several square miles in extent, so thickly studded with holes, where the natives have been digging up yams (Dioscorea) that it was difficult to walk across it. Again, in the sandy desert country which surrounds for many miles, the town of Perth, in Western Australia, the different species of Haemadorum are very plentiful.

The borderline between gathering and farming becomes very hazy at this point. Douglas Yen referred to such activities as Aboriginal agronomy (Yen, 1989). Perhaps the key difference here between foraging and farming is that no native Australian plant was actually domesticated, otherwise hunter‐gatherers do about everything farmers do.

The Great Basin Native Americans did about the same, burning vegetation, sowing seeds, and irrigating tracts of land (Downs, 1964). Indeed, fire was used to modify vegetation just about anywhere that vegetation could be burned, and the practice may well have gone back to Acheulean times (Hallam, 1975). There are some immediate returns from the practice; animals fleeing fires are more vulnerable to the spear and the bow, but the major returns are delayed. New shoots, unencumbered by old growth attract grazing animals; the ash provides some fertility for regrowth; heat renders phosphorus more available; woody vegetation is retarded and herbaceous plants increase; wild seed harvests are enhanced; roots and tubers escape injury in the dry season and thrive as competition is reduced. The landscape is tamed, but the plants and animals were not.