Evidence for reduced environmental variability in response to increasing human population growth during the late Holocene in northwest Tasmania, Australia

Abstract

A fundamental tenet of human land management is to create spatial and temporal predictability in an environment to improve subsistence. Detecting the relationship between humans and their environment in the palaeo-record is confounded by a number of factors, not the least of which is an adequate pairing of the scales of both the palaeoecological and archaeological records. We aimed to determine the impact, if any, of Aboriginal occupation on the environment surrounding an occupation site in northwest Tasmania, Australia. We analysed the sediments within two small wetlands in northwest Tasmania for pollen, charcoal and loss-on-ignition: (1) a high intensity occupation site –with direct eviden..