ABSTRACT
Tension between images of conservative pre-historic economies and past societies that underwent rapid economic changes during later times is epitomized by debates about life in the Australian deserts. Both images have been interwoven into the progression model of Pleistocene life, and similarities in caricatures of Pleistocene people and historical desert dwellers, as conservative, low-density mobile hunters, is no coincidence. Beginning in the 1960s, some archaeologists advocated that desert societies or economies were conservative, reflecting the harsh conditions in which they existed, and as a consequence of the delicate balance between economic activities and the environmental opportunities there had been little change in the life of desert foragers during the Holocene. This notion of unchanging desert dwellers not only influenced interpretations of life in Pleistocene Australia as being unchanging, but also reinforced the idea that the historical economy seen in the nineteenth century had existed throughout the Holocene. The result was a model of desert adaptation in which the society and economy of desert foragers was uniform and had been the same since at least the terminal Pleistocene. This was an influential description of desert pre-history but is increasingly challenged by claims that desert economies were regionally varied and changing.
