ABSTRACT
Tasmania is the best example of a process of island formation that occurred at the end of the last ice-age. Rising seas created islands and archipelagos from what had once been landscapes of hills and plains. Bass Strait flooded nearly 14,000 years ago, separating Tasmania from mainland Australia and isolating Tasmanian Aborigines throughout the Holocene (Figure 7.1). The consequence for people in Tasmania has been vigorously debated. One view is that ancient Tasmanians struggled to cope with their isolation. This model interpreted archaeological change as revealing economic decline, social disarray and stagnation, with religious and intellectual dysfunction. Isolation of human groups is a powerful image in Western literature, often conveying hideous disadvantageous for anyone cut off from wider social interaction. Wrecked and wretched voyagers, lonely and desperate, surviving in a lowly state, were images in historical European thought that reflected perceived danger in nature and human reliance on society and technology as a buffer against nature. Some archaeologists argued that ancient Tasmanians were cultural castaways, stranded by sea-level rise, and their subsequent lifestyle changes resulted from their isolation.
