ABSTRACT
The veil of pre-history often obscures less of the life ways of people living in the Holocene than it does of their Pleistocene ancestors. Higher chronological resolution and better preservation in Holocene sites allows archaeologists to document economic changes which cannot be identified for earlier periods. In comparison to the Pleistocene there is abundant evidence for economic practices in the Holocene, often finely dated or divided into three periods: early-(6,000-10,000 bp), mid-(3,000-6,000 bp) and late-(0-3,000 bp). As a result we know Australian forager economies were reconfigured during the Holocene, and that economic rearrangements varied between regions and through time. Archaeological materials demonstrate alterations in landscape use, modifications to the foods procured, reorganization of technologies, and adjustments to social interactions. These economic changes were adaptations to natural and social environments; they were not uniform across the continent but differed in response to the diversity of situations confronting foragers. This variation created debates among archaeologists about which factor was responsible for stimulating economic change. Some researchers argued that social processes were the cause; others argued that it was the natural environment which provoked responses from societies. These debates, founded on the idea that a single factor was responsible for changes in forager life ways in all parts of the continent, failed to recognize that diversity of economic strategies is a characteristic of the large and environmentally varied continent.
