Edited by Kent V. Flannery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, and approved August 1, 2008 (received for review May 15, 2008)
Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a “resource management” strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. We combine ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Anthropogenic landscapes contain a greater diversity of successional stages than landscapes under a lightning fire regime, and differences are of scale, not of kind. Landscape scale is directly linked to foraging for small, burrowed prey (monitor lizards), which is a specialty of Aboriginal women. The maintenance of small-scale habitat mosaics increases small-animal hunting productivity. These results have implications for understanding the unique biodiversity of the Australian continent, through time and space. In particular, anthropogenic influences on the habitat structure of paleolandscapes are likely to be spatially localized and linked to less mobile, “broad-spectrum” foraging economies.
Author contributions: R.B.B. and D.W.B. designed research; R.B.B., D.W.B., B.F.C., and C.H.P. performed research; R.B.B., D.W.B., B.F.C., and J.H.J. analyzed data; and R.B.B., D.W.B., B.F.C., and J.H.J. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0804757105/DCSupplemental.
