There was a thread recently on fire in the Australian landscape.
Here's an interesting paper on Aboriginal use of fire in the Western Desert
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/19/0804757105.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
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.
--
John Leonard
Canberra
Australia
www.jleonard.net
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