Understanding human behavioural change and shell mound location at Albatross Bay, Cape York, Australia

Abstract

Human behavioural change is often attributed to environmental causation. Environmentally deterministic theories emphasise that the patterning of archaeological material remains reflects a one-way relationship between people and the environment. The correlation of geographic features with archaeological remains produces models that aim to predict the locations of past cultural behaviour. These models often neglect the environmental context of archaeological site formation and as a consequence are unable to accurately locate archaeological sites or explain their visibility. Understanding site location requires a theory that incorporates the variability of environmental conditions, where and when human behaviour occurred and knowledge of how archaeological site visibility today is a product of post-depositional processes. An approach for understanding both human behavioural change and archaeological site location is applied to the shell mounds of Albatross Bay, Cape York Peninsula, Australia, to determine whether human ecodynamics theory can contribute to the improvement of cultural heritage management practices. Literature sources provide dated geomorphological and sedimentological proxy data indicative of environmental change and the variable availability of the marine bivalve, Anadara granosa. Archaeological site patterning, formation and visibility is interpreted in the context of palaeoenvironmental change and made comparable through the systematic recalibration of radiocarbon determinations. Results show that shell mounding activity during the late Holocene cannot be explained using linear explanations of causation. Simplistic models of environmental change neglect the spatial and temporal scale at which processes interact and produce partial understandings of human-environmental interaction. High resolution data sets are required for interpretation of meso and semi-micro-scale interactions between people and place at Albatross Bay. An alternative is to use multiple approaches to investigate localised areas, or microenvironments, in order to control for variability operating at greater scales.