1 CHAPTER 1 INFORMATION PROCESSING AND AUSTRALIAN PREHISTORY 1.1 INTRODUCTION This thesis has two primary aims. The first is to examine a range of ethnohistorical and archaeological data in an attempt to establish the patterns of settlement and subsistence of the prehistoriC Aboriginal inhabitants of northeastern New South Wales. I focus particular attention on the New England Tablelands and the rugged gorge country lying between the coastal hinterland and the tablelands. Secondly, I will describe the patterns of social intercourse and alliance in the region, using both historic and archaeological data. I will then consider the relationship between these, and social arrangements seen elsewhere in Australia. Finally, I will examine the potential of information theory to explain the processes and changes which occurred in the New England area and across Australia during the middle and late Holocene. It will be demonstrated that social relations between groups in northeastern NSW were extremely fluid at contact, and that this fluidity is reflected in the archaeological record of this region. Ethnohistorically, clans in coastal areas sought to establish autonomy from their neighbours, continually forging alliances, which collapsed and then re-emerged as differences were mediated. This is reflected in the complex linguistic arrangements seen in coastal areas, with large numbers of dialects being used by individual clans, but no break being of such depth or of sufficient time for a new language to emerge. We will also see that linguistic evidence suggests a joint ancestry for tableland groups and certain coastal peoples, and that barriers . ", developed between these peoples such that extreme divergence between tableland and the related coastal languages took place. By the time of European settlement, the tableland social organisation, art and exchange networks had far more in common with people to the west than their coastal brethren. The people of northeastern New South Wales sustained themselves with a sophisticated subsistence round encompassing elements of both foraging and logisitical organisation interwoven with a complex mosaic of secular and ceremonial interaction. The existence of extensive and highly plastic social networks of this kind has been documented in many areas of Australia. Lourandos, in his meticulous reconstructive anthropological study of southwestern Victoria (1980a and 1980b) has illustrated one case, while the social networks of the central arid zone of Australia are still the subject of much modern anthropological investigation. 2 Prehistorians have begun to examine the antecedents of these systems in a number of regions. It is generally thought that they began to emerge in the middle and late Holocene, at the same time as other major changes in the archaeological record were occurring (e.g. Lourandos, 1980, 1983, 1985; Bowdler, 1981a; Beaton, 1983, 1985; Hughes and Lampert, 1982; Williams, 1988; Ross, 1985; Morwood, 1987; Veth, 1987). Increases in the numbers of sites, increases in the amount of discard in sites, changes in settlement patterns (often associated with the appearance of new types of sites), changes in material technology and subsistence strategies, more intense occupation of areas that had only been sparsely visited in the past and expansion into marginal areas, regional development of new art styles, and development of long-distance exchange networks have all been noted as demonstrating a rate of change and development not previously seen. Various explanations have been offered for these changes and developments. These include environmental functionalism (Morwood, 1987), arguments of demographic change focusing on inherent population growth with strong foundations in cultural materialism (Hughes and Lampert, 1982; Beaton, 1983 and 1985) and arguments examining the role of social processes to force change (Lourandos, 1980 and 1983; Ross, 1985). These hypotheses have all fallen within what has been somewhat loosely called intensification. Generally, this is taken to mean a growing complexity in social and technological arrangements that continued to escalate and was, in Lourandos' words, "nipped in the bud" by the coming of the Europeans (Lourandos, 1983). Recently, Hiscock (1986a) has argued that some evidence sustains a case in which, rather than a steady climb towards ever greater sophistication, there may have been devolution of the system over the last thousand years. Similarly, Attenbrow (1987) has presented a case that there is evidence that populations were static and possibly decreasing over the last thousand years in numerous areas of southeastern Australia. I will not review each model in detail here. Numerous critiques of the various explanations for these developments are available in the literature: Beaton's (1983) trenchant review of Lourandos (1983); Lourandos'(1984) rebuttal of Beaton's (1983) cultural materialism; Lourandos' (1980a) puncturing of arguments relying on environmental determinism; Hiscock's (1986a) questioning of the methods of quantifying intensification. Rather, I simply note that there has not been a general acceptance of anyone model, as each has been found wanting in certain key elements. Instead of attempting to find a single, all-inclusive explanation of change we might do well to approach the problem in a more piece-meal fashion. In this thesis I will consider the utility of information theory in explaining some components of social and economic change in Aboriginal society in the middle and late Holocene. 3 For most Australian prehistorians, the knowledge that Aborigines possessed about the environment, both social and natural, is taken for granted. It is accepted that systems for the processing of social information were necessary to sustain the social organisation, and it is obvious that people must have possessed detailed knowledge of their environment to extract resources from it. There has not, however, been a detailed review of the impact of information processing systems as a driving force in shaping Aboriginal prehistory in the way that has been considered both in Europe and America (notably Wobst [1977), Hodder [1981], Moore [1981] and Gamble [1981]). As Moore (1983: 173) has observed, this lack of interest in information systems and their effects stems from most archaeologists viewing society as 'an energy-consuming organisation' with archaeologists 'emphasizing the control of energy resources and energy­ producing technology' rather than seeing society as 'an information-processing organisation'. Bowdler (1977) is one of the few who has touched the issue, albeit tangentially, in her coastal colonisation model. In essence what she was saying was that people stuck to the coast for a very long time because they did not possess the requisite knowledge to strike out into the interior. She. did not, however, pursue what the implications of acquiring this knowledge were in terms of social organisation. Indeed, she assumed that the social systems in place at contact had existed for many millenia, and so borrowed Stanner's (1965) model of territorial organisation to explain away the arguments of the theorists of sea-level rise catastrophe. Those interested in Aboriginal art have closely examined the role of art in storing and encoding information on a diverse range of subjects, and how this may have aided social and economic change (e.g. Morwood, 1987; Smith, 1989). They have tended, however, to view the information system as a consequence of changes in other areas of Aboriginal social organisation, settlement and subsistence, and have not considered the possibility that developments in the area of " information processing may have been catalyst for changes in prehistoric settlement, subsistence, ceremony and ritual. Information is a resource that must be acquired, and processing of it is an ability that must be learned. Nor does it come without costs to the acquirers and users of that information. Further, the social consequences of the evolution of information processing systems can be profound, It is possible that the evolution of information processing played a significant role in Australian prehistory, and that viewing the archaeological record of this continent from this perspective might prove fruitful. I will offer an hypothesis in which the mid-Holocene is not seen as a period primarily of major change in social relations or demography, but rather as a point, albeit a highly significant one, in the evolution of information processing systems which had consequences both for social organisation and subsistence strategies. The ultimate consequence of the evolution of this system 4 of information processing was to set in motion social processes which developed a momentum all their own. These produced an inherently unstable political situation which had a more general impact on other aspects of social organisation, such as group interaction as well as alliance and exchange networks. They could also have provided a mechanism for the stagnation of Aboriginal society in the last 1,000 years, as hinted at by Hiscock (1986a) and Attenbrow (1987). In the remainder of this chapter I briefly examine the form and nature of information processing systems. I then consider the process of information validation, how this can be manipulated by politically astute individuals, and the place of art in information processing systems. The main body of the thesis consists of a thorough reappraisal of ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence from northern