Tasmania

Australia’s New Zealand

2022-06-21 — 2022-06-21

Wherein the island’s contested past is presented, an asserted ten‑thousand‑year oral tradition and debated losses and retentions of indigenous technologies being outlined in measured detail.

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Figure 1

1 Fascinating things in Tasmania

2 Archaeology

First up, be aware this is a fraught topic. The original inhabitants of Tasmania received very asymmetrically savage treatment by the European settlers.. There are strong arguments that this was legally genocide (Curthoys 2005; Lawson 2014; Taylor 2023).

However, the peoples of Tasmania can be remembered for more than their brutal treatment. They have an extremely interesting history; check out this asserted 10000 year oral tradition: Hamacher et al. (2023).

The technology of the indigenous Tasmanians in particular has been a scientific football, being used as a case study in isolation. Taylor (2008) asserts that the claim the people there lost fire-making is a myth, although they may have lost other technology. Selected academic cage fights about that (Gott 2002; Henrich 2004; Read 2011; Taylor 2007).

3 References

Curthoys. 2005. “Raphaël Lemkin’s ‘Tasmania’: An Introduction.” Patterns of Prejudice.
Gott. 2002. “Fire‐Making in Tasmania: Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence.” Current Anthropology.
Hamacher, Nunn, Gantevoort, et al. 2023. “The Archaeology of Orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal Oral Traditions to the Late Pleistocene.” Journal of Archaeological Science.
Henrich. 2004. “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses—The Tasmanian Case.” American Antiquity.
Lawson. 2014. The last man: a British genocide in Tasmania.
Read. 2011. “The Misuse of a Mathematical Model: The Tasmanian Case.”
Taylor. 2007. “The Polemics of Eating Fish in Tasmania: The Historical Evidence Revisited.” Aboriginal History.
———. 2008. “The Polemics of Making Fire in Tasmania: The Historical Evidence Revisited.”
———. 2023. “Genocide in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871.” In The Cambridge World History of Genocide: Volume 2: Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One. The Cambridge World History of Genocide.