This Fleeting World

Beginnings: The Era of Foragers 21
This illustration depicts designs on a large Tsimshian box used to store blankets,
an important form of wealth for affluent foragers.
two main home bases. They may also become more sedentary if they devise
technologies that increase the output of resources from a particular area.
Anthropologists refer to such foragers as “affluent foragers.”
The examples that follow are taken from Australia, where foraging lifeways
can be studied more closely because they have survived into modern
times. During the last five thousand years new, smaller, and more finely made
stone tools appeared in many parts of Australia, including small points that
people may have used as spear tips. Some tools were so beautifully made that
they were traded as ritual objects over hundreds of miles. New techniques
meant new ways of extracting resources. In the state of Victoria people built
elaborate eel traps, some with canals up to 300 meters long. At certain points
people constructed nets or tapered traps, using bark strips or plaited rushes,
to harvest the trapped eels. So many eels could be kept in these “eel farms”
that relatively permanent settlements appeared nearby. One site contains
almost 150 small huts built of stone. In addition to eels, the inhabitants of
these small settlements lived off local species of game, from emu to kangaroo,
as well as local vegetable foods such as daisy yam tubers, ferns, and
convolvulus (herbs and shrubs of the morning glory family).
Some communities began to harvest plants such as yams, fruit, and
grains in ways that suggest early steps toward agriculture. Yams were
(and are today) harvested in ways that encouraged re-growth, and people
deliberately planted fruit seeds in refuse heaps to create fruit groves. In