Lands of Red and Gold #6: Collapse and Rebirth
Lands of Red and Gold #6: Collapse and Rebirth
The history of archaeology, like so many of the sciences, is replete with disagreements and unanswered questions, with established consensuses which are overturned by new discoveries or new theses. Unsolved mysteries are an appealling target for applying the scientific method, and an intriguing unanswered question raises interest and often tempers. To be a useful question, there need to be several elements. A good archaeological question requires enough information to propose detailed explanations, but insufficient information to provide a definitive answer. Preferably, there should be strong-willed personalities amongst the researchers; all the better to ensure heated arguments and vehement testing of proposals. Ideally, a good question also needs to be about a civilization which people care about, one which is well-known enough or has enough popular appeal so that arguments over an archaeological controversy spill over into the wider world.
The fate of the Murray civilization will produce one of the most long-lasting questions in the allohistory of archaeology.
The archaeological record of the early Murray civilization is one of gradually growing population, flourishing cities, and developing technology. At the beginning of the Formative Era in 2500 BC, there was one urban centre with a population of roughly five hundred people. At the conventional date for the end of the Formative Era, in 900 BC, there were six major cities with a combined urban population of about one hundred thousand people. Yet over the next two centuries, the cities along the Murray collapsed. Four of them were abandoned entirely, and the remaining two were reduced to mere villages in comparison to what they had been. Many of the smaller settlements were similarly abandoned or depopulated. The three centuries between 900 and 600 BC will usually be referred to as the Interregnum, a time of severe population decline along the Murray, of near-disappearance of trade, of the abandonment of many of the old cultural icons. This was the time when most of the old artistic styles vanished almost completely, along with so much else. It would take most of another millennium for the population of the Murray basin to recover to its former levels, and some of the major cities would never be rebuilt.
What caused the collapse of the Murray civilization? There will be many theories, many ideas, and many conflicting interpretations of the evidence. A few authorities will argue that there was no complete collapse at all, emphasising the continuity of culture, while a few authorities will go to the other extreme and argue that the new civilizations which arose owed very little to their forebears. Yet most researchers will agree that the collapse was severe and wide-ranging, but that that it did not involve complete cultural replacement. Unfortunately, that is the limit of their agreement.
The number of proposed explanations for the collapse of the Formative Gunnagal is immense; over sixty different theories or variations of theories will be proposed to account for the mystery. Setting aside esoteric and supernatural proposals, five main groups of theories are proposed, although archaeologists are unlikely to ever reach a definitive answer. Such are the problems of conducting archaeological research on sites which pre-date the invention of writing.
One group of theories ascribe the collapse of the Formative Gunnagal to destructive warfare, either from foreign invasion or from increasing internecine struggles between the Murray city-states. This proposal finds some support from archaeological evidence; excavations have found that the great city of Murray Bridge was systematically looted and burned at about 900 BC, right at the beginning of the Interregnum. A few of the smaller urban centres show similar destruction, at dates which are spread throughout the Interregnum; among them, the easternmost outpost at Tintaldra was similarly burned sometime around 810 BC. Yet most of the other major urban centres do not show much evidence of destruction, which makes theories of invasion or warfare difficult to support.
Explanations based on destructive warfare will also be criticised on a lack of direct evidence for who these invaders or great warriors might have been. The early Murray civilization was the bastion of farming in what was otherwise a continent of hunter-gatherers (apart from the early Junditmara, who were too far away). There is no evidence of any peoples who might have been numerous enough to invade the Murray basin. Internecine warfare amongst the Murray city-states might have been a possibility, but what evidence is available does not suggest that the city-states were particularly war-like or that they had the military capacity to wipe each other out so thoroughly.
There is some evidence of internal migration within the Murray basin, which might suggest some effects of warfare. During the Formative Era, particular crops such as wattles were usually geographically limited to near the area of original domestication [1]. These agricultural patterns were largely stable throughout the fourteen hundred years of the Formative Era, yet during the Interregnum each of these domesticated wattles were spread throughout the Murray basin. Some authorities argue that this is evidence that invaders moved and brought their crops with them, while others argue that it is more likely that any internal migrations were the effects of the collapse, with survivors fleeing abandoned cities and bringing their crops and other knowledge with them to other areas of the Murray.
Another group of theories relates to environmental or climatic factors. These theories ascribe the collapse of the Murray civilization to famine brought about by recurrent droughts or increased bushfires destroying harvests for repeated years. Surviving examples of Late Formative Murray burials are few, but of those which are excavated, archaeologists will notice a gradual decrease in the height of skeletons, which is taken to be evidence of malnutrition or other effects of famine. According to the environmental collapse theories, droughts or increased bushfires were the underlying cause, and the struggle for limited resources caused some of the destruction attested in the archaeological record.
These theories find some support from studies of tree ring patterns, which show a substantial increase in the number and severity of bushfires during the Interregnum when compared to the preceding period. Critics of the environmental collapse theories will argue that the increased bushfires are more likely to be an effect of the collapse rather than the cause. The Murray civilization had been living in a region with severe bushfires for over a millennium, and should have known how to limit the effects of bushfires by protective burning. These critics argue that the severe bushfires of the Interregnum were the result of the collapsing human population no longer maintaining effective burn-offs on their own, and thus natural bushfires became more severe.
A third group of theories will ascribe the collapse of the Murray civilization to internal revolution or social turmoil. According to these theories, unrest and dissatisfaction with the elites led to social unrest and revolution. Researchers who support these theories point to the evidence of destruction excavated at Murray Bridge and elsewhere as being rooted in social unrest, not foreign invasion. Direct confirmation of these theories are difficult, due to the lack of written sources, but their critics will point out that, as with the theories of foreign invasion, the evidence of destruction applies to only a few cities. It is difficult to explain how social unrest could have been widespread enough to depopulate most of the Murray cities. Even if the social elites were destroyed through revolution, this leads raises the question of where the rebel populations moved to, and why they abandoned so many cities.
A fourth group of theories will seek to explain the collapse of the Murray civilization in terms of a spread of disease. Some researchers favour a disease explanation because the spread of a new disease or diseases could explain rapid initial depopulation, and persistent endemic diseases as slowing population recovery. While no direct evidence of disease survives in the archaeological record, proponents of this theory argue that the expansion of human-created wetlands throughout the Formative Era created the perfect environment for harbouring pathogens and encouraging insect-borne transmission of infectious diseases. Objections to this theory will come principally from lack of evidence. While later civilizations along the Murray are known to harbour epidemic diseases, none of these diseases can be traced to this era or are known to be linked to insect vectors.
The fifth group of theories will ascribe the collapse of the Murray civilization to systemic ecological collapse. According to these researchers, the history of the Late Formative was one of expanding population placing ever-greater pressure on the natural resources of the Murray. Ever more intensive farming is believed to be exhausting the soil, and increasing hunting and fishing is thought to deplete the supply of protein-rich foods. According to these researchers, over-use of the land led to exhausted and sometimes eroded soils, famines, and then competition for limited resources led to destructive warfare and the abandonment of many of the urban centres as the remaining inhabitants reverted to subsistence farming.
What future archaeologists will probably never be able to find out is that most of these theories capture part of the explanation, but that none of them give a complete account. For the truth of the collapse of the Gunnagal civilization is found in a series of unfortunate events, some of their own making, some imposed by nature.
Throughout the Late Formative period, the population of the Murray basin boomed, aided by the development of arsenical bronze tools, and by a steady supply of food from the agricultural package of crops which they had developed. Yet their farming methods were still, in some respects, quite primitive. Red yams were the basis of their diet, but like all yams, they are hard on the soil. Farmers of red yams faced ever-decreasing yields when working on the same fields, which they could resolve only by moving on to new territory, leaving the land fallow for several years, and which provoked more territorial rivalry between the city-states.
While the Gunnagal as a whole had access to several wattle species, most of them had not spread far from their original area of domestication. This meant that their farmers were more vulnerable to pests and diseases which affected single crops. The Gunnagal farmers had not yet recognised the potential of wattles to revitalise the soil, which would have let them rotate their crops between yams and wattles. Without this realisation, the Gunnagal faced declining farming yields from yams and the emergence of several pest species which preyed on wattles, which made their farming increasingly marginal. The same pressure for food meant that their fishing and hunting grounds were gradually being exhausted, which made their population even more vulnerable to famine and other misfortune.
By 950 BC, the Murray civilization, although still heavily-populated, was nearing its Malthusian limits and merely awaiting a trigger for disaster. Calamity would not be long in coming. The climate of south-eastern Australia had been relatively stable for the last few thousand years, but in 1000 BC, the region entered a severe dry spell which would last for nearly a millennium. Rainfall declined, droughts became more prevalent, and already marginal farming yields plummeted. Much of the Lower Murray became too arid to support farming, and while in some areas agriculture could continue, reduced yields meant that this could not sustain the large populations seen at the height of the Late Formative.
At first, the western regions of the Lower Murray were the most badly-affected. The great centre of Murray Bridge, heartland of mining and the only large-scale source of copper and arsenical bronze, became so arid that farming could not be easily sustained. The leaders of the great city responded by trying to force more of the population into mining, to extract more of the valuable copper which could be used to trade for food from the still-fertile areas upstream. This worked in the short-term, but provoked social unrest which developed into revolution. In 898 BC, a revolt in the mines spread to the great city itself, which was burned to the ground. The surviving residents abandoned the city; some fleeing into wetter regions to the west and south, a few escaping upstream, while others reverted to subsistence farming and eking a precarious existence in rural areas around the vanished city.
With the destruction of Murray Bridge, one of the six great cities had been removed from the map. Tragically for the peoples of the Murray basin, this had been the key source of their metal. A couple of much smaller deposits were known in the highlands in the Upper Murray, but these were insufficient to meet demand. Copper and bronze were now almost-irreplaceable commodities, and re-smelting and re-use of metal would not be sufficient. Intensive farming had required more use of bronze tools to clear land and for digging, and this metal in particular was very difficult to obtain. Civilization gradually fell apart in the Murray, with prolonged famines ravaging the population, and long-range trade declining amongst the Gunnagal cities. Warfare became more intense in competition over dwindling resources, and the eventual result was collapse.
The collapse of the early Murray civilization was relatively swift, although not complete. Of the six great cities, four were abandoned entirely. Murray Bridge was destroyed through internal revolution. Robinvale was not destroyed directly, but its position in an already semi-arid area made it vulnerable to prolonged drought. Farming became marginal enough that even the Gunnagal agricultural package could not supply the food surpluses needed to sustain a large city, and the people who dwelt there needed to move on or revert to subsistence farming. Echuca and Tocumwal found themselves caught between the collapse of their wetlands, which was particularly severe given the drought, and the pressure of warfare from the larger centres of Swan Hill and Gundabingee. The end result was that Echuca and Tocumwal were abandoned, although some of the survivors founded a new outpost between those cities, at a place they would call Weenaratta, which in time would grow into a city of great renown.
All that remained of the Murray civilization, or so it appeared, were the former two largest cities of Swan Hill and Gundabingee. Both of these suffered severe population decline during the Interregnum, a result of famine, endemic warfare, and emigration outside the Murray basin. Yet they did survive, reaching their nadir around 750 BC when both cities had only about two or three thousand permanent inhabitants. After that time, they began a slow recovery, although it would take a very long time for the Murray civilizations to regain their former glory.
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History teaches that when it comes to conflict between farmers and hunter-gatherers, farmers almost always win. As individuals, hunter-gatherers were normally much healthier than farmers; the diet of early farmers was more nutritionally limited and the workload much higher. As a group, though, farmers were much more numerous. Unless the climate turns unsuitable for agriculture, then farmers usually have an immense weight of numbers which means that they can displace hunter-gatherers. When one group of peoples adopts agriculture but their neighbours do not, this can often mean substantial shifts in population, particularly if the agriculturalists also have other advantages such as metal tools and domesticated animals.
One of the most dramatic examples of such population shifts is the Bantu expansion which transformed southern Africa. Before the Bantu expansion, the southern half of Africa was inhabited by a variety of hunter-gatherer peoples, including the ancestors of modern Khoisan-speaking peoples and the “pygmies” of the central African jungles. In a series of migrations from their homelands in modern Cameroon and Nigeria, Bantu-speaking farmers pushed into hunter-gatherer territory and displaced most of the hunter-gatherer peoples throughout southern Africa. There were a few holdouts, mostly in areas where farming was unsustainable, but the Bantu-speakers came to dominate Africa south of the equator.
Allohistory teaches of another dramatic example of a population shift; the Great Migrations which transformed southern Australia. In 1000 BC, Australia was mostly a domain of hunter-gatherers. Agriculture was confined almost exclusively to the Murray basin, where the Gunnagal had a thriving but geographically limited civilization; almost all of the farmers lived within a day’s march of the winding Murray. Some cultivation of crops had started to spread slowly beyond this narrow band of land, but the Gunnagal had a technological and spiritual link to the river which meant that they abandoned it only reluctantly. Apart from the Gunnagal, the Australian continent held a great many peoples and languages, but the only other sedentary civilization was the eel-farming Junditmara, who occupied a couple of hundred square kilometres of south-western Victoria.
All of this would change with the collapse of the Gunnagal. This was a time of prolonged drought, of internecine warfare, but it was also a time of large-scale population movements. Some of these population movements were within the Murray basin itself, as people moved up and down the river. This allowed more sharing of ideas, goods and crops, which in time would stimulate a new cultural and technological flowering along the Murray. More of the population movements would be those of people abandoning their ancestral homelands. The calamities of the collapse broke the cultural link to the river, and the Gunnagal began to expand over much larger territory.
The Gunnagal migrants who abandoned the Murray did so for a variety of reasons, fleeing famine or revolution, defeated in warfare, or pursuing tales of opportunity from their predecessors. Regardless of their motivation, they had the same set of advantages; an agricultural package of crops which could grow on all but the most arid lands, and knowledge of how to smelt and work copper. They had lost access to the great copper mines of the Lower Murray which had sustained the Gunnagal, but the Australian landscape contained many small deposits of copper which were sufficient to sustain the tool and weapon-making needs of the bands of migrants moving out of the Murray in the Great Migrations.
From their homelands along the Murray, the descendants of the Gunnagal expanded in all directions, taking their crops with them. The expansion gained its momentum from the initial flood of refugees leaving the drought-stricken Lower Murray, but it gained a life of its own, with the Gunnagal farmers still pushing into new territories long after the population along the Murray had stabilised. The Great Migrations transformed Australia, as agricultural societies displaced hunter-gatherers throughout the southern half of the continent. In the north, the stream of migrants stopped only when they reached the tropics, where the warmer climate and different growing seasons did not suit their staple crops of red yams and murnong [2]. In the west, they stopped only when they reached the aridity of the interior. In the south and east, they halted only when they reached the sea. From the Tropic of Capricorn to Bass Strait, from the Tasman Sea to Australia’s red heart, the region was transformed with the advent of agriculture.
The Great Migrations began in 900 BC, and lasted for over a millennium. They were not a continuous advance, but a series of population movements in many directions, sometimes with agricultural peoples moving back into already-settled areas, and a process of warfare with some leapfrog advances far into new territory while the areas in between remained controlled by hunter-gatherers. The first Gunnagal settlers displaced by war fled eastward across the Great Dividing Ranges through the Southern Highlands to reach Australia’s eastern coast by 600 BC, but most of the eastern seaboard would not be colonised by agricultural peoples for another three centuries. Pioneering Gunnagal migrants followed the River Darling and were growing red yams near Roma in Queensland by 500 BC, at near the northern limit of that crop’s range, but the full displacement of non-Gunnagal peoples from this region would take another four hundred years. The conventional date for the end of the Great Migrations is 200 AD, although Gunnagal settlers had reached most of south-eastern Australia a least a century before that. Most of the last hundred years was a process of consolidation of control over this territory, where the remaining hunter-gatherers were displaced or took up Gunnagal farming ways.
The Great Migrations were a combination of colonisation, assimilation and military expansion. Hunter-gatherer societies did not survive the migrations, except where the peoples were pushed north into the tropics or west into the arid interior. The pre-Gunnagal hunter-gatherers were not exterminated as individuals; many of the colonising Gunnagal intermarried with the local inhabitants. Some elements of old beliefs survived the Great Migrations, especially place-names, and names of unfamiliar plants and animals. Most of their accumulated knowledge of local flora and fauna survived, too. But the diverse hunter-gatherer cultures and languages which had existed before the Great Migrations were transformed into a region of cultural unity. This would later be referred to as Gunnagalia, although the inhabitants at the time did not have any conception of themselves as a coherent group.
Gunnagalia was a common cultural zone, the legacy of having such closely-related peoples expanding over such a wide area. The early Gunnagal spoke one language, although dialects had begun to diverge even before they started leaving the Murray basin. The migrations spread these dialects across Gunnagalia, and the dialects would diverge into separate languages over the next few centuries. The Gunnagal likewise brought their religion, technology, and other accumulated lore with them, and left this legacy for their descendants. This common legacy would be reflected in all the cultures and peoples who followed the early Gunnagal.
Yet while the Gunnagal migrations were extensive, they did not quite displace everyone who occupied the south-eastern regions of Australia. There were three main hold-outs, areas where the pre-Gunnagal peoples preserved their own language and culture. In south-western Victoria, the Junditmara had maintained a settled society with thousands of people long before the Gunnagal had learned to farm yams. Gunnagal migrants brought yams, wattles and knowledge of metalworking to the Junditmara, but the migrants were absorbed into the Junditmara, rather than the other way around. In north-eastern New South Wales, a hunter-gatherer people named the Bungudjimay occupied the Coffs Harbour region before the Great Migrations. An early group of Gunnagal settlers entered that area, and were few enough in number that they became part of the Bungudjimay. With this knowledge, the Bungudjimay took up farming and adopted a settled lifestyle before the main stream of Gunnagal migrants reached them. The third group of hold-outs were in the Monaro plateau, an area of high country in southern New South Wales that includes some of the headwaters for the Murray, including one of its major tributaries, the Murrumbidgee. Here, the altitude meant that red yams did not grow well, and farming developed using hybrids of domesticated murnong and a related alpine species [3], producing a new crop suited to these regions. This meant that the Nguril and Kaoma peoples who lived there had time to take up farming rather than being displaced by Gunnagal immigrants.
The Great Migrations did not touch all of the fertile areas of southern Australia. While they reached the south-eastern quarter of the continent, there was another fertile region of the south which they did not touch. The fertile lands of south-western Australia are separated from the eastern regions by desert barriers, included a land so barren that the first European explorers in the region named it the land of no trees [4]. In allohistorical Australia, there was extremely tenuous contact between east and west, conducted via the peoples who lived in this arid region. The desert barriers meant that no large-scale migrations were possible, but in time some crops and knowledge did diffuse across the barren lands. Around 550 BC, the first red yams were being grown in Esperance, a fertile region at the western edge of the Nullarbor. A few other crops would follow, such as bramble wattle and native flax, though many others did not make the crossing. Yet those few crops allowed the Yuduwungu people of Esperance to develop sedentary societies, and in time they developed their own agricultural package of crops, including some plants not known further east. The Yuduwungu had some very slight trade contact with peoples across the Nullarbor, enough for knowledge of metalworking and pottery to spread, although they developed their own unique styles. In time, the Yuduwungu would begin their own migrations, spreading farming, their language and culture across the fertile regions of south-western Australia.
By around 200 AD, much of the southern half of Australia has become a land of farmers. Hunter-gatherers still occupy the arid interior of the continent, but in the east and the west, agriculture is now widespread. In most cases, these peoples are still quite thinly-spread, but the reliable food supply will allow their population to grow rapidly in the following centuries. The foundations have been set for the development of complex societies and advancing technology. Still, the most populous region of the continent remains the Murray basin, where the inhabitants started to recover from the collapse by around 600 BC. The long-term result of the collapse would turn out to be not necessarily so bad; the changed conditions and internal population movements produced a variety of innovations. In time, the heirs of the Gunnagal would share these new developments with Australia, too.
Although not all of these new developments would be welcome.
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[1] Three main wattles were domesticated in different parts of the Murray basin. The bramble wattle (Acacia victoriae) is adapted to the driest climates and usually grown in the Lower Murray, the mystery wattle (A. difformis) grows in the Middle Murray, while the golden wattle (A. pycnantha) is cultivated mostly in the higher-rainfall areas of the Upper Murray.
[2] A couple of the domesticated Australian crop species will actually grow further north than this, particularly the bramble wattle. As a complete package of crops, however, the effective growing limit is a little south of the Tropic of Capricorn.
[3] Microseris scapigera, the alpine murnong, is well-adapted to the highland regions of south-eastern Australia. (Some authorities class it as a subspecies of the common murnong, M. lanceolata, but either way, it is suitable for growing in highland areas.)
[4] This is the Nullarbor Plain. Its name is sometimes thought to be of Aboriginal origin, but is in fact derived from Latin and means “no trees.” The Nullarbor is an extremely harsh landscape, consisting largely of a limestone plateau which is indeed so arid that it doesn’t really support any trees. Some Aboriginal peoples do live here (the Pila Nguru), although in relatively small numbers. The arid Nullarbor is a substantial barrier to land communication between eastern and western Australia; not quite impassable, but nearly so without local knowledge.
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Thoughts?
The history of archaeology, like so many of the sciences, is replete with disagreements and unanswered questions, with established consensuses which are overturned by new discoveries or new theses. Unsolved mysteries are an appealling target for applying the scientific method, and an intriguing unanswered question raises interest and often tempers. To be a useful question, there need to be several elements. A good archaeological question requires enough information to propose detailed explanations, but insufficient information to provide a definitive answer. Preferably, there should be strong-willed personalities amongst the researchers; all the better to ensure heated arguments and vehement testing of proposals. Ideally, a good question also needs to be about a civilization which people care about, one which is well-known enough or has enough popular appeal so that arguments over an archaeological controversy spill over into the wider world.
The fate of the Murray civilization will produce one of the most long-lasting questions in the allohistory of archaeology.
The archaeological record of the early Murray civilization is one of gradually growing population, flourishing cities, and developing technology. At the beginning of the Formative Era in 2500 BC, there was one urban centre with a population of roughly five hundred people. At the conventional date for the end of the Formative Era, in 900 BC, there were six major cities with a combined urban population of about one hundred thousand people. Yet over the next two centuries, the cities along the Murray collapsed. Four of them were abandoned entirely, and the remaining two were reduced to mere villages in comparison to what they had been. Many of the smaller settlements were similarly abandoned or depopulated. The three centuries between 900 and 600 BC will usually be referred to as the Interregnum, a time of severe population decline along the Murray, of near-disappearance of trade, of the abandonment of many of the old cultural icons. This was the time when most of the old artistic styles vanished almost completely, along with so much else. It would take most of another millennium for the population of the Murray basin to recover to its former levels, and some of the major cities would never be rebuilt.
What caused the collapse of the Murray civilization? There will be many theories, many ideas, and many conflicting interpretations of the evidence. A few authorities will argue that there was no complete collapse at all, emphasising the continuity of culture, while a few authorities will go to the other extreme and argue that the new civilizations which arose owed very little to their forebears. Yet most researchers will agree that the collapse was severe and wide-ranging, but that that it did not involve complete cultural replacement. Unfortunately, that is the limit of their agreement.
The number of proposed explanations for the collapse of the Formative Gunnagal is immense; over sixty different theories or variations of theories will be proposed to account for the mystery. Setting aside esoteric and supernatural proposals, five main groups of theories are proposed, although archaeologists are unlikely to ever reach a definitive answer. Such are the problems of conducting archaeological research on sites which pre-date the invention of writing.
One group of theories ascribe the collapse of the Formative Gunnagal to destructive warfare, either from foreign invasion or from increasing internecine struggles between the Murray city-states. This proposal finds some support from archaeological evidence; excavations have found that the great city of Murray Bridge was systematically looted and burned at about 900 BC, right at the beginning of the Interregnum. A few of the smaller urban centres show similar destruction, at dates which are spread throughout the Interregnum; among them, the easternmost outpost at Tintaldra was similarly burned sometime around 810 BC. Yet most of the other major urban centres do not show much evidence of destruction, which makes theories of invasion or warfare difficult to support.
Explanations based on destructive warfare will also be criticised on a lack of direct evidence for who these invaders or great warriors might have been. The early Murray civilization was the bastion of farming in what was otherwise a continent of hunter-gatherers (apart from the early Junditmara, who were too far away). There is no evidence of any peoples who might have been numerous enough to invade the Murray basin. Internecine warfare amongst the Murray city-states might have been a possibility, but what evidence is available does not suggest that the city-states were particularly war-like or that they had the military capacity to wipe each other out so thoroughly.
There is some evidence of internal migration within the Murray basin, which might suggest some effects of warfare. During the Formative Era, particular crops such as wattles were usually geographically limited to near the area of original domestication [1]. These agricultural patterns were largely stable throughout the fourteen hundred years of the Formative Era, yet during the Interregnum each of these domesticated wattles were spread throughout the Murray basin. Some authorities argue that this is evidence that invaders moved and brought their crops with them, while others argue that it is more likely that any internal migrations were the effects of the collapse, with survivors fleeing abandoned cities and bringing their crops and other knowledge with them to other areas of the Murray.
Another group of theories relates to environmental or climatic factors. These theories ascribe the collapse of the Murray civilization to famine brought about by recurrent droughts or increased bushfires destroying harvests for repeated years. Surviving examples of Late Formative Murray burials are few, but of those which are excavated, archaeologists will notice a gradual decrease in the height of skeletons, which is taken to be evidence of malnutrition or other effects of famine. According to the environmental collapse theories, droughts or increased bushfires were the underlying cause, and the struggle for limited resources caused some of the destruction attested in the archaeological record.
These theories find some support from studies of tree ring patterns, which show a substantial increase in the number and severity of bushfires during the Interregnum when compared to the preceding period. Critics of the environmental collapse theories will argue that the increased bushfires are more likely to be an effect of the collapse rather than the cause. The Murray civilization had been living in a region with severe bushfires for over a millennium, and should have known how to limit the effects of bushfires by protective burning. These critics argue that the severe bushfires of the Interregnum were the result of the collapsing human population no longer maintaining effective burn-offs on their own, and thus natural bushfires became more severe.
A third group of theories will ascribe the collapse of the Murray civilization to internal revolution or social turmoil. According to these theories, unrest and dissatisfaction with the elites led to social unrest and revolution. Researchers who support these theories point to the evidence of destruction excavated at Murray Bridge and elsewhere as being rooted in social unrest, not foreign invasion. Direct confirmation of these theories are difficult, due to the lack of written sources, but their critics will point out that, as with the theories of foreign invasion, the evidence of destruction applies to only a few cities. It is difficult to explain how social unrest could have been widespread enough to depopulate most of the Murray cities. Even if the social elites were destroyed through revolution, this leads raises the question of where the rebel populations moved to, and why they abandoned so many cities.
A fourth group of theories will seek to explain the collapse of the Murray civilization in terms of a spread of disease. Some researchers favour a disease explanation because the spread of a new disease or diseases could explain rapid initial depopulation, and persistent endemic diseases as slowing population recovery. While no direct evidence of disease survives in the archaeological record, proponents of this theory argue that the expansion of human-created wetlands throughout the Formative Era created the perfect environment for harbouring pathogens and encouraging insect-borne transmission of infectious diseases. Objections to this theory will come principally from lack of evidence. While later civilizations along the Murray are known to harbour epidemic diseases, none of these diseases can be traced to this era or are known to be linked to insect vectors.
The fifth group of theories will ascribe the collapse of the Murray civilization to systemic ecological collapse. According to these researchers, the history of the Late Formative was one of expanding population placing ever-greater pressure on the natural resources of the Murray. Ever more intensive farming is believed to be exhausting the soil, and increasing hunting and fishing is thought to deplete the supply of protein-rich foods. According to these researchers, over-use of the land led to exhausted and sometimes eroded soils, famines, and then competition for limited resources led to destructive warfare and the abandonment of many of the urban centres as the remaining inhabitants reverted to subsistence farming.
What future archaeologists will probably never be able to find out is that most of these theories capture part of the explanation, but that none of them give a complete account. For the truth of the collapse of the Gunnagal civilization is found in a series of unfortunate events, some of their own making, some imposed by nature.
Throughout the Late Formative period, the population of the Murray basin boomed, aided by the development of arsenical bronze tools, and by a steady supply of food from the agricultural package of crops which they had developed. Yet their farming methods were still, in some respects, quite primitive. Red yams were the basis of their diet, but like all yams, they are hard on the soil. Farmers of red yams faced ever-decreasing yields when working on the same fields, which they could resolve only by moving on to new territory, leaving the land fallow for several years, and which provoked more territorial rivalry between the city-states.
While the Gunnagal as a whole had access to several wattle species, most of them had not spread far from their original area of domestication. This meant that their farmers were more vulnerable to pests and diseases which affected single crops. The Gunnagal farmers had not yet recognised the potential of wattles to revitalise the soil, which would have let them rotate their crops between yams and wattles. Without this realisation, the Gunnagal faced declining farming yields from yams and the emergence of several pest species which preyed on wattles, which made their farming increasingly marginal. The same pressure for food meant that their fishing and hunting grounds were gradually being exhausted, which made their population even more vulnerable to famine and other misfortune.
By 950 BC, the Murray civilization, although still heavily-populated, was nearing its Malthusian limits and merely awaiting a trigger for disaster. Calamity would not be long in coming. The climate of south-eastern Australia had been relatively stable for the last few thousand years, but in 1000 BC, the region entered a severe dry spell which would last for nearly a millennium. Rainfall declined, droughts became more prevalent, and already marginal farming yields plummeted. Much of the Lower Murray became too arid to support farming, and while in some areas agriculture could continue, reduced yields meant that this could not sustain the large populations seen at the height of the Late Formative.
At first, the western regions of the Lower Murray were the most badly-affected. The great centre of Murray Bridge, heartland of mining and the only large-scale source of copper and arsenical bronze, became so arid that farming could not be easily sustained. The leaders of the great city responded by trying to force more of the population into mining, to extract more of the valuable copper which could be used to trade for food from the still-fertile areas upstream. This worked in the short-term, but provoked social unrest which developed into revolution. In 898 BC, a revolt in the mines spread to the great city itself, which was burned to the ground. The surviving residents abandoned the city; some fleeing into wetter regions to the west and south, a few escaping upstream, while others reverted to subsistence farming and eking a precarious existence in rural areas around the vanished city.
With the destruction of Murray Bridge, one of the six great cities had been removed from the map. Tragically for the peoples of the Murray basin, this had been the key source of their metal. A couple of much smaller deposits were known in the highlands in the Upper Murray, but these were insufficient to meet demand. Copper and bronze were now almost-irreplaceable commodities, and re-smelting and re-use of metal would not be sufficient. Intensive farming had required more use of bronze tools to clear land and for digging, and this metal in particular was very difficult to obtain. Civilization gradually fell apart in the Murray, with prolonged famines ravaging the population, and long-range trade declining amongst the Gunnagal cities. Warfare became more intense in competition over dwindling resources, and the eventual result was collapse.
The collapse of the early Murray civilization was relatively swift, although not complete. Of the six great cities, four were abandoned entirely. Murray Bridge was destroyed through internal revolution. Robinvale was not destroyed directly, but its position in an already semi-arid area made it vulnerable to prolonged drought. Farming became marginal enough that even the Gunnagal agricultural package could not supply the food surpluses needed to sustain a large city, and the people who dwelt there needed to move on or revert to subsistence farming. Echuca and Tocumwal found themselves caught between the collapse of their wetlands, which was particularly severe given the drought, and the pressure of warfare from the larger centres of Swan Hill and Gundabingee. The end result was that Echuca and Tocumwal were abandoned, although some of the survivors founded a new outpost between those cities, at a place they would call Weenaratta, which in time would grow into a city of great renown.
All that remained of the Murray civilization, or so it appeared, were the former two largest cities of Swan Hill and Gundabingee. Both of these suffered severe population decline during the Interregnum, a result of famine, endemic warfare, and emigration outside the Murray basin. Yet they did survive, reaching their nadir around 750 BC when both cities had only about two or three thousand permanent inhabitants. After that time, they began a slow recovery, although it would take a very long time for the Murray civilizations to regain their former glory.
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History teaches that when it comes to conflict between farmers and hunter-gatherers, farmers almost always win. As individuals, hunter-gatherers were normally much healthier than farmers; the diet of early farmers was more nutritionally limited and the workload much higher. As a group, though, farmers were much more numerous. Unless the climate turns unsuitable for agriculture, then farmers usually have an immense weight of numbers which means that they can displace hunter-gatherers. When one group of peoples adopts agriculture but their neighbours do not, this can often mean substantial shifts in population, particularly if the agriculturalists also have other advantages such as metal tools and domesticated animals.
One of the most dramatic examples of such population shifts is the Bantu expansion which transformed southern Africa. Before the Bantu expansion, the southern half of Africa was inhabited by a variety of hunter-gatherer peoples, including the ancestors of modern Khoisan-speaking peoples and the “pygmies” of the central African jungles. In a series of migrations from their homelands in modern Cameroon and Nigeria, Bantu-speaking farmers pushed into hunter-gatherer territory and displaced most of the hunter-gatherer peoples throughout southern Africa. There were a few holdouts, mostly in areas where farming was unsustainable, but the Bantu-speakers came to dominate Africa south of the equator.
Allohistory teaches of another dramatic example of a population shift; the Great Migrations which transformed southern Australia. In 1000 BC, Australia was mostly a domain of hunter-gatherers. Agriculture was confined almost exclusively to the Murray basin, where the Gunnagal had a thriving but geographically limited civilization; almost all of the farmers lived within a day’s march of the winding Murray. Some cultivation of crops had started to spread slowly beyond this narrow band of land, but the Gunnagal had a technological and spiritual link to the river which meant that they abandoned it only reluctantly. Apart from the Gunnagal, the Australian continent held a great many peoples and languages, but the only other sedentary civilization was the eel-farming Junditmara, who occupied a couple of hundred square kilometres of south-western Victoria.
All of this would change with the collapse of the Gunnagal. This was a time of prolonged drought, of internecine warfare, but it was also a time of large-scale population movements. Some of these population movements were within the Murray basin itself, as people moved up and down the river. This allowed more sharing of ideas, goods and crops, which in time would stimulate a new cultural and technological flowering along the Murray. More of the population movements would be those of people abandoning their ancestral homelands. The calamities of the collapse broke the cultural link to the river, and the Gunnagal began to expand over much larger territory.
The Gunnagal migrants who abandoned the Murray did so for a variety of reasons, fleeing famine or revolution, defeated in warfare, or pursuing tales of opportunity from their predecessors. Regardless of their motivation, they had the same set of advantages; an agricultural package of crops which could grow on all but the most arid lands, and knowledge of how to smelt and work copper. They had lost access to the great copper mines of the Lower Murray which had sustained the Gunnagal, but the Australian landscape contained many small deposits of copper which were sufficient to sustain the tool and weapon-making needs of the bands of migrants moving out of the Murray in the Great Migrations.
From their homelands along the Murray, the descendants of the Gunnagal expanded in all directions, taking their crops with them. The expansion gained its momentum from the initial flood of refugees leaving the drought-stricken Lower Murray, but it gained a life of its own, with the Gunnagal farmers still pushing into new territories long after the population along the Murray had stabilised. The Great Migrations transformed Australia, as agricultural societies displaced hunter-gatherers throughout the southern half of the continent. In the north, the stream of migrants stopped only when they reached the tropics, where the warmer climate and different growing seasons did not suit their staple crops of red yams and murnong [2]. In the west, they stopped only when they reached the aridity of the interior. In the south and east, they halted only when they reached the sea. From the Tropic of Capricorn to Bass Strait, from the Tasman Sea to Australia’s red heart, the region was transformed with the advent of agriculture.
The Great Migrations began in 900 BC, and lasted for over a millennium. They were not a continuous advance, but a series of population movements in many directions, sometimes with agricultural peoples moving back into already-settled areas, and a process of warfare with some leapfrog advances far into new territory while the areas in between remained controlled by hunter-gatherers. The first Gunnagal settlers displaced by war fled eastward across the Great Dividing Ranges through the Southern Highlands to reach Australia’s eastern coast by 600 BC, but most of the eastern seaboard would not be colonised by agricultural peoples for another three centuries. Pioneering Gunnagal migrants followed the River Darling and were growing red yams near Roma in Queensland by 500 BC, at near the northern limit of that crop’s range, but the full displacement of non-Gunnagal peoples from this region would take another four hundred years. The conventional date for the end of the Great Migrations is 200 AD, although Gunnagal settlers had reached most of south-eastern Australia a least a century before that. Most of the last hundred years was a process of consolidation of control over this territory, where the remaining hunter-gatherers were displaced or took up Gunnagal farming ways.
The Great Migrations were a combination of colonisation, assimilation and military expansion. Hunter-gatherer societies did not survive the migrations, except where the peoples were pushed north into the tropics or west into the arid interior. The pre-Gunnagal hunter-gatherers were not exterminated as individuals; many of the colonising Gunnagal intermarried with the local inhabitants. Some elements of old beliefs survived the Great Migrations, especially place-names, and names of unfamiliar plants and animals. Most of their accumulated knowledge of local flora and fauna survived, too. But the diverse hunter-gatherer cultures and languages which had existed before the Great Migrations were transformed into a region of cultural unity. This would later be referred to as Gunnagalia, although the inhabitants at the time did not have any conception of themselves as a coherent group.
Gunnagalia was a common cultural zone, the legacy of having such closely-related peoples expanding over such a wide area. The early Gunnagal spoke one language, although dialects had begun to diverge even before they started leaving the Murray basin. The migrations spread these dialects across Gunnagalia, and the dialects would diverge into separate languages over the next few centuries. The Gunnagal likewise brought their religion, technology, and other accumulated lore with them, and left this legacy for their descendants. This common legacy would be reflected in all the cultures and peoples who followed the early Gunnagal.
Yet while the Gunnagal migrations were extensive, they did not quite displace everyone who occupied the south-eastern regions of Australia. There were three main hold-outs, areas where the pre-Gunnagal peoples preserved their own language and culture. In south-western Victoria, the Junditmara had maintained a settled society with thousands of people long before the Gunnagal had learned to farm yams. Gunnagal migrants brought yams, wattles and knowledge of metalworking to the Junditmara, but the migrants were absorbed into the Junditmara, rather than the other way around. In north-eastern New South Wales, a hunter-gatherer people named the Bungudjimay occupied the Coffs Harbour region before the Great Migrations. An early group of Gunnagal settlers entered that area, and were few enough in number that they became part of the Bungudjimay. With this knowledge, the Bungudjimay took up farming and adopted a settled lifestyle before the main stream of Gunnagal migrants reached them. The third group of hold-outs were in the Monaro plateau, an area of high country in southern New South Wales that includes some of the headwaters for the Murray, including one of its major tributaries, the Murrumbidgee. Here, the altitude meant that red yams did not grow well, and farming developed using hybrids of domesticated murnong and a related alpine species [3], producing a new crop suited to these regions. This meant that the Nguril and Kaoma peoples who lived there had time to take up farming rather than being displaced by Gunnagal immigrants.
The Great Migrations did not touch all of the fertile areas of southern Australia. While they reached the south-eastern quarter of the continent, there was another fertile region of the south which they did not touch. The fertile lands of south-western Australia are separated from the eastern regions by desert barriers, included a land so barren that the first European explorers in the region named it the land of no trees [4]. In allohistorical Australia, there was extremely tenuous contact between east and west, conducted via the peoples who lived in this arid region. The desert barriers meant that no large-scale migrations were possible, but in time some crops and knowledge did diffuse across the barren lands. Around 550 BC, the first red yams were being grown in Esperance, a fertile region at the western edge of the Nullarbor. A few other crops would follow, such as bramble wattle and native flax, though many others did not make the crossing. Yet those few crops allowed the Yuduwungu people of Esperance to develop sedentary societies, and in time they developed their own agricultural package of crops, including some plants not known further east. The Yuduwungu had some very slight trade contact with peoples across the Nullarbor, enough for knowledge of metalworking and pottery to spread, although they developed their own unique styles. In time, the Yuduwungu would begin their own migrations, spreading farming, their language and culture across the fertile regions of south-western Australia.
By around 200 AD, much of the southern half of Australia has become a land of farmers. Hunter-gatherers still occupy the arid interior of the continent, but in the east and the west, agriculture is now widespread. In most cases, these peoples are still quite thinly-spread, but the reliable food supply will allow their population to grow rapidly in the following centuries. The foundations have been set for the development of complex societies and advancing technology. Still, the most populous region of the continent remains the Murray basin, where the inhabitants started to recover from the collapse by around 600 BC. The long-term result of the collapse would turn out to be not necessarily so bad; the changed conditions and internal population movements produced a variety of innovations. In time, the heirs of the Gunnagal would share these new developments with Australia, too.
Although not all of these new developments would be welcome.
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[1] Three main wattles were domesticated in different parts of the Murray basin. The bramble wattle (Acacia victoriae) is adapted to the driest climates and usually grown in the Lower Murray, the mystery wattle (A. difformis) grows in the Middle Murray, while the golden wattle (A. pycnantha) is cultivated mostly in the higher-rainfall areas of the Upper Murray.
[2] A couple of the domesticated Australian crop species will actually grow further north than this, particularly the bramble wattle. As a complete package of crops, however, the effective growing limit is a little south of the Tropic of Capricorn.
[3] Microseris scapigera, the alpine murnong, is well-adapted to the highland regions of south-eastern Australia. (Some authorities class it as a subspecies of the common murnong, M. lanceolata, but either way, it is suitable for growing in highland areas.)
[4] This is the Nullarbor Plain. Its name is sometimes thought to be of Aboriginal origin, but is in fact derived from Latin and means “no trees.” The Nullarbor is an extremely harsh landscape, consisting largely of a limestone plateau which is indeed so arid that it doesn’t really support any trees. Some Aboriginal peoples do live here (the Pila Nguru), although in relatively small numbers. The arid Nullarbor is a substantial barrier to land communication between eastern and western Australia; not quite impassable, but nearly so without local knowledge.
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Thoughts?
