The Alligator Rivers : prehistory and ecology in Western Arnhem Land

Abstract

This monograph represents the somewhat uneasy marriage of two widely separated pieces of research. The bulk of the work, including all the fieldwork, was done when from 1964 to 1967 I was a graduate student in the Prehistory section of the then Department of An thropology and Sociology of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. Of the PhD thesis which was then presented (C. White 1967, Plateau and plain : prehistoric investigations in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory), the present work is a major revision of interpretation and writing which was done during 1979-80, when I was a Visiting Fellow in the now independent Department of Prehistory, on leave from my job at Rutgers University in the United States. The intervening 13 years had seen both major changes in the social and ecological circumstances of my Arnhem Land research area and radical shifts in my education and my approach to questions of human adaptation and behaviour.