Archaeological Settlement Patterns and Mobility Strategies: Lower Adelaide River, Northern Australia

This monograph investigates settlement patterns and mobility strategies on the lower Adelaide River, northern Australia, in the late Holocene period. Earth mounds provide the opportunity for research into Aboriginal adaptive strategies in an environment that changed dramatically through this period. Themes addressed include their location, morphology, chronology, origins and the role that earth mounds play in wider settlement systems. They are located next to floodplains which underwent dynamic environmental change from mangrove swamps in the mid Holocene, through a variable estuarine and freshwater mosaic environment c. 3000 years ago, to the freshwater floodplains of today. Within the framework provided by geomorphological research, the author argues that the mounds represent base camps and that occupation of the floodplain margins was the major settlement strategy in the region from at least 4000 years ago. Within that time the occupants of the mounds adapted their foraging patterns and altered their mobility strategies according to floodplain conditions.