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The meandering channels are fed infrequently by monsoonal rains from the north, which transform large sections of the desert into a lush, green landscape. It is the world’s last unregulated desert channel system (meaning there has been no intensive irrigation or damming) and one of Australia’s richest beef cattle areas.

The Channel Country spreads across the Lake Eyre Basin, found in parts of Queensland, Northern Territory and South Australia.

Illustration by Nathan Wright An extraordinary landscape This map shows the direction of trade and market centres and also the location of other important items of exchange. Pituri leaves (some of which are from the Mulligan river region) are a narcotic and highly valued. The location of Mithaka country within the trade network of Pituri.

Understanding the Mithaka food production system may well tell us whether such terms are a good fit for defining socio-economic networks in Aboriginal Australia. Were First Australians farmers or hunter-gatherers? Contemporary archaeological research suggests it’s not such a simple dichotomy. We have also developed a method to locate traces of long-lost village sites. Our landscape study, published in the journal Antiquity, has found over 140 quarry sites, where rock was excavated to produce seed grinding stones. In partnership with the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, who occupy the Channel Country in Central Australia, we have begun investigating Aboriginal settlement sites, pit dwelling huts (known as gunyahs) and quarries. We have been working in a landscape that provides an important test of the Dark Emu hypothesis. Historians Billy Griffiths and Lynette Russell, and now anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, have argued Pascoe has fallen into a trap of privileging the language of agriculture above hunter-gatherer socioeconomic systems. Dark Emu builds on an earlier, less known work by archaeologist Rupert Gerritsen, who argued a number of regions across Australia should be considered centres of Aboriginal agriculture. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu is in the news again, with the publication of a new book critiquing Pascoe’s arguments.