Strategies for investigating human responses to changes in landscape and climate at lake mungo in the Willandra Lakes, Southeast Australia

The Willandra Lakes lie in the southwest corner of the Murray-Darling Basin on the edge of Australia’s arid core. They were inscribed on the World Heritage register in 1981 partly because of their perceived potential for providing insights into the interplay between human and environmental history in a climatically sensitive area during the Late Pleistocene, a period of significant change in global climate. This potential derives from the archaeological traces preserved in the alternating layers of sand and clay that record fluctuations in the amount and quality of water in the adjacent lakes, which were controlled primarily by changes in the amount of spring meltwater flowing westward from the Australian Alps.
This chapter reviews the features of the Willandra’s sedimentary and archaeological records that demonstrate their extraordinary potential for generating information about past human activities and palaeoenvironments. Two studies illustrate how traces of past human activity can be linked directly to the palaeoenvironmental record, either through the stratigraphic context of the activity traces, which establishes their relationship to shifts in regional and global climates, or through their sedimentary context, which establishes the prevailing hydrological conditions.