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As modern humans spread across the world along coastlines and waterways during the Late Pleistocene, they encountered a remarkable variety of coastal environments, each with its own resources and challenges. In this episode, we explore one of the seemingly least hospitable coastal environments: maritime deserts. We discuss Boodie Cave on Barrow Island, off Australia’s northwest coast, with Tiina Maane from the University of Queensland to discover how people adapted their knowledge to this demanding environment and thrived there for tens of thousands of years.

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Key People

Tiina Maane

Key Places

Boodie Cave

Barrow Island

Further Reading

Ward, Ingrid, et al. "50,000 years of archaeological site stratigraphy and micromorphology in Boodie Cave, Barrow Island, Western Australia." Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 15 (2017): 344-369.

Skippington, Jane, Tiina Manne, and Peter Veth. "Isotopic indications of late Pleistocene and Holocene paleoenvironmental changes at Boodie Cave archaeological site, Barrow Island, Western Australia." Molecules 26.9 (2021): 2582.

Veth, Peter, et al. "Early human occupation of a maritime desert, Barrow Island, North-West Australia." Quaternary Science Reviews 168 (2017): 19-29.

Veth, Peter, Ingrid Ward, and Tiina Manne. "Coastal feasts: a Pleistocene antiquity for resource abundance in the maritime deserts of north west Australia?." The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 12.1 (2017): 8-23.

Veth, Peter, et al. "The archaeology of Montebello Islands, north-west Australia: late Quaternary foragers on an arid coastline." (2007).

Veth, Peter, Kane Ditchfield, and Fiona Hook. "Maritime deserts of the Australian northwest." Australian Archaeology 79.1 (2014): 156-166.

Before Us is produced by Worlds Before LLC. Erich Fisher writes and produces each episode and handles sound design and editing. Helen Farr co-hosts and contributes with writing and producing. Ian Laurence composed the theme song. The voices of our hosts and guests are real and have not been generated by AI.