If there were water: prehistoric settlement patterns in the Victorian Mallee

'If there were water, the Thunder said, there are a number of things we could do, particularly 'stop and drink'. Without water 'one cannot stop or think ... one can neither stand nor lie nor sit'. With aridity there is sterility - 'thunder without rain' no life. The Thunder in T. S. Eliot's poem from The Waste Land (1922) was making a number of assumptions about human responses to plenty and drought. Many anthropologists and archaeologists studying hunter gatherer settlement patterns have made, and still make, very similar assumptions. Their arguments, like the Thunder's, rely on the premise that where people will 'stop' in the landscape, and leave archaeological remains, depends largely upon ecological parameters, particularly the presence of water. In this thesis this fundamental assumption will be tested by a consideration of the prehistoric settlement patterns of the Aborigines of north western Victoria.