Peopled landscapes: archaeological and biogeographic approaches to landscapes

The way we view the Australian landscape at the start of the 21st century is notably different to how we viewed it in the late 20th century, and Peter Kershaw has had a most significant role in this. One of the key elements to Peters intellectual contribution lies in the discovery that the Australian landscape is more changeable and dynamic than was previously imagined, and in particular more deeply influenced by human history than we could have then known. The notion that people arriving in an uninhabited landscape over 40,000 years ago so fundamentally changed fire regimes, and that Aboriginal people have continued to shape the environment through ongoing landscape firing practices ever since and as a consequence affected the whole ecology of an island continent is one that shook the scientific community and forced a rethink of the way we view the long-term history and present environmental state of Australia.