The study of collector variability in the transition to sedentary food producers in northern Colombia

Human adaptation to the tropics by populations of collectors has been a longtanding issue of debate, especially with regard to the role that collectors may have played in pathways toward sedentism and food production. In this essay, I examine significant differences in strategies developed for estuarine environments versus the inland environments of the transitional savannas of northern Colombia to analyze how these two adaptations articulate with the processes which led toward sedentism and food production in neotropical northern Colombia. Contrary to the received wisdom, I argue that the exploitation of rich estuarine environments is not necessarily a prelude to food production; seed exploitation early in the sixth millennium B.P. in the northern Colombian transitional savanna zone provides a second and arguably more probable model.     

ENTANGLED INVASIVE LIVES: INDIGENOUS INVASIVE PLANT MANAGEMENT IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

This article explores the entanglement of two kinds of invasive lives in northern Australia: invasive plants, and the enduring life of the unfinished colonial project, which continues to have implications for indigenous peoples. In the extensive indigenous lands of Australia's tropical north, communities have increasing responsibility for invasive plant management among other pressing land management tasks. In a context of climate change and novel ecosystems, these entanglements exacerbate environmental management challenges in the tropical savanna and affect indigenous livelihoods. Drawing on arguments that it is necessary to literally speak novel ecologies, we here enunciate and describe a novel ecological assemblage we call Indigenous Invasive Plant Management (IIPM). Historical accounts and contemporary ethnography (semi‐structured interviews and participant observation undertaken in 2010–2013) show a lingering colonial heritage in the ways that IIPM is entwined with tenure and governance issues, and in its everyday practice. These findings illustrate how IIPM can risk being a form of continuing dispossession as well as having good potential outcomes.