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maintained. Those “exotic” materials provide proof for the existence of extensive networks
through which goods circulate.

The unpredictability—in space and time—ofrain.fall in what Gould elsewhere 1969a:273
calls “the harshest physical environment on earth ever inhabited by man before the Industrial
Revolution” is a factor necessitating a fluid and adaptive social structure. Such a structure has
been widely reported e.g. Tonkinson 1991; Myers 1986, and involves what could be called
a non-dogmatic mode of land afliliation and ownership. Prolonged co-residence, for example,
can, in the Western Desert, give rights to land just as birth or descent does. Moreover,
affiliation to land does not automatically involve the right to exclude others from accessing
its resources. Furthermore, exogarny, that is, the need or obligation to marry outside the local
community, is a strong characteristic in the Western Desert, as marriage creates mutual rights
of access to resources as well as solidarity between in-laws.

That such networks existed in the past as well as in recent times is testified to by
archaeologists’ and anthropologists’ findings of exotic material, that is, material that could only
have arrived at a specific location through trade. One example quoted by Gould 1980:l4lfl
concerns Kimberley points found among Central Australian groups, which could only have
arrived there by trade. Afier discussing ethnographic evidence for such exotic material at
Puritutjarpa, Gould writes, not without some irony:

Unless one wishes to indulge in fantasies such as imagining thousands of
stone tools and flakes with tiny feet migrating on their own across the countryside
one must accept the premise that the presence of exotic lithic materials
is circumstantial evidence of social networks along which such materials flowed
Gould 19802156.

Other reports and studies concerning the circulation of goods throughout the desert were
made by Mountford and Harvey 1938, who proposed a general north-south route from the
Kjmberleys to the Great Australian Bight in the south, and by Akerman 1973, who depicted
the circulation of shells among settlements from the Pilbara and Central Australia into the
Western Desert see Map 18 below."

The evidence discussed so far shows that material and immaterial goods must have spread
through the Western Desert. We may also claim with reasonable confidence that these goods
predominantly came from the Kimberley and Pilbara regions, and we can see that this fact
accords well with the proposition that the section system, or at least one of them, entered the
Western Desert from the same area. However, we have little evidence for detailed routes of
diifusion and trade. With the exception of Akerman’s 1973 report on the trade of shells, no
other study I lcnow of depicts actual topographic paths.

‘9 More evidence for, and examples of, extensive trade routes throughout Australia can be foimd in McCarthy
1939-40; Mulvaney 1976; Davidson I935; Akerrnan Stanton 1994.