102 Veronica StrangThere are two major points to make about this body of indigenous knowledge: st, that it is all �every part of it �written into the land and, second, that this location in place serves to integrate each of its strands. Because the land itself is the primary medium and repository of knowledge, each area of knowledge is so closely woven into the whole that one cannot refer to any part of it without in some way referring to the rest. Numerous ethnographic accounts (ibid) have shown that Aboriginal knowledge is mly eld in place�and closely conted in conceptual terms. Thus, as Wilson notes (1988: 50, cited in Ingold 1995) he landscape is turned into a mythical topographic map, a grid of ancestor tracks and sacred sites� So people experience of being n place�is not merely a matter of going there to get resources, but is a way of engaging with knowledge about kin relations, spiritual and emotional life, morality and so forth. Thus the land becomes a repository for the history of groups and individuals, which in Aboriginal terms goes back indeitely, or as one woman put it, o the beginning to us�(Alma Wason). Ethnographic investigation of indigenous knowledges in Kowanyama points to other key issues. For example, Aboriginal discourses are dominated by spatial rather than temporal metaphors, and are based on cyclical rather than linear concepts of time. As various writers have noted, (e.g. Gosden 1994; Gould 1987) this is an attribute shared by many indigenous cultures. According to Aboriginal law, human lives echo ancestral journeys in their emergence from the Dreaming and their eventual reintegration with the ancestral forces, and, ideologically, human beings are required to relive the lives of the ancestral beings. It is difult to imagine a more conservative cosmological model, or one more designed to be resistant to change. Crucially though, this model of time also means that linear history is de-emphasized, while spatial meaning comes to the fore. As noted previously, (and by Munn 1986; Morton, 1987) the Dreamtime is merely another dimension that exists, invisibly, alongside �or perhaps one should say underneath �the present. So it is less a creative era, and more of a place where things happen. The dominance of spatial metaphors underlines the importance of place in the construction of indigenous knowledge and points to another important characteristic: that such knowledge is constructed on a scale that is very immediate. There is no separation of linear millennia from the gods: they are located right on the doorstep, powerfully manifested through ancestral creativity in a sentient landscape. Another major characteristic, which also appears to be shared by other indigenous groups, is that discourses about the environment are primarily qualitative (see Rudder 1983; Myers 1986; Munn 1986). It is a truism that Aboriginal languages have no words for numbers above three, and informants in Kowanyama conm that although it is possible in their own languages to make sets of three, more commonly more than three is just a lot. This qualitative emphasis is nicely illustrated by an ethnographic example: on the cattle station at Rutland Plains, just outside Kowanyama, it was regularly necessary during the mustering season to bring in all of the work horses (about 60
