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Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Archaeology, History and Theory of Archaeology
Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199551224.013.063
Over the past hundred years or so, hunter-gatherer research has undergone cumulative
expansion and diversification, and has also weathered a range of internal and external
critiques. Today, the study of hunter-gatherers remains as important as ever, but
grappling with the immense and increasingly specialized research literature can be a
daunting challenge. This handbook makes a detailed review of the field both timely and
also a valuable exercise for researchers, scholars, teachers, and students. The topics,
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materials, and ongoing debates examined throughout this handbook demonstrate that
interest in hunter-gatherers is alive and well, and that the research field is flourishing,
with several important themes requiring future research.
The study of forager societies may also hold the key to some of the central
(p. 2)
questions about human social life, politics, and gender, as well as diet, nutrition,
sustainable human–environment relations, and perhaps also ‘long-term human
futures’ (Lee and Daly 1999, 1). For this reason, ‘ideas observed, tested, or refined with
the study of hunter-gatherers have been among the most important areas of
anthropological research’ (Hitchcock and Biesele 2000, 3).
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ways of classifying human cultural diversity into logical schema. Scholars also began to
theorize about early human origins, as well as the later developments that had generated
the contemporary conditions of cultural diversity: anthropology focused on the study of
‘traditional’ non-European societies; archaeology emerged as a discipline tasked with
making sense of past societies. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scholars began
to erect complex social evolutionary schemes that mapped out different general stages in
the progression of humanity towards higher levels of cultural, moral, and intellectual
achievement. Specific stages such as savagery, barbarism, and civilization were defined
by differences in economy, social forms, and technological attributes. Hunting societies
were essential elements in these progressive evolutionary schema, because they were
used to illustrate some of the lower sub-stages, thereby forming a base-line against which
subsequent developments and achievements could be measured and contrasted (e.g.
Morgan 1877). However, these ideas were closely associated with a unique perspective
on the world that was developing among Western educated elites at this time (see
Pluciennik, Part I).
Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boas’s experience of
fieldwork led him to attack classical evolutionary schemes on both empirical and moral
grounds—he argued they were inherently racist and based largely on armchair
speculation, rather than direct and detailed knowledge gathered first hand through
extended ethnographic field research with specific groups. In Race, language and culture
(Boas 1911), he examined how these three attributes varied independently: some cultures
could have a simple technology but a very complex world view; all languages were
equally complex and suitable for abstract thought; and there was also important
variations in cultural achievements within one and the same ‘race’.
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As the founder of American anthropology, Boas also argued for conducting extended
ethnographic field research, generating a discipline with a distinctive emphasis on
understanding the unique features of local cultures via sustained fieldwork (Lee and Daly
1999, 7). He also argued that ethnographic museum collections were better ordered
according to tribes living in different geographical areas, rather than the kinds of
typological categories or hypothetical evolutionary schemes that were influential,
especially in late nineteenth-century Europe (Trigger 2006, 180–1). Later, Boasian
thinking also fed into some of the first detailed ethnographic treatments of North
American culture areas (e.g. Wissler 1917; and see Garvey and Bettinger, Part I, this
volume).
(p. 4) Hunter-gatherer research was also central to the later intellectual growth of
archaeology as it outgrew its early Antiquarian origins. With the main bulk of human
evolutionary history spent as hunters and gatherers, those studying human origins and
the earlier prehistoric past also came to focus on understanding early forager societies.
In fact, the study of hunter-gatherers can be linked directly to the emergence of
prehistoric archaeology. In Scandinavia, early treatments of long-term human cultural
development had used general changes in material culture to define successive
technological stages or eras, each reflecting discrete temporal segments (Thomson’s
three-age system of Stone, Bronze, and Iron: see Rowley-Conwy 2007). Meanwhile,
studies in France and England began to focus on understanding the very earliest ages of
mankind, which triggered an increasing interest in early hunting societies, and the
realization that the Stone Age of Europe needed to be divided into the Old Stone Age
(Palaeolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic: Trigger 2006, 121–38).
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reasoned that, just as modern elephants provide information about the anatomy of extinct
mammoths, so ‘modern primitive societies’ could shed some light on the behaviour of
prehistoric humans. However, most of the ethnographic descriptions were used to draw
only very general analogies between ‘primitive’ and ‘prehistoric’ peoples. Only in a few
specific cases did Lubbock identify more specific parallels, for example, noting
similarities in the tool-kits of the modern Inuit and the societies of the Upper Palaeolithic
(Trigger 2006, 171–3).
Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, and into the early part of the twentieth
century, it is possible to identify the emergence of the concept of ‘hunter-gatherers’ as
representing a distinct kind of society, as well as several influential research traditions,
including progressive social evolutionary thinking and the Boasian school of ‘historical
particularism’. Finally, it is possible to identify the increasing use of ethnographic
parallels from modern hunter-gatherer societies to help understand and illustrate the
archaeological record.
Studies
In the early part of the twentieth century, and particularly in the 1930s, anthropological
analysis of hunter-gatherers was starting to move towards two overarching themes: the
structuring role of kinship in band societies, and the role of ecology and adaptation. The
growing interest in kinship in hunter-gatherer ‘band’ societies was led by Radcliffe-Brown
(1931), and helped to establish the distinctive functionalist focus of British social
anthropology. Growing interest in exploring the role of ecology and adaptation emerged
in North America. Boas’s historical particularism still formed the mainstream of
anthropological thinking, but there was growing interest in revisiting and updating some
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of the concepts surrounding cultural evolution, a trend closely associated with the Neo-
evolutionary thinking of Leslie White and Julian Steward (Trigger 2006, 387).
White regarded himself as the intellectual heir of L. H. Morgan (Trigger 2006, 387) and
engaged in an explicit rejection of Boasian historical particularism, offering instead the
concept of ‘general evolution’. However, White ignored the influence of the environment
on culture, and focused instead on what he saw as main lines of cultural development
(Trigger 2006, 388)—cultures were best regarded as elaborate thermo-dynamic systems
that gained increasing control of energy flows, and functioned to make human life more
secure and enduring. With reliance only on human muscle, energy capture by hunter-
gatherers was rather limited, placing them at the lower end of this spectrum. In contrast,
industrialists and urban civilizations had harnessed control of fossil fuels and were in the
process of mastering nuclear power, placing them at higher levels of these general
sequences of development.
In contrast, the new framework of ‘cultural ecology’ emerged through the fieldwork of
Julian Steward in the Great Basin (see Garvey and Bettinger, Part I, and Robinson, Part
VI). This research examined the distinctive social organization of hunter-gatherer bands
(Steward 1936; 1938; and see 1955), but also sought general explanatory factors for
these patterns by examining the historical dynamics of human–environment adaptations.
Steward’s key contribution to the study of hunter-gatherers was therefore to focus on
what bands actually did for a living. This led to a more empirical and ecologically
orientated approach to the study of cultural evolution, with historically contingent
patterns of adaptation regarded as being crucial in determining potentially different lines
of cultural development, as well as the general limits of variation in different cultural
systems. Steward’s cultural ecology went on to generate a contrasting multilinear
approach to the study of cultural evolution (Trigger 2006, 389). Steward also argued that
hunter-gatherer societies were ideal for this kind of approach because the details of these
kinds of ‘simpler cultures’ are much more directly conditioned by the characteristics of
the local environment than more complex ones. For example, the timing and
characteristics of important food sources such as fish runs and game migrations would
effectively determine the social organization and other habits of forager tribes exploiting
those resources (Steward 1955).
Many now regard Steward as the ‘founder of modern hunter-gatherer studies’ (Lee and
DeVore 1968, 5). His cultural ecology was particularly attractive to a new generation
(p. 6) of anthropologists because it overcame the cautious Boasian paradigm by
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Slightly later, Service (1962; 1966; 1975) blended the work of White and Steward in an
attempt to reconcile the two, and used ethnographic data to illustrate highly general
developmental sequences, for example, from bands and chiefdoms through to states. This
generated renewed interest in understanding hunter-gatherers as quintessential
examples of ‘band-scale’ societies, and also reinforced the importance of Radcliffe-
Brown’s (1931) model of patrilocal band organization in Australia, to which Steward had
added other kinds of band. Service later went on to argue that the patrilocal band was
typical for all hunter-gatherers in the present and also the past, though this generated
heated debate (Lee and DeVore 1968, 7). More generally, these developments were
positive because they focused attention on the extent to which potential regularities
might actually unite different hunter-gatherer societies, encouraging further cross-
cultural research into the general features of hunter-gatherer societies and their adaptive
dynamics.
It is important to note, however, that the growing interest in hunter-gatherers and their
functional ecological and social relations with local environments was not a development
limited to North American anthropology. In Europe, there had been earlier interests in
applying ecological-functionalist frameworks to the hunter-gatherer archaeological
record, as illustrated by Grahame Clark’s work on the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of
Britain and continental Europe (e.g. Clark 1954). Clark had been influenced by several
antecedent developments, including new interest in exploring prehistoric cultures in their
ecological settings, an approach that first emerged in Scandinavia. He was also exposed
to the functionalist approaches of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and was developing
an interest in exploring how people actually lived in the past; that is, a focus on the
people, not just the details of their tools and artefacts.
This raised new questions about how and why specific items of material culture were
produced and used. These different strands of thinking eventually coalesced into an
archaeological approach that was not dissimilar to the cultural ecology developed by
American anthropologists; that is, that culture is functional and enabled survival, and that
all aspects of human culture are influenced to a greater or lesser extent by ecology, such
that culture and environment are factors within a single system (Clark 1939). Clark also
used ethnographic analogies, but in different ways to his predecessors, looking at specific
tool assemblages and not entire cultures, as had hitherto been the practice.
On a more empirical level, Clark also undertook major fieldwork at the Mesolithic site of
Star Carr just after the Second World War (1949–52), which set a new standard for the
archaeological investigation of hunter-gatherer wetland sites and palaeoeconomic
reconstruction. At this time, Hawkes (1954) was arguing that without written records to
rely on, prehistoric archaeologists should concentrate on studying lower-level behavioural
inferences, such as the details of economic activities and perhaps broader details of social
relations, as these were the easiest to identify in the material record. Evidence pertaining
to the spirituality, (p. 7) religion, and beliefs of prehistoric societies was likely to remain
so ambiguous that attempts to understand these facets of prehistoric life were best
regarded as exercises in controlled speculation (Hawkes’s ladder of inference). This kind
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By the mid-twentieth century, there was also growing interest among American
archaeologists in exploring evidence for adaptive human–environment relations,
especially in relation to the continent’s rich archaeological record of prehistoric hunter-
gatherers. These ideas and interests eventually crystallized into the ‘New Archaeology’
paradigm led by Lewis Binford, who had been a student of Leslie White. Binford followed
White (1959) in defining culture as man’s ‘extrasomatic means of adaptation’; that is, that
culture serves primarily as a means of adapting to local environments (Binford 1962).
These arguments led Binford to start to explore, isolate, and examine the functional
dimensions of particular cultural systems.
If culture can be generally regarded as serving some kind of adaptive function, then the
specific details of particular cultural systems can be regarded as human responses to the
demands of local environments. Moreover, if the environment changes over time, then
culture will also need to adjust. Although there may be additional changes in population,
leading to demographic pressures, Binford argued that all culture change was ultimately
rooted in ecological factors (Trigger 2006, 395–6). It was on the basis of these
assumptions that he was led to argue that archaeology had a unique contribution to make
—it could address the same kinds of research problems as Steward’s cultural ecology, but
importantly, could do so over much longer time-scales. This defined the goal of
archaeology as the study of ‘culture process’ (Binford 1965).
These emerging interests in the study of long-term adaptation are often presented as a
rather clean break with earlier scholarship, but addressing these new topics only became
feasible after the development of radiocarbon dating methods. Prior to the 1950s,
archaeologists had faced the primary problem of how best to date archaeological
materials, and had used artefact-focused analysis methods such as seriation to
reconstruct relative chronologies and broad culture historical sequences (Binford and
Johnson 2002, viii; Lyman et al. 1997). With new methods to reconstruct absolute
chronologies, archaeologists could shift their research goals towards understanding how
adaptive pressures had generated cultural variability and change at different spatial and
temporal scales. More generally, however, these renewed concerns with understanding
prehistoric adaptation built on and directly complemented an earlier generation of
functional-ecological research in both America and in Europe, e.g. in the work of Graham
Clark, as noted above (Trigger 2006, 393).
New Archaeologists also emphasized that the reconstruction of culture change was best
undertaken by analysing those aspects of behaviour that were most closely associated
with adaptation, such as the details of economy and technology. This was a challenging
endeavour, and so many early efforts sought to understand adaptation and change in
smaller-scale societies, whose relationships with the environment were more direct and
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empirically measurable—these hunting and gathering cultures also formed a major part
of the archaeological record, especially in North America. As with Steward’s cultural
(p. 8) ecology, Binford’s parallel concerns with understanding long-term processes of
In the mid-1960s, a series of summary meetings was held to review progress on key
issues. These included the Conference on band organisation in 1965, and the Conference
on cultural ecology in 1966. However, the Man the hunter meeting in 1966 is now widely
regarded as the consolidation of a new phase in hunter-gatherer studies (Lee and DeVore
1968). In the following decades, these foundational conferences ‘had tremendous impact
on the anthropological view of hunter-gatherers…and defined what was germane to know
about them’ (Binford 2001, 21).
The main goal of Man the hunter was to present new data and clarify conceptual issues;
moreover, this endeavour had a strongly multi-disciplinary nature from the very outset
(Lee and DeVore 1968, vii). The aim was to examine new ethnographic field data and look
more closely at kinship, social dynamics, and ecological relations, in order to understand
the long-term evolution of hunter-gatherer adaptations. In the end, the conference
boasted a remarkably diverse array of speakers, including archaeologists,
anthropologists, and demographers, whose theoretical approaches spanned ecological
and structuralist schools. Papers examined ecology, social and territorial organization,
marriage and kinship, demography and population ecology, as well as prehistoric
archaeology and the use of ethnographic analogies. The conference title suggests only a
narrow concern with ‘man’ and the dynamics of ‘hunting’, but female gender and the
utilization of plant resources was an important secondary theme as it became clear that
only in Arctic and subarctic regions did populations rely almost entirely on meat (Lee and
DeVore 1968, 7). Analysis of gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies has been a central
theme ever since (see Sterling, Part I; Jarvenpa and Brumbach, Part VII).
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Discussions at Man the hunter were also flavoured by a touch of romanticism: many who
attended wanted to understand the essential features of human existence, and were
evidently drawn to the study of hunter-gatherers because it was thought that the ‘human
condition was likely to be more clearly drawn here than among other kinds of
societies’ (Lee and DeVore 1968, x).
‘Nomadic Style’
By the close of the meeting it was clear that the conference had ‘raised more questions
than it answered, [and] there seemed to be a widespread feeling among participants that
a useful beginning had been made in understanding the hunters better’ (Lee and DeVore
1968, 11). Nevertheless, Lee and DeVore in their introductory chapter also attempted
some sense of synthesis, and made two basic assumptions about hunter-gatherers: 1. they
live in small groups; 2. they move around a lot. In addition, it was argued—derived largely
on materials gathered from southern Africa—that the hunter-gatherer economic system
was based on several core features, including a home base or camp, a gendered division
of labour, with males hunting and females gathering, and perhaps most importantly, a
central pattern of sharing out the collected food resources. This, they argued, provides a
kind of organizational base-line from which subsequent developments can be derived (Lee
and DeVore 1968, 12). The behavioural implications of this basic hunter-gatherer
economic system were simple but important:
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Lee and DeVore argued that these patterns equated to ‘nomadic style’, and were best
exemplified by the forager groups documented by anthropologists in southern Africa, who
eventually came to serve as paradigmatic examples of hunter-gatherer band societies.
Man the hunter was also important on another level because it started to overturn
lingering assumptions that all foragers were typically people clinging on the brink of
starvation, with an inadequate and unreliable food supply forcing them to move around
frequently to find scarce resources. The earlier consensus propagated by many
nineteenth-century social (p. 10) evolutionary thinkers was that the hunting and gathering
lifestyle was, by its very essence, dictated by the economics of scarcity.
On the basis on these insights, Sahlins branded hunter-gatherers the ‘original affluent
society’, but it is important to note that these reinterpretations of foraging societies
emerged at the same time as a growing Western unease with the contemporary world. A
sense of moral decay was reflected in growing concerns about the escalation of the
Vietnam War, and in growing awareness of the environmental impacts of relentless
industrialization (Kelly 1995, 15–16). In contrast, anthropologists found that foragers
presented an alternative and perhaps more desirable way in which human societies could
operate. Ethnographers were able to portray the forager lifestyle as one that consisted
primarily of lounging about and socializing, rather than working long and hard just to
secure a basic living. These hunter-gatherers did not have a less complex culture because
they had no time; rather, the simplicity of their lives stemmed from a zen philosophy that,
because they wanted little, they effectively had all they needed.
Sahlins’s influential arguments added further detail to Lee and DeVore’s initial
formulations of ‘nomadic style’, and led to the creation of a generalized foraging model
that combined deep environmental confidence, a lack of materialism, low population
density, egalitarianism, lack of territoriality, minimum storage, and an easy flux in band
composition (Kelly 1995, 14–15).
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example is Suttles’s (1968) chapter, which focused on the Pacific Northwest Coast (see
O’Neill, Part VI). He started to speculate that many definitive features of ‘nomadic style’
would eventually break down due to the inevitable logistical challenges associated with
managing variability in the kind of salmon-based fishing economy that characterized the
region. According to his analysis, small nomadic bands would eventually be replaced by
surplus-producing, and wealth-accumulating, groups who had developed the kinds of
essential technological facilities that were required to bank up resources, providing a
means of coping with seasonal vagaries in the salmon supply.
The key insight from Suttles’s study is that if maintaining a secure food supply requires
increasing territorial control of resources and associated mass-capture facilities, then the
‘loose non-corporate nature of the small-scale society cannot be maintained’ (Lee and
(p. 11) DeVore 1968, 12). Crucially, as earlier small-scale egalitarian bands start to be
replaced by new forms of social and economic organization, this process opens out long-
term developmental trajectories that could eventually lead to major transformations in
social relations and technologies. In time, these could also establish the foundations for
new kinds of political institution, such as clan organizations, governments, and even the
state, all of which ultimately find their origins in the breakdown of nomadic style and the
coeval shifts in the internal dynamics of hunter-gatherer societies (Lee and DeVore 1968,
12; and see Hayden, Part IV for a similar argument).
Early formulations of nomadic style had provided a useful starting point, but by the 1970s
and earlier 1980s, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that variability extended
well beyond these early attempts to summarize typical features of hunter-gatherer
society. Researchers attempted to reclassify the forms, causes, and constraints of this
diversity, and in the process, variability within as well as between hunter-gatherer groups
was increasingly recognized (Kent 1996, 16).
The distinction between simple and complex hunter-gatherers was initially regarded as
an important conceptual breakthrough, and provided a useful way of thinking through
some of the more extreme ethnographic contrasts in hunter-gatherer variability. More
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recently, this kind of binary thinking has been criticized for reducing the inherent
flexibility and variability of forager behaviour, social structure, and ideology into rather
simplistic oppositional categories such as simple/complex, immediate return/delayed
return, mobile/sedentary. In archaeology, these typologies also became problematic
because they went on to serve as rigid conceptual frameworks into which disparate
evidence was often fitted, with interpretations often illustrated through reference to
standard sets of ethnographic examples, such as the Kalahari San and Northwest Coast
groups (Kelly 1995, 34; Schweitzer 2000, 45).
Renewed interest in the use of ethnographic analogy emerged within the New
Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. With increasing interest in developing more robust
and explicitly scientific approaches to the study of long-term culture change,
archaeologists were seeking to identify general cross-cultural patterning in human
behaviour. Anthropologists could generate this kind of insight through close scrutiny of
ethnographic datasets, but archaeologists faced an additional challenge in that they had
to study prehistoric objects, artefacts, and other material residues in order to indirectly
infer these kinds of behaviours among past societies.
Archaeologists eventually realized that they could not understand the archaeological
record in isolation, but needed to develop a series of low-level inferences about how
different kinds of behaviour generated distinctive archaeological signatures (‘Middle
Range Theory’). Moreover, they could not rely on ethnographers to provide these
insights, but needed to undertake their own field studies. These concerns eventually
promoted the development of hunter-gatherer ‘ethnoarchaeology’, which saw
archaeologists engaging in long-term fieldwork with living populations (see Lane, Part I;
David and Kramer 2001). Seminal work included Binford’s 1978 study of the Nunamiut in
Alaska, Gould’s work in Australia (Gould 1969), and John Yellen’s 1977 study of the Kung
(David and Kramer 2001; and see Lane, Part I for a full discussion of hunter-gatherer
ethnoarchaeology).
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In Britain, another version of New Archaeology was developing with the work of David
Clarke (1968), which attempted to systematize the analysis of material culture traditions.
Prior to this, the main concern had been development of artefact typologies, rather than
reconstruction of human behaviour (Trigger 2006, 431). Clarke wanted to develop a fuller
understanding of material culture, and a substantial part of his research involved
quantitative analysis of the Western North American Indian (WNAI) datasets. The WNAI
were argued by Clarke to constitute some of the most detailed hunter-gatherer
ethnographic records in the world, and had been assembled under the direction of Alfred
Kroeber, a student of Boas. They recorded the lifeways and cultural traditions of scores of
different hunter-gatherers in the most minute detail, and provided Clarke with a factual
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Moreover, the cultural ecology framework developed by Julian Steward and used in many
of these interpretations tended to implicitly replicate the nineteenth-century view that
modern hunter-gatherers were largely timeless populations, at stable equilibrium with
their respective environments, having had little motivation to change over the millennia
(Kelly 1995, 47). The Kalahari San, for example, were widely assumed to constitute
exemplars of an older form of human life, that prevailed everywhere on earth until
pastoralism and agriculture began to expand some 12,000 years ago (Suzman 2004).
Indeed, Suzman (2004) argues that the 1960s and 1970s was the last stage in ‘lost world
anthropology’, when researchers still hoped to find the last remaining populations of
these kinds of authentic hunter-gatherers.
to the study of human culture left themselves increasingly exposed to criticism from more
mainstream anthropology. Beyond the sub-field of hunter-gatherer studies, there were
renewed interests in the dynamics of culture-contact, and in acknowledging the enormous
impacts that colonialism and imperialism had had on all indigenous cultures. Particularly
problematic was the implicit choice within hunter-gatherer studies to portray modern
forager groups as relatively pristine, isolated, and self-sufficient units, whose internal
dynamics were stripped of both history, as well as the effects of participating in wider
spheres of interaction (Kelly 1995, 47). These older assumptions were subjected to
withering critique in the 1980s and early 1990s, which eventually called into question the
very empirical and epistemological basis of modern hunter-gatherer studies (see, for
example, Lee 1992).
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While focusing on forager groups in Africa, the revisionist position in the Kalahari Debate
had implications for all hunter-gatherer studies. If culture-contact had been a defining
feature of all modern hunter-gatherer groups, then could they still be understood as a
timeless, self-contained, and relatively distinctive kind of society, or were many aspects of
their behaviour a product of more recent historical developments such as colonialism
(Bender and Morris 1988; Kent 1992; Lee 1992; Solway and Lee 1990; Wilmsen and
Denbow 1990)?
As debates intensified, it became increasingly clear that hunter-gatherers had also been
in different kinds of culture-contact for many millennia, rather than a few decades or a
couple of centuries. Spielman and Eder (1994), for example, review the immense
literature on forager–farmer contacts amongst some of the ‘classic’ foraging societies,
including the Kalahari San, the Efe of north-east Zaire, the Kenyan Okiek, as well as the
Agta of the Phillipines and some South Asian groups, including the Hill Pandaram.
Common dynamics in these relationships include the acquisition of carbohydrate-rich
foods produced by farmers in exchange for forest products such as honey, resins, and
medicinal plants, and for labour procured by foragers.
These insights cast further doubt on the assumption that any modern hunter-gatherer
groups can be regarded as survivals of an older and relatively unchanged kind of human
existence—all are products of complex local transformations, and so their present-day
behaviours and attributes must be explained through reference to these wider processes.
Headland and Reid (1989, 52) concluded that until the misconception of hunter-gatherers
as primitive and isolated was corrected, ‘our image of hunter-gatherer culture and
ecology will remain incomplete and distorted’.
More generally, these debates about the role of history and culture-contact formed
(p. 15)
part of wider moves in anthropology to address the deep impacts of Western colonialism
on societies that ethnographers had hitherto regarded as being exotic, timeless, and
traditional (Asad 1991). In turn, however, revisionist portrayals of hunter-gatherers were
critiqued for generating negative new stereotypes—foragers were presented as powerless
colonial victims, or as a rural proletariat that was defined by a culture of poverty (Kelly
1995, 29).
Perhaps the major outcome of wider revisionist critique is that hunter-gatherer societies
are now considered within their wider ecological and historical setting, rather than as
direct analogies for the social organization and behaviour of ancient humans and early
Page 16 of 35
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Even directly after Man the hunter, many researchers were moving away from ecological
and adaptive approaches, and were starting to explore other themes and topics (Lee and
Daly 1999, 9). Hunter-gatherer studies had initially grown from a subsistence definition,
and rest on the implicit assumption that populations that rely entirely on wild resources
for their subsistence will have similar kinds of social organization and follow similar
patterns of behaviour. Even with the development of broader hunter-gatherer typologies
(see above), this generated a number of tensions within the wider anthropological
endeavour, which in North America still traced its roots back to the work of Boas. For
example, Kent (1996, 1) notes that ‘while understanding diversity has been a hallmark of
anthropological enquiries since the inception of the discipline hunter-gatherer (or
forager) studies tend to stress similarities’. Kent also argued that these dominant
theoretical orientations had emphasized economics, particularly subsistence, at the
expense of other realms of culture (Kent 1996, 17; and see Barnard 2004; Schweitzer
2000, 46).
Page 17 of 35
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Ironically, much of this work on traditional world views tended to be rather ahistorical,
highlighting ‘traditional’ bonds with the land, rather than the historical dynamics of
culture-contact. Other research has actually bridged these different concerns, and
highlights the enduring cosmological significance of foraging within a rapidly changing
world. Many modern foragers continue to regard hunting and gathering as an expression
of cultural identity and as means of fulfilling the kinds of moral obligations to ancestors
and to the land that are implicit to a sense of belonging. These bonds provide the
emotional and spiritual resources that underpin cultural resilience, although the
challenges to indigenous cultures raised by encroaching settlement, deforestation, and
other environmental impacts remain profound (see chapters in Part VI).
Archaeology of Hunter-Gatherers
These debates eventually fed through to archaeological research into prehistoric hunter-
gatherers, and it is worth tracing some of these impacts here. Two new and interlocking
streams of research can be identified: (a) ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers and (b) forager–
farmer contacts.
In the 1980s, archaeologists started to (re-) ‘discover’ a range of traits and behaviours
among ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers that did not fit with the early
nomadic style model of Lee and DeVore (1968). As new typologies were formulated,
‘complex’ hunter-gathers were added to the range of potential social forms, with
Northwest Coast groups serving as the definitive ethnographic examples (see O’Neill,
Part VI). In European archaeology, the emergence of these new typologies coincided with
the discovery of elaborate Mesolithic hunter-gatherer mortuary sites in the Baltic region,
which seemed to point to the existence of similarly ‘complex’ hunter-gatherer societies in
prehistory, especially in areas with rich aquatic ecosystems, which provided a resource
base for relatively sedentary and socially stratified societies prior to the transition to
farming (see Nilsson Stutz, Part IV).
Prior to this, it had been assumed that all prehistoric hunter-gatherers were mobile bands
with an egalitarian social order who would inevitably be replaced by the expansion of
agricultural societies with the onset of the Neolithic—this kind of scenario had been
predicted by nineteenth-century social evolutionary thinking, and was still implicit in
understandings of the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. For the first time, archaeologists
started to acknowledge the existence of well-established and economically viable hunter-
fisher-gatherer populations along many of Europe’s coastal regions and major waterways.
Moreover, there were increasing indications that the expansion of the agricultural
frontier had stalled for long (p. 17) periods—in some cases, for millennia—at the margins
of these complex hunter-gatherer societies, for example, in northern Europe. Although
agricultural expansion had ended for a time, it was also clear from the archaeological
Page 18 of 35
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evidence that there was a lively network of interaction and exchange across these
enduring forager–farmer frontiers.
At this point, insights from the Kalahari Debate (see above)—and about culture-contact
more generally—became increasingly important, serving as ethnographic parallels for
investigating the dynamic settings that characterized similar kinds of contact zones in
prehistory (Trigger 2006, 440–1). It was argued, for example, that exchange of partners
across these frontiers can eventually destabilize hunter-gatherer societies, but in earlier
contact phases, these new encounters provided structured opportunities for foragers to
select which attributes they chose to adopt or reject. What eventually emerged from
these ethnographically informed archaeological debates was a greater appreciation of the
agency of hunter-gatherers, and also the potential for economic intensification within
wider hunter-gatherer adaptations, rather than the rapid replacement of foraging by
farming (Zvelebil 1986; 2008; Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy 1984; and see Fewster 2001
and Part V).
Foragers could also actively select which attributes they adopted from farmers, ranging
from domesticates, through to prestige goods, new technologies, or even new ways of
perceiving the world, all of which could also be adopted in different sequences—economic
transformations did not necessarily precede ideological transformation (see below; e.g.
Thomas 1988; and see Cummings, Part V). Over time, the Neolithic came to be
understood as a long-term process of Neolithization, and the agency of local foragers also
meant that it was not a uniform and monolithic phenomenon, but was characterized by
enormous regional variability and historical contingency (Zvelebil 1998; 2005; also see
Part V introduction by Cummings).
As anthropologists began to move away from the core themes of Man the hunter and
undertake more historically-oriented and humanistic studies of hunting and gathering,
broadly similar intellectual shifts eventually started to take place among some British and
Scandinavian archaeologists (see Cannon, Part I, this volume). Much of this new post-
processual movement was a deliberate reaction to the unique intellectual history of New
Archaeology and its processual descendants, which had drawn heavily on the Neo-
evolutionary approaches of White and Steward—this had been especially pronounced in
hunter-gatherer studies (see above). These adaptive and ecological approaches had never
dominated in mainstream anthropology, and actually had been a rather minority
viewpoint, just as they were adopted readily into archaeology, and even dominated the
discipline for a time. Many archaeologists had adopted a commitment to seeking cross-
cultural understanding of ecological and adaptive relationships between prehistoric
hunter-gatherers and their environments, and also rigorous construction of analogies and
development of Middle Range Theory (see Lane, Part I). At the core of this approach was
the argument that behaviour and technology basically served an adaptive function,
especially among small-scale societies like hunter-gatherers.
Page 19 of 35
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In contrast, post-processual archaeologists asserted that all material culture and social
action were meaningfully constituted, and in seeking to counterbalance the earlier (p. 18)
emphasis on adaptation and economic factors, became increasingly interested in
exploring the higher rungs of Hawkes’s ladder of inference, for example, in relation to
ideology and world view (see above; Trigger 2006, 442–3). Also rejected was an emphasis
on seeking cross-cultural regularities—much of this reflected the inevitable rediscovery of
the long-standing anthropological concept of culture as a source of the cross-cultural
idiosyncratic variation in human beliefs and behaviours (Trigger 2006, 444). As a result,
post-processual archaeology championed relativistic and particularistic readings of the
archaeological record, an approach that can be broadly traced back to the anthropology
of Boas, and later to the new cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz (1965; 1973; and
see Clifford 1988; Turner 1967). Thus, the argument was that all cultures are unique and
all sequences of change are historically contingent.
Emphasizing historical contingency and cultural relativism also fed into critiques of the
ways in which New Archaeology had employed ethnographic analogies, at least in a
rigorous scientific and uniformitarian sense that Binford had originally envisaged. In
addition to the argument that all cultures need to be understood on their own terms, a
further problem was that even the earliest ethnographic or historical records of
indigenous cultures were produced long after sustained contact with European
populations. These made it difficult to justify the drawing of analogies between modern
and prehistoric hunter-gatherers, as the recent colonial histories of the latter had
generated very different kinds of attributes and behaviours that would not have been
present in earlier periods.
More generally, however, the broader post-processual critique has been much more
muted in hunter-gatherer archaeology than in the archaeology of later periods such as
the Neolithic (see Cannon 2011; see also Cannon, Part I). In part, this may be due to the
coarse-grained nature of much of the hunter-gatherer archaeological record, which often
lends itself to reconstructing little more than artefact typologies and broader patterns in
settlement and subsistence behaviour. In contrast, European Neolithic archaeologists
have long been confronted by dramatic monumental architecture, which demands a wider
range of interpretations. On other levels, the struggle to develop more resolutely social
and symbolic insights into prehistoric foragers may reflect the deeper legacy of ecological
Page 20 of 35
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and adaptive approaches, which have been absolutely central to the emergence of hunter-
gatherer studies. It was also compounded by the early post-processual rejection of the
ethnoarchaeology project on ideological and empirical grounds—additional field research
among contemporary foraging populations could have generated new ways of thinking
about the symbolic and social dimensions to hunter-gatherer landscapes and material
culture, and there are now growing signs that this kind of broader research agenda is
eventually starting to gather pace (see, for example, Lane, Part I; Jarvenpa and Brumbach,
Part VII; David and Kramer 2001).
Second, in the decades since Man the hunter, hunter-gatherer studies have become ever
more interdisciplinary, but as specialization has increased, lines of communication
between many different research areas have broken down (Panter-Brick et al. 2001a).
Some certainly lament the increasing ‘balkanization’ of the subject into a series of
distinct and highly focused branches, whose leading proponents rarely communicate with
one another (Panter-Brick et al. 2001b, 1). This situation has left hunter-gatherer studies
without a coherent paradigm (or even common assumptions) with which to explain
behavioural variability, or to set common research priorities (Ames 2004, 370). At present
there are certainly multiple, occasionally overlapping approaches, which range from
Page 21 of 35
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Third, some even go far as to argue that hunter-gatherer studies are based on an
unfruitful concept in the first place, as revealed by the initial internal critiques of
‘nomadic style’, as well as external revisionist critiques such as the Kalahari Debate. At a
deeper level, the very concept of a hunter-gatherer has also been recast as a unique,
historically contingent, and now outdated reflection of earlier modes of Western
intellectual thinking; many other approaches to understanding cultural diversity appear
to offer more fruitful research directions and require greater exploration (see Pluciennik,
Part I). Even if it is agreed that ‘hunters and gatherers’ do actually exist at some
conceptual and empirical level, almost everything else about them is a matter for
relentless contestation (Lee 1992). In exploring (p. 20) some of these debates, Kelly
argues, however, that the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ remains a useful heuristic device and a
good point of analytical departure (Kelly 1995, 34–5).
Research Outlook
Looking across current research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-
gatherers, several broad directions of current enquiry can be identified:
First, these include what might generally be termed ‘purists’, who tend to trace their
intellectual inheritance back to the ecological and adaptive approaches of Julian Steward
(1936; 1938; 1955), maintaining a rigorous commitment to a scientific, cross-cultural and
comparative analysis of human behaviours. A good recent example is the work of Binford
(2001), who combines analysis of ethnographic datasets from 390 groups of modern
foragers with detailed information on environments (world climates, plants, animals) to
develop global scale ‘pattern recognition’ in hunter-gatherer behavioural variability.
Earlier forms of cultural ecology have now been replaced by a new generation of
approaches, including human behavioural ecology, and genes-culture co-evolutionary
theory (Durham 1991) or the ‘dual inheritance theory’ of Boyd and Richerson (1985;
2005), which examines the role of social learning and decision-making processes in the
replication of cultural traditions (see Garvey and Bettinger, Part I). Advocates argue that
together the different elements of this broad Neo-Darwinian perspective generate a
coherent framework for integrating insights from optimal foraging theory, demography,
health, nutritional status, technology, cultural diversification, territoriality, and mobility,
but in ways that emphasize the capacity for human decision-making processes, the
dynamics of social learning, and the specific costs and benefits of different lines of
activity (Kelly 1995; Shennan 2002; 2004; 2009).
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studies, the approach tends to follow older concerns with generating robust models that
are testable, and generalizable, e.g. via faunal studies (David and Kramer 2001, 116–37).
Finally, looking back over the past century-and-a-half, one further development of
fundamental importance in hunter-gatherer studies—and in anthropology more generally
—has also been a growing engagement between the societies being studied, and those
conducting the research. If in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a
massive gulf, with scholars objectifying hunters and treating them as objects of scrutiny,
then by the start of Boasian field anthropology, the boundaries were starting to break
down through the experiences of undertaking sustained fieldwork (Lee and Daly 1999, 7).
These developments eventually promoted a general moral and ethical concern among
anthropologists to make their research more meaningful and relevant to local peoples, as
well as to include members of these communities into professional research activities.
This greater engagement with indigenous peoples has not been a smooth or easy process,
and demands balancing the roles of scholar as well as advocate, and also the need to
liaise closely with members of local indigenous groups, a point emphasized by several
chapters in Part VI (Lee and Daly 1999, 7).
Page 23 of 35
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In more recent periods then, the long-term trend in both anthropology and archaeology
has been towards building better and more inclusive working relationships with
indigenous peoples. The production of knowledge has increasingly become a two-way
process. It is no longer possible to be a detached observer, and the role of field
researcher has now become merged with the role of public communicator, and
occasionally legal advocate. More generally, research into hunter-gatherer populations
both past and present has been increasingly influenced by agendas set by local
communities and interest groups. However, the practice of an ethically responsible
scholarship remains challenging on many levels (Trigger 1996, 11–12; and see chapters
in Part VI).
After Man the hunter was published in 1968, scholars interested in the archaeology and
anthropology of hunter-gatherers began to meet on a more regular basis at the CHAGS
meetings (Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies). These conferences served to
provide a common forum for debate, ensuring that the field—as far as possible—
maintained a sense of collective focus and identity, often around exploration of new
themes and overarching debates (see Sterling, Chapter 7, this volume, for a summary;
and Lee and Daly 1999, 10–11). Most of these meetings also generated critical syntheses
in the form of books and edited volumes, as well as debates that were played out in
different specialist journals. Together, these milestone meetings and associated
publications can be used to chart the development and growing diversification of the field
from the late 1960s onwards.
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Part II explores hunting and gathering as a distinctive way of life that formed the general
behavioural context for early human evolution. In placing these developments within a
long-term global context, it critically engages with evidence for foraging activities among
Neanderthal and early modern human societies, and focuses on understanding local
developments, extinctions, and transformations, as well as wider population dispersals
within several key regions, including Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Part III investigates the accelerating global transformations that were affecting hunter-
gatherer societies in Europe, Africa, and Asia in the terminal Pleistocene and earlier
Holocene. It details the enormous climatic and biogeographic shifts that were taking
place at this time, and tracks some of the human responses to the local and regional
opportunities and constraints that this environmental change generated, including
colonization of new regions and continents and the emergence of new kinds of
subsistence strategies.
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culture, and capable of uniquely artistic expression. Other chapters explore how many of
the innovations and cultural developments that tend to be associated with early farming
societies actually emerged first in preceding hunter-gatherer societies. These include
social complexity, the world’s earliest pottery technologies, as well as initial steps
towards plant and animal domestications. It was these latter two innovations that
eventually generated the potential for full reliance on new agro-pastoral economies,
albeit at the expense of earlier foraging traditions. Other chapters explore how hunter-
gatherers were responsible for cumulative elaborations in mortuary behaviour, and also
for new kinds of coastal adaptation that provided the setting for new forms of symbolic,
social, and political elaboration.
Focus then shifts towards understanding the eventual fate—but also the remarkable
cultural resilience and behavioural dynamism—of hunter-gatherer societies living in a
world increasingly characterized by the relentless expansion of agro-pastoral farming, as
well as the challenges and opportunities associated with coeval developments such as the
rise of urbanism, nation states, and global empires. Part V explores how some of these
earlier developments triggered the emergence of complex and historically contingent
forager–farmer interactions in a range of dynamic frontier settings; it also explores how
these changes led in some areas to the eventual demise and/or assimilation of older
patterns of hunting and gathering, but in others to the rise of increasingly
‘commercialized’ foraging practices. In many world regions, the rise of exchange-
orientated hunter-gatherer societies reflected opportunities for close interaction and
balanced coexistence with adjacent farmers, pastoralists, and in more recent periods,
with the commercial demands of states and empires.
Part VI builds on these themes, and explores some of the ethnographically documented
forager societies of more recent historical periods. Chapters present detailed critical
reviews of the ethnohistoric and anthropological understandings of ‘modern’ hunter-
gatherers (after 1500 AD) in several key world regions, including ‘classic’ study regions
like Australia and Africa, which have figured prominently in general discussions about
hunter-gatherers and their cultural dynamics, as well as other groups or regions that are
relatively new to these international debates. Rather than present general ethnographic
descriptions of local populations (see, e.g. Lee and Daly 1999), chapters aim primarily to
understand regional research traditions, examining why certain perspectives and
approaches have tended to characterize discussion of specific hunter-gatherer societies,
and also exploring the range of future work that remains to be done in many of these
regions.
Part VII concludes the handbook by tracing out new avenues for the long-term
development of hunter-gatherer research. Chapters in this part affirm the diversity and
vibrancy in current hunter-gatherer research, methodologically, empirically, and
theoretically. Together, authors contributing to this part outline a sense of long-range
strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions
can ensure that the field of hunter-gatherer research continues to generate penetrating
insights into the factors underlying human cultural and behavioural diversity, and also
Page 27 of 35
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how the academic study of hunter-gatherer populations and their archaeological and
cultural heritage now increasingly involves active participation by, and engagement with,
indigenous peoples and descendant communities right across the globe.
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Peter Jordan
Vicki Cummings
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