Introduction

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Introduction

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Peter Jordan and Vicki Cummings

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers
Edited by Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, and Marek Zvelebil
Print Publication Date: Apr 2014
Online Publication Date: Jan
2014

Subject: Archaeology, History and Theory of Archaeology

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199551224.013.063

Abstract and Keywords

This general introductory chapter examines the history of hunter-gatherer researchand outlines the general goals
of the handbook. It starts by tracing the early origins of the concept of hunter-gatherers, and investigates its
increasing role in the emerging disciplines of archaeology and anthropology in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Factors leading to the emergence of modern hunter-gatherer studies in the mid-twentieth
century are examined, and some of the foundational debates and overarching theoretical frameworks are
reviewed. The increasing intellectual diversification of the field is explored, and a summary overview of the main
contemporary research directions is provided. Having critically examined these earlier developments, the chapter
concludes by outlining the rationale for a new handbook on the archaeology and anthropology of huntergatherers, and sumarizes its structure and thematic content.
Keywords: History of hunter-gatherer research, ethnoarchaeology, humanist approaches, revisionism, variability, current challenges

THE study of hunting and gathering populations remains a vibrant interdisciplinary research field situated at the

intellectual heart of both archaeology and anthropology. Early considerations of hunting and gathering societies
can be found among the work of eighteenth-century intellectuals, and a more detailed treatment of the foraging
way of life was central to the founding and development of both archaeology and anthropology as closely related
academic disciplines in the nineteenth century.
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 huntergatherers 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, 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.

Why Study Hunter-Gatherers?

The investigation of hunter-gatherers is central to the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, both of which
attempt to document and explain the immense diversity in human cultures (Ames 2004, 364). Until around 12,000
years ago, virtually all humanity lived as foragers (Lee and Daly 1999, 1). Therefore, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle
represents the conditions in which key periods of human evolution occurred prior to the emergence and
subsequent spread of agro-pastoral farming in the Holocene (Barnard 2004, 1). While living as foragers humanity
developed the definitive physical traits and mental capacities that are shared by all people to this day (e.g. Mithen
1996). Due to this important historical legacy, the study of hunting and gathering societies has come to serve as a
testing ground for general theories about human evolution, as well as to speculate about the original social,

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Introduction
ideological, and political condition of all humanity.
(p. 2) The study of forager societies may also hold the key to some of the central questions about human social
life, politics, and gender, as well as diet, nutrition, sustainable humanenvironment 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).

Early Research on Hunter-Gatherer Societies

The communities who eventually became labelled as hunter-gatherers saw increasing attention in European
political and social thought from the sixteenth century onwards (Lee and Daly 1999, 7; see Barnard, Pluciennik,
Part I). Speculations about these societies drew on the accounts of savages that were being collected by
European travellers and explorers in newly discovered areas of the globe, all of which made the subsequent
intellectual treatment and classification of these diverse populations a highly contingent and subjective exercise
(Pluciennik, Part I). However, the more formal intellectual development of hunter-gatherer studies closely parallels
the disciplinary history of North American anthropology (covering all four sub-fields: cultural, physical, and
linguistic anthropology, and also archaeology), and in Europe, the history of social anthropology (i.e. the
ethnographic study of contemporary societies) and archaeology (the study of past societies through their
surviving material remains).
With rapid nineteenth-century growth in European imperialism, colonial settlement, and increasing general
knowledge about the exotic peoples living in other parts of the world, as well as growing archaeological
appreciation of the extended antiquity of humanity, contemporary thinkers tried to rationalize this new information,
and attempted to find 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).
More generally, many founding researchers in anthropology either undertook extended ethnographic fieldwork, or
completed detailed analytical treatments of (p. 3) hunter-gatherer societies. Fieldworkers included Franz Boas
(1966), who visited the Canadian Arctic (1888) and the Pacific Northwest Coast, followed by Kroebers extensive
research in California (Kroeber 1925), and Robert Lowies work among the Crow Indians (Lowie 1935). Other
important research traditions included Danish studies in Greenland and Arctic Canada, early ethnographic
fieldwork in Australia (Keen, Part VI), and also major international projects, including the Jesup North Pacific
Expedition (Lee and Daly 1999, 78).
Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boass experience of fieldwork led him to attack
classical evolutionary schemes on both empirical and moral groundshe 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.
Boas went on to develop a contrasting perspective on human cultural diversity. In rejecting uniform patterns or
discrete cultural stages, he argued that all local cultures are essentially unique formations, which needed to be
understood on their own terms (cultural relativism), and that their traits and attributes were historically contingent

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Introduction
constellations produced through highly specific cultural histories or via contacts and diffusion. As a result, these
distinctive cultural patterns should always be studied on an individual case-by-case basis (historical
particularism), and could never be lumped together into universal stages, as social evolutionary thinkers had
suggested.
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, 1801). 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).
A focus on hunter-gatherers can be identified in the work of other early European anthropologists. For example, in
France early library-based research was conducted by Emile Durkheim, writing on Australian Aborigine religion in
The elementary forms of the religious life (French = 1912; English version 1915 which is the one cited here), and
Marcel Mauss (Mauss and Beauchat 1979 [1906]) on the seasonal life of the Eskimo. Two decades later, Claude
Lvi-Strauss started with hunter-gatherers and fieldwork in Brazil, before looking at the origins of kinship and
mythology (Lvi-Strauss 1969 [1949]). Important early work by British anthropologists included Malinowski on
Australian Aborigines (1913) and Radcliffe-Brown (1922) among the Andaman Islanders. Radcliffe-Brown (1931)
later produced a classic work on Australian Aborigine social organization and helped to establish a focus on
studies of kinship as a definitive feature of British social anthropology.
(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 (Thomsons
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, 12138).
In the later nineteenth century, it is also possible to identify a growing mutual engagement between the
archaeological and anthropological study of hunter-gatherers, a trend that persists through to the present. Early
prehistorians started to draw on ethnographic parallels to speculate about the kinds of human existence that
defined earlier stages of prehistory (Trigger 2006, 13855). For example, Lubbock, in Prehistoric times: as
illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages (Lubbock 1865) drew on
general ethnographic sketches of modern tribal societies. He 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, 1713).
This early archaeological use of ethnographic information also implicitly reflected contemporary social evolutionary
thinking. Modern hunter-gatherers were assumed to have become trapped in an earlier mode of human existence,
and as prehistoric archaeologists struggled to make sense of the artefacts they were finding, they looked to
detailed ethnographic studies to provide relatively direct insights into what was assumed to be a distinctive general
stage of human development. In this way, the study of hunter-gatherer ethnography formed a way for
archaeologists to understand an earlier stage of prehistoric existence that almost all other humanity was assumed
to have progressed away from. The increasing use of ethnography in archaeology continued with William Sollas
(1911), who was the first to define hunter-gatherers as a specific way of life in Ancient hunters and their modern
representatives. Again, he used ethnographic descriptions of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups such as the
modern Eskimo, who were argued to represent prehistoric Magdelanian people, and African Bushmen, who were

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Introduction
used as parallels for Aurignacian hunters.
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.

(p. 5) The Emergence of Modern Hunter-Gatherer Studies

In the early part of the twentieth century, and particularly in the 1930s, anthropological analysis of huntergatherers 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. Boass historical
particularism still formed the mainstream of anthropological thinking, but there was growing interest in revisiting and
updating some 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 humanenvironment adaptations. Stewards 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. Stewards 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 proposing a materialist and natural science perspective on human behaviour,
especially among simpler band-scale societies (Schweitzer 2000, 35). Cultural ecology had a dramatic impact on
American anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s. However, it was never a nomothetic approach, and sought initially
to understand only the particular details of local cultural patterns on a case-by-case basis, rather than to derive
general principles that could be applicable to any cultureenvironmental situation (Kelly 1995, 423; see Garvey
and Bettinger, Part I).
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-Browns (1931)

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Introduction
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 huntergatherer 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 Clarks 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 (194952), 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 (Hawkess ladder of inference). This kind of thinking about what
archaeological analysis couldand could notreconstruct in the way of details about prehistoric societies and
their behaviour tended to reinforce existing trends. Understanding prehistoric hunter-gatherers was therefore
regarded as being an exercise in the reconstruction of palaeoeconomy; that is, past subsistence activities.
By the mid-twentieth century, there was also growing interest among American archaeologists in exploring
evidence for adaptive humanenvironment relations, especially in relation to the continents 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 mans 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, 3956). It was on the basis of these assumptions that he was led to
argue that archaeology had a unique contribution to makeit could address the same kinds of research problems
as Stewards 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

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Introduction
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 empirically
measurablethese hunting and gathering cultures also formed a major part of the archaeological record,
especially in North America. As with Stewards cultural (p. 8) ecology, Binfords parallel concerns with
understanding long-term processes of adaptation ensured that hunter-gatherers remained in central focus.
Moreover, this renewed interest in identifying and explaining cross-cultural regularities in hunter-gatherer
technology, subsistence, and other behavioural attributes now united archaeologists and anthropologists around a
common goal.

The Founding Conferences: Man the Hunter

After the Second World War, anthropological research into hunter-gatherers had coalesced around the two
primary themes of kinship and ecological relations, while archaeologists were also becoming increasingly
interested in acquiring cross-cultural ethnographic data on forager societies in order to help them better
understand the archaeological record. Ethnographic field research conducted within a cultural ecology framework
was also generating large bodies of new empirical data on hunter-gatherer subsistence and social relationships,
and this required critical synthesis in relation to some of the new theoretical concerns that emerged at the same
time (Burch 1994, 2).
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-gatherersand 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).
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).

(p. 9) Early Formulations of Hunter-Gatherers: Nomadic Style

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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 arguedderived largely on materials gathered
from southern Africathat 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:
1. If hunter-gatherers do move around a lot to get food, the amount of personal property has to be kept low,
and this constraint on property ownership also keeps wealth differentials low, ensuring an egalitarian social
order.
2. The nature of the food supply keeps hunter-gatherer groups small in sizenormally under 50 personsas
larger concentrations rapidly exhaust local resources and cause members to disperse into smaller foraging
units.
3. Hunter-gatherer groups do not maintain exclusive rights to resources: fluid and flexible situations are the
norm due to the waxing and waning of inter-group obligations, and widespread visiting and guesting. This
ensures reciprocal access to food resources, with this open-access system underpinned by inter-group
marriage.
4. Production of food surpluses is not common. Everybody knows where food resources are located and so
the environment itself is the store house. Also, each person can monitor the movement of others, so there is
no fear that these resources will be secretly appropriated.
5. Frequent visiting prevents particular groups from becoming too attached to specific territories, and a lack
of personal and collective property means that mobility is not impeded. Conflict is easily resolved by group
fissioning and reformation into new social units.
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.
These lingering assumptions were confronted by Marshall Sahlins, who outlined an alternative perspective on the
ideology of foraging (Sahlins 1968; and see 1972). He presented limited ethnographic data from Africa and
Australia that appeared to demonstrate that foragers actually work very few hours to meet their basic economic
needs, which Sahlins interpreted as a reflection of deeper cultural confidence in being able to procure resources in
even the most extreme environment (Lee and DeVore 1968, 6).
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.
Sahlinss influential arguments added further detail to Lee and DeVores initial formulations of nomadic style, and
led to the creation of a generalized foraging model that combined deep environmental confidence, a lack of

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Introduction
materialism, low population density, egalitarianism, lack of territoriality, minimum storage, and an easy flux in band
composition (Kelly 1995, 1415).

Debating Hunter-Gatherer Variability

The Man the hunter conference set the tone for discussion up through to the present time (Binford 2001, 21), and
crucially, stimulated further ethnographic fieldwork to collect the empirical data required to test and refine these
early models. But even at the original conference there had been preliminary discussions about documented
aspects of forager behaviour that did not equate with the predictions of nomadic style. A good example is
Suttless (1968) chapter, which focused on the Pacific Northwest Coast (see ONeill, 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 Suttless 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).
Several early attempts at formulating higher-resolution taxonomic systems became particularly influential, including
Woodburns (1980; 1982) distinction between immediate return and delayed return hunter-gatherers. Additional
contrasts were also drawn between simple and complex hunter-gatherer societies. Simple hunter-gatherers were
best exemplified by nomadic style, which was argued to represent a broadly accurate portrayal of many African
and some Australian groups. In contrast, many other hunter-gatherer societies exhibited a wide range of strikingly
different attributes and behaviours. The societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast are generally deployed as the
definitive ethnographic example of complex hunter-gatherers: they exhibit high population densities, accumulate
enormous material wealth, live in permanent settlements, and engage in competitive feasting to maintain
entrenched social stratification (Arnold 1996; Hayden 1981; Price 1981; Price and Brown 1985; Testart 1982;
Woodburn 1980; Yesner 1980; and see Zvelebil 1998, 7; also ONeill, Part VI).
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 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).

New Archaeology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Hunter-Gatherers

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From Lubbock (1865), through to Sollas (1911) and Clark (1939), archaeologists studying prehistoric huntergatherers had made frequent use of ethnographic analogues to understand (p. 12) and illustrate the lifeways of
prehistoric hunter-gatherers. These parallels tended to be rather descriptive, and generally drew on social
evolutionary frameworks in order to justify making links between societies living in such different time periodsif all
foraging cultures formed a single uniform stage of human development, then ethnography could provide a rather
direct entry route into understanding the hunting societies of the more distant past.
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 longterm 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 Binfords 1978 study of
the Nunamiut in Alaska, Goulds work in Australia (Gould 1969), and John Yellens 1977 study of the Kung (David
and Kramer 2001; and see Lane, Part I for a full discussion of hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology).
As part of these wider methodological developments, the use of ethnographic parallels was also subjected to much
closer scrutiny. In time, a more explicitly theorized treatment of ethnographic analogies became one of the core
methodological achievements of New Archaeology and its processual offspring. In seeking to make more
systematic use of existing ethnographic datasetsas well as to generate new findings through ethnoarchaeology
archaeologists went on to become both the greatest producers, and also the most eager and enthusiastic
consumers, of information pertaining to hunter-gatherer behavioural and socio-political diversity (Ames 2004).
A good example of this kind of interdisciplinary research trend is Binfords influential forager-collector model, which
is presented in Willow smoke and dogs tails (1980). As noted above, archaeologists had earlier assumed that all
hunter-gatherers formed a single kind of society, and this justified the general use of modern ethnographic
analogies in archaeological interpretations, irrespective of specific environmental settings, and fundamental
differences in subsistence, mobility strategies, and other aspects of behaviour. This kind of logic enabled modern
San forager groups from the Kalahari Desert to be readily used as rather direct analogues for a wide range of
prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.
Fresh from ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Alaska (Binford 1978), Binford wanted to demonstrate that there were
many hunting and gathering societies whose behavioural attributes were fundamentally different to those of the
San, who were still being regarded as the paradigmatic examples of the nomadic style thought to typify all huntergatherers (Binford 1980). Having worked closely with the Nunamiut in Alaska, Binford wanted to highlight that there
were potentially very different ways of positioning people relative to resources, and that these contrasting
strategies (foraging versus collecting) tended to co-vary in a (p. 13) rather predictable way with both latitude and
the seasonal availability of local resources. Establishing these broad distinctions in adaptive strategies provided a
way of summarizing this recognized ethnographic variability in ways that could be useful to archaeologists seeking
to make sense of prehistoric data. In fact, Binford went on to devote most of his career to accounting for patterns
of variability in hunter-gatherer adaptation (Trigger 2006, 394). In turn, his work made fundamental contributions to
hunter-gatherer studies more generally, and also served to maintain the inherently interdisciplinary character of
this endeavour.
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

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Introduction
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 basis for
developing more resolutely anthropological (or behavioural) perspective on spatial distribution patterns in material
culture, generating deeper, cross-cultural insights that would eventually have utility for archaeologists (Clarke
1968, 36888).

Revisionist Approaches and Culture-Contact

In the immediate post-Man the hunter era, the paradigmatic goal for modern hunter-gatherer studies was to reveal
definitive socio-economic and cultural patterns, so that once these common attributes had been identified, higherlevel generalizations could eventually be drawn from the confusion and noise of particularistic ethnographic
detail. Such systematic behavioural insights would also be useful for making archaeological inferences. In seeking
cross-cultural regularitiesrather than variationsbetween hunter-gatherer groups (Bird-David 1996), the general
quest was to identify and understand archetypal forager societies. Eventually, hunter-gatherers from the Kalahari
Desert of South Africa came to be understood as typical not just of all contemporary foragers, but also to personify
the original human condition (Kelly 1995, 15).
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.
(p. 14) However, those scholars who continued to advocate a strongly ecological approach 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).
Initially, this critique focused on ethnographic portrayals of forager groups in southern Africa, and went on to
become known as the Kalahari Debate (see Hitchcock, Part VI). These groups had been presented as hunters and
gatherers living under changing circumstances, but still exemplars of a long-standing kind of original human
adaptation. This traditionalist perspective was increasing challenged by revisionist arguments, which took into
account the complex history of the wider region. These alternative insights emphasized that all the Kalahari
foraging groups had been in long-term culture-contact with surrounding farmers and pastoralists, and rather than
epitomizing some kind of original human condition, were perhaps better understood as a kind of impoverished rural
underclass, which had been pushed into marginal areas through the impacts of wider economic and political
developments that had played out across the region, including the more recent effects of European colonialism
(Wilmsen 1983; 1989).
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),

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Introduction
for example, review the immense literature on foragerfarmer 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 existenceall 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.
(p. 15) More generally, these debates about the role of history and culture-contact formed 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 huntergatherers were critiqued for generating negative new stereotypesforagers 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 hominins (Ames 2004, 366). As the importance of culture-contact among
hunter-gatherers became more widely acknowledged, anthropologists actually embraced this theme as a major
new research direction focused on understanding the inherent flexibility and dynamism of foraging societies within
particular historical and ecological settings (see chapters in Part VI). Paradoxically, these new anthropological
insights into foragerfarmer contacts, and the historical contingency of much hunter-gatherer behaviour became of
increasing interest to archaeologists in the 1990s, as they sought new ways to understand potentially analogous
encounters in prehistory, such as the transition to farming in Europe (see below and Part V).

Historical and Humanist Research Traditions

Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers
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).
In response, some hunter-gatherer researchers increasingly employed historical frameworks and went on to
examine the fate of foragers as they became encapsulated minorities within empires and nation states in both
Africa and beyond. But even as the traditionalist/revisionist Kalahari Debate raged back and forth, neither side
actually examined the Bushmans own perception of the world (Barnard 2004, 7). In response, Bird-David (1996,
302) argued that the diverse ways in which hunter-gatherers (p. 16) understand their worlds have long been
overlooked and that more attention should be given to symbolic worlds and world views of these peoples. In a
series of seminal papers (1990; 1992; 1996) she explored forager relationships with the environment, arguing
persuasively that what lies at the core of local concerns is not maximization of leisure time (cf. Sahlins 1968;
1972), but an aim to maintain good and caring relationships with others and with the environment (Bird-David
1990). This increasing concern with investigating hunter-gatherer world views has led to renewed interest in

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Introduction
engaging with older anthropological constructs such as shamanism and animism, as well as more general research
in hunter-gatherer perceptions of the environment (e.g. Ingold 2000; Layton and Ucko 1999; Whitley 2000; 2001).
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) foragerfarmer 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 ONeill, Part VI). In European
archaeology, the emergence of these new typologies coincided with the discovery of elaborate Mesolithic huntergatherer mortuary sites in the Baltic region, which seemed to point to the existence of similarly complex huntergatherer 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 MesolithicNeolithic transition. For the first time, archaeologists started to acknowledge the
existence of well-established and economically viable hunter-fisher-gatherer populations along many of Europes
coastal regions and major waterways. Moreover, there were increasing indications that the expansion of the
agricultural frontier had stalled for long (p. 17) periodsin some cases, for millenniaat 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 evidence that there was a lively network of interaction and
exchange across these enduring foragerfarmer frontiers.
At this point, insights from the Kalahari Debate (see above)and about culture-contact more generallybecame
increasingly important, serving as ethnographic parallels for investigating the dynamic settings that characterized
similar kinds of contact zones in prehistory (Trigger 2006, 4401). 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 sequenceseconomic 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 longterm 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).

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Introduction
Post-Processual and Interpretive Archaeologies
As anthropologists began to move away from the core themes of Man the hunter and undertake more historicallyoriented 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
Stewardthis 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.
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 Hawkess ladder of inference, for example, in
relation to ideology and world view (see above; Trigger 2006, 4423). Also rejected was an emphasis on seeking
cross-cultural regularitiesmuch 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.
Paradoxically, even though post-processual archaeology rejected the attempt to use ethnoarchaeological
research to build Middle Range Theory it still drew readily but often implicitly on ethnographic insights. These were
often deployed in an illustrative and rather eclectic way (e.g. Tilley 1994), and only if they supported a desired
interpretation or particular perspective, an approach that can lack analytical rigour and intellectual transparency.
In the end, however, post-processual archaeologylike processual archaeologywent on to become a heavy
consumer of anthropological theory, but in reacting to New Archaeology, opted to borrow from the cultural and
idealist side of the anthropology spectrum, rather than from the materialist, adaptive, and functional side that
Binford had advocated (Trigger 2006, 4803).
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
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 groundsadditional 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,

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Introduction
for example, Lane, Part I; Jarvenpa and Brumbach, Part VII; David and Kramer 2001).

(p. 19) Current Challenges

Contemporary research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunters and gatherers has now become
extremely diverse, though the specialist field appears to have remained distinctive and intellectually vibrant
enough to have generated and accommodated many different approaches and a diversity of theoretical interests.
These equip hunter-gatherer studies with the capacity to investigate, among other things, variability in technology
and the use of habitats, gender roles and their relationship to diet, nutrition, health, and demography, as well as the
use and spread of languages, local world views and cosmologies, the dynamics of social organization, and longterm responses to environmental change (Panter Brick et al. 2001b, 67).
Despite the apparent intellectual resilience of hunter-gatherer studies, several recent milestone reviews have
raised major concerns, some even predicting the imminent demise of the field as a distinct arena of enquiry (e.g.
Ames 2004, 371; Burch 1994, 454). First, one basic concern, especially for field anthropologists, is that
opportunities to collect new ethnographic data are rapidly disappearing due to relentless assimilation and the wider
transformations generated by the acceleration of globalization and associated environmental degradation. In
contrast, this is not the case for the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, and much important research remains to be
done, from building basic cultural and chronological sequences in many remoter regions, through to developing
new research directions in some of the better-studied areas. And in more recent periods, much more research
could be directed at analysis of colonial era archives to improve current understandings of hunter-gatherer
ethnohistory, an opportunity highlighted by several chapters in Part VI.
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 (PanterBrick 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 strongly materialist
to the strongest post-modernist approaches. Some scholars are particularly critical of a growing focus on
generating particularistic histories; that is, research conducted without any overarching theory to bind it all
together (Ames 2004, 371).
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, 345).

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

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Introduction
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).
In archaeology, much research into hunter-gatherers, particularly in North America, tends to follow this kind of
ecologically orientated and broadly Neo-Darwinian approach, but there are also important exceptions. When
applied in ethnoarchaeological field 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, 11637).
Second, it is possible to identify a more loosely defined group of researchers interested in exploring historically
contingent, humanist, interpretive, or multi-vocalist perspectives on hunter-gatherers (see Cannon, Part I, this
volume). The concern here is exploring forager flexibility and diversity, the uniqueness of local cultures, as well as
the significance, lived experience, identities, and personhoods caught up in the practices of hunting and gathering.
These different anthropological approaches and research themes are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and
divergent sets of insights can be creatively combined, as the goal is to create a more holistic understanding of
different cultures (Kent 1996). In archaeology, a similar trend can be identified in the recent post-processual or
interpretive streams of hunter-gatherer research, but development of these alternative approaches has tended to
remain rather limited to date, and often characterizes scholarship in northern Europe. The more general goal is to
assert the meaningful nature of material culture and the subjectivity of human experience and social action, rather
than deploy more rigorous cross-cultural analogies to explain human behavioural responses to environmental
constraints (Cunningham 2003).
More generally, the archaeological investigation of hunter-gatherers is now being revolutionized by new
methodologies that enable the biographic life-histories of individuals (p. 21) to be reconstructed in an
unprecedented degree of detail, for example, in relation to scientific analysis of diet, health, activity patterns, and
mobility (see Schulting, Part VII), but also in relation to interpretations of personhood, social identities, and the
performance of mortuary rituals (see Nilsson Stutz, Part IV). These studies of individual life-histories across
cemetery populations, regions, and periods transcend any simplistic distinction between the kinds of adaptive and
symbolic perspectives noted above, and represent one arena where perhaps the most detailed and exciting
hunter-gatherer archaeology remains to be done (see Jordan and Cummings, Part VII).
Finally, looking back over the past century-and-a-half, one further development of fundamental importance in
hunter-gatherer studiesand in anthropology more generallyhas 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).
The New Archaeology also fundamentally changed older perceptions of hunter-gatherers by emphasizing their
cultural variability and long-term dynamism, albeit in terms of sophisticated adaptive responses to the local
environment. Hitherto it had been assumed that since the nineteenth century many first nation populations in North
America had changed little over time and were relatively backward and culturally static (Trigger 2006, 409).
Importantly, greater global engagement between archaeologists and local indigenous communities is now
becoming an essential component of all contemporary archaeological research and fieldwork.
In more recent periods then, the long-term trend in both anthropology and archaeology has been towards building

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Introduction
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, 1112; and see chapters in Part VI).

Why an Oxford Handbook of Hunter-Gatherers?

These different research streams have generated an enormous and ever-expanding interdisciplinary literature on
hunter-gatherers. Even as hunter-gatherer studies began to regard itself as a distinctive sub-discipline in the late
1960s, there has never been much (p. 22) consensus, and vibrant debate was an important trend from the outset
(Lee and DeVore 1968). Grappling with the breadth and intellectual diversity of this scholarship has now become a
daunting task, even for established researchers seeking to explore new themes, approaches, (pre)historic periods,
and/or geographic regions.
After Man the hunter was published in 1968, scholars interested in the archaeology and anthropology of huntergatherers 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 fieldas 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, 1011). 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.
Over recent decades additional flagship publications in hunter-gatherer research have included the Smithsonian
Institutions multi-volume Handbook of North American Indians, which includes basic ethnographic and some
archaeological and environmental information pertaining to a wide range of cultures, many of whom were
traditionally hunter-gatherers. Similar series exist for other world regions. Lee and Dalys (1999) Cambridge
encyclopaedia of hunters and gatherers provides short regional archaeological summaries and basic
ethnographic descriptions of global hunter-gatherer populations, as well as short essays on general themes. Other
important recently edited books have included Panter-Brick et al.s Hunter-gatherers: an interdisciplinary
perspective (2001a), and Barnards Hunter-gatherers in history, archaeology and anthropology (2004); the field
also now has its own online journal: Before farming: the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers.
More generally, however, the archaeologists studying prehistoric hunter-gatherers have tended to publish on more
regionally focused periods and topics, though some major recent volumes include the regular proceedings of the
Mesolithic in Europe conference (MESO) which is held every five years (Bonsall 1990; Larsson et al. 2000;
McCartan et al. 2008). Large-scale international and interdisciplinary collaborative research projects such as the
Baikal Hokkaido Archaeology Project are now starting to make important contributions to the literature on
prehistoric hunter-gatherers, for example, Weber et al.s Prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Baikal Region, Siberia
(2010). Other recent comparative archaeological studies include Erens Hunter-gatherer behavior: human
response during the Younger Dryas (2012), which explores how forager populations adapted behaviourally and
technologically in the face of major climatic change. In addition, regional and specialist journals continue to publish
a steady flow of papers on prehistoric hunter-gatherers and their adaptive dynamics, culture-contacts, and general
lifeways.
On some levels, the growing intellectual diversity in hunter-gatherer studies is a sign of a healthy research field
that is engaging with new themes and approaches, but it also courts the danger of intellectual fragmentation
(Panter-Brick et al. 2001b, 1). After several years of delay, a new CHAGS meeting was held in Liverpool, UK, in June
2013, with its organizers promising to generate reflection on the current state of hunter-gatherer research in
relation to the overarching theme of cultural resilience and vulnerability. Individual conference sessions spanned
such diverse topics as population genetics of hunter-gatherers, analysis of craft traditions and social learning,
through to the language of perception, and the study of forager (p. 23) ritual and dance. It is interesting that all
these topics can still happily find a common intellectual home under the banner of hunter-gatherer studies, which

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Introduction
remain at the very heart of anthropological enquiry, and serving to illuminate and illustrate many of the basic
theoretical problems and their practical solutions (Myers 2004, 175). And looking further ahead, the next CHAGS
has already been scheduled for Vienna, Austria, in 2015. Despite these positive developments, it has been some
time since there has been an attempt to publish an extended critical overview of hunter-gatherer studies,
especially one that combines research into both the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers, and also
integrates theoretical perspectives with regional and thematic case studies.
The Oxford handbook on the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers aims to fill this important gap in
the current academic literature. It seeks to critically review past developments, but more importantly, to outline
some of the most important new directions for future research. In order to meet these goals, the handbooks
structure and content is aimed at three overlapping readerships: undergraduate and postgraduate students; earlycareer researchers requiring detailed introductions to central themes and long-standing debates; and established
scholars seeking fresh perspectives and new directions for future research. Finally, it aims to provide a detailed
resource for those with a more general interest in hunter-gatherer societies of the past and present.

Handbook: Summary of Contents

The handbook is organized into seven thematic parts, each containing chapters with more detailed case studies.
Each part opens with an extended introductory essay, which situates the content of individual chapters within a
general intellectual framework, and identifies emerging directions for future research and debate.
Part I establishes a general conceptual framework for the handbook. It undertakes a critical engagement with the
underlying theoretical trends that have shaped and informed the development of hunter-gatherer research over
recent centuries, and explores the main analytical frames of reference, including ecological and adaptive
approaches, historical and particularistic perspectives, as well as key research methodologies such as
ethnoarchaeology, and also cross-cutting themes such as hunter-gatherer gender relations.
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.
Part IV highlights the innovative characteristics of many prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, and aims to overturn
the lingering assumption that most pre-agricultural societies (p. 24) tended to lack an internal capacity for cultural
change. Specifically, it investigates how earlier hunter-gatherers were caught up in the processes that led to
humans becoming a fully technological species, highly reliant on the use of material 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 worlds 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 fatebut also the remarkable cultural resilience and
behavioural dynamismof 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 foragerfarmer interactions in

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Introduction
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 longrange 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 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.

(p. 25) Conclusion

The study of hunter-gatherers has been central to the development of archaeology and anthropology, and has
also had increasing relevance for indigenous peoples and descendant communities. Whatever the inherent
problems with defining hunter-gatherers, and despite the occasional doom-laden predictions that hunter-gatherer
studies would eventually fragment due to intellectual diversification, or simply implode due to lack of new field data,
the myriad regions, time periods, and general themes and topics considered throughout the handbook indicate that
the research field remains alive and well. Much more important research and critical synthesis lies ahead, and this
task will form an important challenge for future generations of archaeologists and anthropologists.
Older images of hunter-gatherers as being a timeless and essentially uniform category of society lacking capacity
for development and innovation are now long gone, and the notion of hunter-gatherer perhaps now best serves
as a point of analytical departure into the analysis of a remarkably dynamic way of life that expresses a deep and
enduring cultural significance, but one that also exhibits enormous diversity, flexibility, and resilience across time
and space. Together then, all contributors to the handbook engage with far-reaching questions about the
fundamental nature of human subsistence, spirituality, and social life. Their chapters investigate many of the
common underpinnings of all human cultural diversity, including the topics of diet, health, and demography, as well
as human understandings and perceptions of ecology, materiality, and landscape. All of these are overarching
themes that continue to have a pressing contemporary relevance for global humanity.

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Peter Jordan
Peter Jordan is Director of the Arctic Centre at the University of Groningen.

Vicki Cummings
Vicki Cummings is Reader in Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire.

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