The anthropology of hunter-gatherers: key themes for archaeologists (original) (raw)
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Archeological Papers of The American Anthropological Association, 2008
This chapter presents an overview of 40 years of research on hunter-gatherers and attempts to situate Susan Kent's oeuvre within this larger body of work. Some of the main contours of the economic, social, and political life and core ideologies of foraging peoples are outlined. Then the key debates around questions of the historical autonomy of hunter-gatherers are explored along with Kent's position on these issues. All hunter-gatherer groups have undergone a series of changes under the impact of states and markets and the processes of incorporation into the global system. While none have escaped the devastating effects of these impacts, strong evidence exists for the persistence of core values and institutions. Susan Kent's research, with her unique positioning in archaeology and development studies, influenced these debates in important ways.
Hunter-gatherer religions and rituals have fascinated the western world almost since the first contacts between European and small-scale non-farming societies and cultures. In part this interest has been fueled by the perceived exoticism of the foragers' beliefs and practices; partly by administrative/religious concerns; and also for more purely intellectual reasons. Early encounters with and descriptions of Siberian shamans, for example, were widely broadcast in eighteenth-century Western Europe, where they influenced artists such as Mozart and Goethe (Flaherty 1992). Spanish missionaries in the Americas, starting with the Columbus expeditions, recorded detailed information on indigenous beliefs and practices, recognizing this knowledge as valuable in promoting conversions to Catholicism (e.g., Pané [1494-6] 2006; Geiger and Meighan [1812-5] 1976; Boscana [1822] 1978)-in the process inventing systematic ethnological research and ethnographic reporting. Academic concerns reflect numerous disciplines, including anthropology (e.g., Kroeber 1907), sociology (e.g., Durkheim [1912] 2001), the history of religion/religious studies (e.g., Eliade 1972), folklore and mythology (e.g., Gayton and Newman 1940), ethnobotany and pharmacology (e.g., Schultes 1977), psychiatry (Silverman 1967), and archaeology (e.g., Price 2001; Ross and Davidson 2006). Huntergatherer religions-at least as re-interpreted in contemporary western terms-also figure prominently in the New Age/self-realization and alternative medicine and psychiatric movements (e.g., Senn 1989). The result is a very broad body of literature, ensuring that this topic will be researched and debated long into the future.
Conference Program_SHARING The Archaeology & Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers_Cambridge Sep 2016.pdf
Program and abstracts of the conference: SHARING The Archaeology & Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers" held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge in September 2016. During the conference leading archaeologists, biological anthropologists and social anthropologists discussed new approaches for studying hunter-gatherers and how to promote the collaboration between archaeology and anthropology and the sharing of academic research of hunter-gatherers. The conference had 75 participants from UK, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Finland, Russia, India, Australia, South Africa, Japan, Israel, USA and Canada. Funded by the D.M. McDonald Grants & Awards Fund at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Archaeology, anthropology and subsistence
Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute, 2001
Wherever and whenever one may wish to place the roots of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, the subsistence-based categories of savage hunters and civilized farmers still lie at the heart of the division of much contemporary intellectual labour. The sources of these categories can be traced back into the seventeenth century, although they were first systematically related to (pre)history and cultural difference in the mid-eighteenth century. The subsequent relations between these categories and the changing disciplines of ethnology, ethnography, and archaeology have not remained constant over time or space. However, the underlying assumption that subsistence practices are meaningful and useful societal categories has persisted for the past 250 years. The relationship between such concepts, the closely associated idea of social evolution, and anthropology and archaeology, in particular from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is examined. It is suggested that finding ways of writing across such categories is a necessary step for the future of both disciplines.
Coward, F. and Grimshaw, L. Hunter-Gatherers in Early Prehistory
in 'Investigating prehistoric hunter-gatherer identities: case studies from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europe, eds. Cobb, H., Coward, F., Grimshaw, L. and Price, S. Oxford: Archaeopress. BAR International Series 141. , 2005
The success of the post-processual critique of processual models of prehistory has led to the development of models of human behaviour that prioritise people and their activities in a social milieu. However, although some aspects of these approaches have crept in to the late Mesolithic, the vast majority of illustrations of such paradigms in archaeology have been post-Neolithic. Why is there no social archaeology of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic? Firstly, the nature of the data is argued to be insufficient both quantitatively and qualitatively to address the lifeways of people in the past. The questions considered appropriate for the study of the Palaeolithic have thus been largely restricted to those considering the economics of subsistence or raw material procurement and lithic manufacture. Secondly, the problem is one of identification; the attitudes of researchers towards post-Neolithic farmers and Mesolithic and Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer (and particularly pre-human hunter-gatherer) populations have meant that the two branches of research are considered fundamentally different. The effect of this process of estrangement of hunter-gatherer archaeology from the rest of the discipline is the establishment of an a-personal Palaeolithic. The pre-eminence of the evolutionary paradigm, which equates change and evolution, identifies the process of evolution as purely a factor of time; change is conditional only on time passing, and is thus virtually unrelated to humans and their activities. The focus of research into Pleistocene archaeology has been at continent-wide geographical scales and geological timescales, which have removed the possibility of accessing personal experiences and actions. In addition, the conception of a culture as a system seeking homeostasis means that change requires external causality – usually, in the Palaeolithic, the environment. This session would like to reintroduce the not-so-radical notion of ‘people’ to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, as creators of the archaeological record, and as inhabitants of the Pleistocene world. How can we access aspects of the prehistoric hunter-gatherer past that would have had meaning for its inhabitants/creators? How does the recognition of hunter-gatherer ‘persons’ in prehistory affect the generalizing, continent- and geological/climatic- scale models of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic which are current in the discipline? We invite papers that use new perspectives to ‘crack open’ the ‘black box’ of hunter-gatherer ‘persons’ of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic to access new perspectives on and understandings of the period.