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Hunter-gatherer adaptations to long-term fluctuations in regional resource structure require mechanisms to cope with periodic subsistence stresses. Among documented groups, a common response to such stress is temporary movement into adjacent occupied areas-moving in with "relatives" when things go wrong. However, in the case of early (ca. 12,000-10,000 B.P.) Paleoindian groups in the Americas, the availability of neighboring groups with a detailed knowledge of local resource geography could not be relied upon. Post-Pleistocene environmental changes and the low initial population of the New World are important factors conditioning a lifeway characterized by a dependence on hunting (though not exclusively of megafauna), and by high residential, logistical, and range (territorial) mobility. Early Paleoindian groups had to adopt a subsistence technology that could be employed regardless of the specific resource microstructure. In some regards, Paleoindians seem to have behaved like tropical foragers while in others like arctic collectors. Use of high quality lithic raw materials from large quarry sources, reliance on a bifacial technology, limited use of caves and rockshelters, and a low level of processing of food products for storage all may be indicative of such a subsistence technology, which would have been unlike that of any modern hunter-gatherers.

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In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity, and downplays attempts to model the original foraging lifeway or to use foragers to depict human nature stripped to its core. Kelly reviews the anthropological literature for variation among living foragers in terms of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, technology, exchange, male-female relations, division of labor, marriage, descent and political organization. Using the paradigm of human behavioral ecology, he analyzes the diversity in these areas and seeks to explain rather than explain away variability, and argues for an approach to prehistory that uses archaeological data to test theory rather than one that uses ethnographic analogy to reconstruct the past.

Three different sorts of bifacial tools-by-products of the shaping process, cores, and long use-life tools-are used to consider the role mobility plays in producing variability in hunter-gatherer lithic technologies. The relations among tool roles, raw-material distribution, and mobility as well as the archaeological consequences of the different roles are key factors. An examination of temporal trends in the use of bifacial implements in the Carson Sink of western Nevada shows how the proposed perspective on lithic technology can help to elucidate change in mobility strategies. A shift from the use of bifaces as cores to an infrequent use of bifaces as tools suggests a shift from logistical to short-term residential use of the raw-material-poor Carson Sink; a later shift to the use of small, frequently unifacial, nonresharpenable points may indicate a shift to target-specific hunting strategies.