The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers

Abstract

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.

A demographic perspective on the Middle to Later Stone Age transition from Nasera rockshelter, Tanzania

“…With the exception of our estimate of artefact accumulation rates, which increase with the loss of resident fauna, archaeological indicators of residential mobility crosscut a complex pattern of habitat change recorded in the fossil fauna and regional palaeoenvironmental archives, with more open and xeric grasslands documented from the MSA/LSA Mumba and Nasera industries to the LGM Lemuta industry, followed by a shift to more mesic habitats during the warmer Holocene. The pronounced reduction in residential mobility in the Late Pleistocene beginning with the Nasera industry and continuing into the arid LGM is at odds with data from recent and historic foragers that predicts decreased residential mobility and home range size under conditions comparable to the Holocene [41,42] rather than prior to it. This suggests causal factors other than environmental change, of which increased population density is one possibility.…”

Resilience of small-scale societies’ livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production

“…Other forms of technology, such as storage, allow the unbalanced temporal production of specific resources to remain available throughout the year, mitigating risk and uncertainty in resource availability (de Saulieu and Testart 2015, and references therein). Mobility can also be considered a technological strategy to manipulate the spatial distribution of resources and maintain the stability of the system (Binford 2001, Kelly 2013, Hamilton et al 2014, and references therein).…”

Upper Palaeolithic population histories of Southwestern France: a comparison of the demographic signatures of 14C date distributions and archaeological site counts

“…1). The study area covers~50 000 km 2 ; an area large enough to accommodate the range in ethnographically documented hunteregatherer occupation areas and annual ranges (see Binford, 1983:110;Kelly, 2013) d which we assume are useful estimates when investigating prehistoric hunteregatherer populations d and which permits an appropriate scale for the understanding of regional demographic processes. The available area for occupation was undoubtedly larger during the Upper Palaeolithic and has been reduced due to subsequent global changes in sea level (Lambeck et al, 2002).…”