Communal Hunting Facilities as a Record of Human Cooperation

Summary

Communal hunting facilities such as drive walls, hunting pits, and other features, are one of archaeologists’ most direct proxies for past human cooperation. At the least, communal hunting facilities are unambiguous evidence for past cooperative effort. They are also informative of the nature of that cooperation, since variation in facility size and configuration should reflect variation in cooperative behavior. In this study, I present a model designed to understand variation in communal hunting facilities. I then test the expectations of that model by presenting a comparative analysis between communal hunting facilities in North America and Eurasia. I conclude by suggesting that communal hunting facilities inform not only the origins of cooperative behavior, but also its evolution alongside larger socio-political processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeological Perspectives on the Evolution of Forager Cooperation

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15646