Hunter-Gatherer (Other Keyword)
Hunter-Gatherers
1-25 (53 Records)
One of the challenges of Paleoanthropology is developing coherent models for ancient social and economic systems that have no close analogues in the recent archaeological and historical records. Systematic observations of variability among recent foragers produced by Binford, Kelly and others, are vital tools for understanding early humans. They provide necessary frames of reference for predicting variation, and for understanding why observations may not fit predictions. In a 2001 paper we...
Archaeological Survey of the Proposed Sewage System Improvements, Ridgeway, South Carolina (1976)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Architecture and monuments as territorial markers among the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast, Atacama Desert (Northern Chile) (2016)
Architecture, as a material device that is perceived and experienced, involves the creation of spatial and visual signatures within a landscape, effectively connecting social groups and territories. In this paper, we explore the role of architecture and monuments in processes of territorialization, land tenure and the use of space among hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast in the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. Between 7,000 to 1,000 BP these groups developed diverse ways of making and using...
Characterizing Hunter-Gatherer Ground Stone Bedrock Features in the Northeastern Chihuahuan Desert (2017)
Ground stone bedrock features are common at archaeological sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. These features are human-made depressions pecked, ground, or worn into bedrock or large boulders, and were used for a variety of processing activities by the indigenous peoples. Although archaeologists in the region have informally recognized different "types" of ground stone bedrock features (e.g., slicks, grinding facets, deep mortars), there have been no dedicated studies of...
Cooperation or Competition? The Underwater Archaeology of Communal Hunting Structures (2017)
Forager cooperation can be difficult to detect in archaeological contexts. One approach is to focus on built structures, such as drive lanes or fishing weirs, which required the participation of multiple persons. Yet such features are ephemeral and vulnerable to disturbance and destruction. One way to circumvent these challenges is to target areas with excellent preservation, such as underwater contexts. For example, the cold, fresh water of the Great Lakes preserved 9,000 year old stone built...
Cultural interaction and Fueguian Islands archaeology: discussing Middle and Late Holocene (50º-55º South Latitude, Chile) (2017)
The Fueguian archipelago, dominated by three mayor islands, namely Tierra del Fuego, Dawson and Navarino, is located namely at southernmost end of South America and was peopled by hunter-gatherer societies from c. 10.500 BP to the 20th century. Sea coastline areas have evidence of specialized marine adaptation since c. 7.000 BP, including navigation. Ethnohistoric and ethnographic records account for an overlapping network area of three groups: Selk'nam land hunters and Alacalufe or Kawésqar...
Developing Demographic Proxies for Archaic Faunal Database Integration (2016)
In conjunction with multi-scalar integrative faunal research on the use of aquatic resources by Archaic period hunter-gatherers, the EAFWG has been required to focus on both environmental and demographic reconstructions for both specific locales and larger regions within the interior of the North American Eastern Woodlands. Although the importance of social and ethnic factors has increasingly been recognized, both environmental change and variability and human population growth and aggregation...
Did Increased Landscape Management through Pyrodiversity Lead to a Rise in Deer Procurement in the San Francisco Bay Area? (2017)
Some of the earliest archaeological applications of human behavioral ecology were Central California studies of faunal resource depression by Jack Broughton including a detailed study of the massive Emeryville Shellmound, located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. An intriguing pattern identified by Broughton was a significant increase in the relative abundance of deer in the later occupational strata at Emeryville. Broughton attributed this shift to the initiation of distant-patch hunting...
Distribution of Piedra De Lumbre "Chert" and Hunter-Gatherer Mobility and Exchange in Southern California (1992)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Early pottery and the quest for fat in Northeastern North America (2017)
Accumulating evidence point toward hunter-gatherer communities as the first inventors of ceramic containers in many parts of the world, but the incentives behind this technological innovation remain elusive. In this presentation, archaeological information and biomolecular data from organic residues analyses are combined to support a scenario in which pre-agricultural communities in Northeastern North America used early pottery as a fat rendering device, whether the fat came from fish oil or...
The Effect of Property Rights on Low-Level Food Production (2017)
A basic premise of economics is that more secure property rights reduce conflict and provide an incentive for individuals to invest capital to increase productivity. This premise underlies recent theories developed by archaeologists that food production and more secure property rights, by necessity, co-evolve. The argument goes like this: Dense and predicable resources provide an incentive for more secure property rights and more secure property rights provide an incentive for individuals to...
The Emergence of Cultural Consensus in Hunter-Gatherers: Towards a Computer Model of Ethnogenesis in the Past (2017)
In this contribution we present the results of a computer simulation of an "artificial society", implemented to understand how cultural identities and cultural standardization may have emerged in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society as a consequence of restricted cooperation. The aim of the model is to explain how diversity and self-identification may have emerged in the small-scale societies of our prehistoric past. The computer model explores some possible consequences of theoretical...
An ethnoarchaeological study on anthropic markers from a shell-midden in Tierra del Fuego: Lanashuaia II (2015)
Hunter-gatherer sites constitute often challenging research contexts within the discipline of archaeology; identifying and even defining whom Tierra del Fuego constitute an optimum arena for studying anthropic markers in hunter-gatherers sites for two reasons: a) good preservation of archaeological remains; b) a rich ethnographic record about hunter-fisher-gatherer societies who inhabited this region. The aim of this work is to present the first results of an intrasite spatial analysis, based on...
The Evolution of Cooperative Labor within a Long-lived Housepit at the Bridge River site in British Columbia (2017)
At the Bridge River site, British Columbia, evidence for intra-household cooperation appears to center within a time of village growth during late Bridge River 2 (ca.1500-1300 cal. BP) before collapsing into familial-based competitive behavior during Bridge River 3 (ca. 1300-1100 cal. BP). This shift from cooperation to competition occurs in tandem with a rise in inequality as the community experienced a Malthusian ceiling. Building on previous multivariate statistical approaches, further...
Examining Lithic Technological Organization As a Dynamic Cultural Subsystem: the Advantages of an Explicitly Spatial Approach (1993)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Excavation and Survey in the Argentine Andes: Preliminary Field Report of the First IFR Field School in Uspallata, Mendoza (2017)
The first field school in the Uspallata valley, Mendoza, took place in 2016 and was organized by the Institute for Field Research (IFR). Its goals were to clarify the use of the landscape over the last two thousand years by people with an economy that incorporated hunting, gathering, small-scale agriculture, and possibility llama herding. Research was near one of Mendoza’s best known archaeological sites, Cerro Tunduqueral. This site’s dense rock art has been known for decades, but little is...
Exploring the Archaeological Applications of ITRAX XRF Soil Analysis in Southern Ontario (2017)
Prehistoric human occupation in Southern Ontario, Canada spans the gamut of ephemeral hunter-gatherer usage to intensive Iroquoian village settlements. ITRAX core scanning has the capacity to explore some of this rich history. Initially developed for environmental core analysis, ITRAX technology can highlight differences in culturally generated chemical signatures between intensive and ephemeral occupations. This automated, non destructive x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis has the potential to...
Fins, Feathers and Furs: Fish, Bird, and Mammal Remains from a Stege Mound Complex Site, CA-CCO-297 (2015)
During approximately the last thousand years people were at CA-CCO-297 focused upon taking small schools of fishes, aquatic and marine ducks and sea otters. These were obtained from estuarine habitats immediately adjacent to the site. Seasonality profiles for fish/bird/mammal species indicate procurement occurred throughout the year. Harvesting of these taxa was facilitated by the use of watercraft and nets and hunting tactics including mass collection, prey switching and coharvesting....
Forager Mobility in Constructed Environments (2015)
As obligate tool users, humans habitually reconfigure material-resource distributions. It is proposed here that such resource restructuring may have played an important role in shaping hunter-gatherer mobility decisions and the emergent macro-structure of settlement patterns. This paper presents a model of hunter-gatherer mobility in which modifications of places, including the deposition of cultural materials, bias future mobility decisions. With the aid of an agent-based model, this simple...
Foraging for bulbs in the Cape Floristic Region (2015)
Underground storage organs (USOs) serve as a staple source of carbohydrates for many hunter-gatherer societies. While the way of life of hunter-gatherers in South Africa’s Cape is no longer in existence, there is extensive historical and archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers’ use of such plants as foodstuffs. This is to be expected, given that the Cape supports the largest concentration of plants with USOs globally. To meet the goals of the Paleoscape project, the importance of...
From Hunting and Gathering to Farming in Northern Thailand (2017)
Southeast Asia’s prehistoric zooarchaeological record is peculiar: faunal assemblages are seemingly ‘diverse,’ and generally include a large number of mammalian/reptilian/avian and molluscan species, but often these assemblages lack telltale evidence for human consumption. Therefore, one of the primary challenges confronting zooarchaeologists in this region is identifying what taxa were actually exploited by prehistoric foragers and how these patterns changed over time. This paper investigates...
Healers Also Gather Acorns: Examining the Division of Labor and Power Dynamics among California Hunter-Gatherers (2016)
Previous theories concerning women’s access to roles of power within Native American Hunter-Gatherer societies have focused on linking such access to socially proscribed gender identities, role flexibility, and/or kinship systems. My work seeks to validate such models within the context of women’s access to the role of healer among California Hunter-Gatherer groups by looking to written records from the 1800s and ethnographies from the early 1900s. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis,...
A hearth with a view, the spatial analysis of a Late Holocene hunter-gatherer house (2015)
Excavations of a house floor located in North America’s Great Basin resulted in hundreds of bone and stone artifacts. We present a spatial analysis of the recovered household artifacts. Identified raw materials provide evidence for connections to communities farther afield. Results indicate a diverse and complex suite of social goals. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve...
Household Archaeology on the Northern Channel Islands of the Santa Barbara Coast, California (2015)
House depressions are visible at many archaeological sites on the Northern Channel Islands, including some that are thousands of years old, yet household archaeology is a topic that is often overlooked in the region. Documenting the number, size, location, and layout of house depressions can help in understanding past settlement strategies, access to resources, the emergence of cultural complexity, demography, cultural landscapes, environmental change, and craft specialization, among other...
Hunter-Gatherer Storage and Settlement: A View from the Central Sierra Nevada (2015)
Though optimal foraging theory is useful for examining hunter-gatherer subsistence decisions, food storage falls outside the scope of traditional models, because it separates foraging effort from consumption. The time that foragers spend accumulating a surplus for storage has the potential to conflict with the time they need for other activities during seasons of abundance, creating opportunity costs to storage. Changes in settlement strategies can alter these opportunity costs and affect...