Foraging Spectra: Hunter-Gatherer Diversity in Prehistory

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Kuhn. Mary Stiner.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Stewart. Peter Mitchell.

There is arguably nowhere more susceptible to the tyranny of the ethnographic record than southern Africa. From Man the Hunter’s quintessential foragers to the revisionists’ marginalized proletariat, Kalahari hunter-gatherers cast shadows far longer than those created by the desert sun. There is no denying that this extraordinary record – central to both economic and social approaches to southern African prehistory – has greatly enriched our picture of the past. Unsurprisingly, however, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey. Robert Bettinger.

The behavioral ecological approach Kelly champions in the Foraging Spectrum has clearly enhanced our understanding of hunter-gatherer diversity. Still, despite important developments in modeling and comparative analysis in the twenty years since first publication, occasional stark contrasts between groups living in similar environments suggest that ecological factors and adaptive behaviors cannot alone account for the impressive record of ethnographic and archaeological diversity. We consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard. Britt Starkovich.

This paper examines changing patterns of subsistence during the Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic of Central Europe. We present data on faunal assemblages from our excavations in Germany and look at the extent to which the selection and exploitation of prey reflects expectations from behavioral ecological models. We also consider how these faunal assemblages inform us about the evolution of social and economic behavior during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. SAA 2015 abstracts made available...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Cannon. David Meltzer.

Among the many important contributions that Robert Kelly has made to the archaeological and anthropological literature are 1) an elegant theoretical model of forager residential movement, presented in his book The Foraging Spectrum, 2) a very influential argument about the Paleoindian colonization of the Americas, which he developed along with Lawrence Todd, and 3) insightful discussions of landscape learning by hunter-gatherers. Here, we explore these issues further by expanding Kelly’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Lemke.

Robert Kelly’s seminal work, The Foraging Spectrum, cataloged diversity among ethnographic foragers to demonstrate the tremendous range of cultural, economic, demographic, and political systems within the broad category, "hunter-gatherer." While we have a clear understanding that ethnographic foragers are diverse, archaeological interpretations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers still tend to be seen through the lens of ethnographic analogy. The creative and critical use of ethnographic data is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gustavo Politis.

Twenty years ago the Foraging Spectrum highlighted the variability in forager behavior around the world and generated several models to reconstruct the lifeways of these kind of societies in the past. However, contemporary tropical rainforest hunter-gatherers of South America are still underrepresented in the current debate and they are rarely used as a source of analogy to interpret prehistoric foragers. This is partially due to the existence of several myths about them that still persist in...