Entangled Encounters in the Central Andes: Process, Outcome and Legacy

While the term hunter-gatherer refers to a mode of subsistence, disparate cultures fitting these economic criteria have traditionally been grouped together despite variation in demography, mobility, foraging behavior, and sociopolitical organization. This diversity is primarily known from ethnographic data and most investigations of hunter-gatherers tend to build detailed pictures of human society through ethnographic analogy rather than archaeological evidence. To take additional steps toward documenting the range of diversity in forager lifeways, this session is designed to honor and draw inspiration from Robert Kelly's The Foraging Spectrum. Its central goals are to contribute to anthropological theory generally, and archaeological methods specifically, by examining the range of variability in prehistoric foragers extending beyond the ethnographic record. Individual papers cover a broad array of geographic areas and time periods and draw upon topics raised in Kelly's original work. This explicit use of new archaeological data, methods, and theories will highlight novel forms of foraging and social systems available only in the deep past.