A Kangaroo Hunt

Summary

O’Connell is best known for championing an approach to exploring the evolution of human behavior and its attendant archaeological patterns through the distinctive lens of human behavioral ecology. His contributions in developing ways to operationalize theory for generating testable hypotheses about big questions in the human experience have indelibly shifted the trajectory of empirically bent studies of subsistence. However, far less appreciated are his keen ethnographic descriptions of the social contexts in which decision-making unfolds. Here I use an important essay that O’Connell (2000) wrote which describes an emu hunt conducted in Alyawarra country in 1974 as a springboard to discuss the contexts of contemporary hunting practices among Martu in Australia’s Western Desert. I argue that insights into both the Alyawarra and Martu situations provide important directions for framing new questions and theoretically driven hypotheses concerned with subsistence transitions.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• A Sense of Question: Papers in Honor of James F. O'Connell

Keywords

Spatial Coverage