Drivers of Clothing Variability among Ethnographically Documented Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Test of Competing Hypotheses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Clothing is ubiquitous among living humans, and there is reason to believe it has been important for hominins for tens of thousands of years. Despite this, clothing has received little attention from scientific anthropologists. Consequently, there are some important questions about clothing use that have yet to be adequately addressed. One of these is, What drives the variation in the clothing of ethnographically-documented societies? The study reported here sought to shed some light on this question. First, we developed a way of quantifying clothing variation based on Wendall Oswalt’s method of analyzing subsistence toolkits. We then used the method to generate data for 50 hunter-gatherer groups. Subsequently, we evaluated the impact of a number of potential drivers of clothing variation, including ambient temperature, rainfall, snowfall, mobility, polygyny, and social class. Several variables were found to be influential when they were examined individually, but when the variables were analyzed simultaneously, the only ones that had an impact were temperature, windchill, polygyny, and class, with temperature being considerably more important than the latter three. It appears, therefore, that variation in the wardrobes of ethnographically-documented hunter-gatherers was driven primarily by temperature-related variables and, to a lesser extent, by sexual selection and social signaling.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37595.0