Environment versus Technology: Weighing the Drivers of Western North American Holocene Intensification

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Environment and technology are the independent “givens” of Julian Steward’s model of cultural ecology wherein different techno-environmental combinations favor different subsistence, settlement, and organizational responses. While all parties concede the importance of both, the thrust of much recent archaeological research echoes the contemporary media narrative in which environment—specifically climate change— is dominant, which is in keeping with a long-standing theoretical treatments of simpler societies, hunter-gatherers in particular. In this view, while technology can transform hunter-gatherers into something else (e.g., agriculturalists), technological variation among hunter-gatherers is mainly facultative, responding to local conditions, making technology a function of environment, and turning Steward’s cultural ecology into environmental determinism. This, and the correlative emphasis on climate as the major driver of hunter-gatherer behavioral change, is not in accord with the facts, specifically western North American hunter-gatherer demographic proxies showing a “hockey stick” trajectory at odds with climate records and sharply skewed to the very late Holocene, with an inflection point coinciding with the appearance of the bow and arrow at about AD 500, which favored social formations impossible with the atlatl (e.g., the family band), entraining a cascade of technical and social innovations that transformed western North American hunter-gatherer landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38894.0