Drinking & Clubbing: Insights from Comparative Ethnology on “Invisible” Technologies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Intersection of Ethnography and Technology: Understanding the Evolution of Human Technologies through Ethnographic Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human technologies have a long evolutionary history. However, most early technologies have perished over time, especially those made from organic materials. In the absence of archaeological evidence, comparative ethnology can provide valuable insights. This paper focuses on two "archaeologically invisible" technologies: wooden clubs and the production of fermented alcoholic beverages. A cross-cultural analysis of recent hunter-gatherers reveals the widespread use of wooden clubs for both violence (86%) and hunting (74%). Together with evidence from primatology, these data suggest that early human groups used clubs as a common weapon. Furthermore, the variation in design and purpose of ethnographically documented clubs suggests that they are not standardized weapons and that similar variability likely existed in the past. In contrast, the production of fermented beverages is less common among modern foragers, observed in less than 20% of studied cases. However, their presence on several continents and the variability of raw materials (ranging from honey and fruits to tree sap and flower nectar) suggest that fermented beverages were discovered independently by various hunter-gatherer societies several times in history. Using these two technologies as examples, the paper emphasizes the importance of comparative analysis of ethnographic data for understanding our past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Exploring the Intersection of Ethnography and Technology: Understanding the Evolution of Human Technologies through Ethnographic Research   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52536