Hunting The Gatherers

Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.

Papers from a seminar held in 2008 at the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Ariz.

This volume provides the reader with a multifaceted overview of the study of stone tools used by humans in the past. Including case studies from various geographic regions and different continents, and covering a wide range of chronologies, the contributions here are centred on the study of human communities based on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. A number of essays in this volume focus on tool production and use, and address major paleoanthropological questions related to past human economic and social behaviour. The book also includes detailed and careful studies of human technology during Prehistory.

A bold, provocative history of our species finds the roots of civilization’s success and failure in our evolutionary biology. We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet people are more listless, divided and miserable than ever. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, and yet our political landscape grows ever more toxic, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these two truths? What's more, what can we do to close it? For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to live in clans, but today most people don't even know their neighbors’ names. Traditional gender roles once served a necessary evolutionary purpose, but today we dismiss them as regressive. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we're not built for is killing us. In this book, Heying and Weinstein cut through the politically fraught discourse surrounding issues like sex, gender, diet, parenting, sleep, education, and more to outline a provocative, science-based worldview that will empower you to live a better, wiser life. They distill more than 20 years of research and first-hand accounts from the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth into straight forward principles and guidance for confronting our culture of hyper-novelty.

"In his fourth book, survival instructor Tony Nester delves into practical methods that he has applied on extended survival courses over the past twenty years showing the best techniques for beginning and advanced students of wilderness living. This innovative book illustrates, with detailed photos, the essential methods for harvesting, preserving and cooking small game fish, edible plants, and how to reduce your dependence on "the system""--Cover page 4.

In today’s world hunter-gatherer societies struggle with seemingly insurmountable problems: deforestation and encroachment, language loss, political domination by surrounding communities. Will they manage to survive? This book is about one such society living in the monsoon rainforests of western Nepal: the Raute. Kings of the Forest explores how this elusive ethnic group, the last hunter-gatherers of the Himalayas, maintains its traditional way of life amidst increasing pressure to assimilate. Author Jana Fortier examines Raute social strategies of survival as they roam the lower Himalayas gathering wild yams and hunting monkeys. Hunting is part of a symbiotic relationship with local Hindu farmers, who find their livelihoods threatened by the monkeys’ raids on their crops. Raute hunting helps the Hindus, who consider the monkeys sacred and are reluctant to kill the animals themselves. Fortier explores Raute beliefs about living in the forest and the central importance of foraging in their lives. She discusses Raute identity formation, nomadism, trade relations, and religious beliefs, all of which turn on the foragers’ belief in the moral goodness of their unique way of life. The book concludes with a review of issues that have long been important to anthropologists—among them, biocultural diversity and the shift from an evolutionary focus on the ideal hunter-gatherer to an interest in hunter-gatherer diversity. Kings of the Forest will be welcomed by readers of anthropology, Asian studies, environmental studies, ecology, cultural geography, and ethnic studies. It will also be eagerly read by those who recognize the critical importance of preserving and understanding the connections between biological and cultural diversity.

As one of the most significant economic innovations in prehistory, hunting architecture radically altered life and society for hunter-gatherers. The development of these structures indicates that foragers designed their environments, had a deep knowledge of animal behavior, and interacted with each other in complex ways that reach beyond previous assumptions. Combining underwater archaeology, terrestrial archaeology, and ethnographic and historical research, The Architecture of Hunting investigates the creation and use of hunting architecture by hunter-gatherers. Hunting architecture—including blinds, drive lanes, and fishing weirs—is a global phenomenon found across a broad spectrum of cultures, time, geography, and environments. Relying on similar behaviors in species such as caribou, bison, guanacos, antelope, and gazelles, cultures as diverse as Sami reindeer herders, the Inka, and ancient bison hunters on the North American plains have employed such structures, combined with strategically situated landforms, to ensure adequate food supplies while maintaining a nomadic way of life. Using examples of hunting architecture from across the globe and how they influence forager mobility, territoriality, property, leadership, and labor aggregation, Ashley Lemke explores this architecture as a form of human niche construction and considers the myriad ways such built structures affect hunter-gatherer lifeways. Bringing together diverse sources under the single category of “hunting architecture,” The Architecture of Hunting serves as the new standard guide for anyone interested in hunter-gatherers and their built environment.

This book compiles a collection of case studies analysing drivers of and responses to change amongst contemporary hunter-gatherers. Contemporary hunter-gatherers’ livelihoods are examined from perspectives ranging from historical legacy to environmental change, and from changes in national economic, political and legal systems to more broad-scale and universal notions of globalization and acculturation. Far from the commonly held romantic view that hunter-gatherers continue to exist as isolated populations living a traditional lifestyle in harmony with the environment, contemporary hunter-gatherers – like many rural communities around the world - face a number of relatively new ecological and social challenges to which they are pressed to adapt. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are increasingly and rapidly being affected by Global Changes, related both to biophysical Earth systems (i.e., changes in climate, biodiversity and natural resources, and water availability), and to social systems (i.e. demographic transitions, sedentarisation, integration into the market economy, and all the socio-cultural change that these and other factors trigger). Chapter 10 of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.