Metadata of the chapter that will be visualized online
Chapter Title
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Copyright Year
2013
Copyright Holder
Springer Science+Business Media New York
Corresponding Author
Family Name
Ames
Particle
Given Name
Kenneth M.
Suffix
Division/Department
Department of Anthropology
Organization/University
Portland State University
City
Portland
State
OR
Country
USA
Email
[email protected]
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Complex Hunter-Gatherers
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Kenneth M. Ames
Department of Anthropology, Portland State
University, Portland, OR, USA
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Introduction
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Complex hunter-gatherers are hunter-gatherers
whose cultures and societies have cultural, social,
and economic traits that anthropologists and
other scholars had long assumed required agriculture for them to develop. Permanent inequality
is the trait that has attracted the most attention
among archaeologists, but others include large,
dense populations; large, relatively permanent
settlements; and intensive economies among
other characteristics. First widely recognized by
archaeologists in the late 1970s, they have been a
focus of major research efforts since. This
research has been a testing ground for many theories about the origins and evolution of social
complexity, especially of the origins and development of permanent inequality in small-scale
societies.
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Definition
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At the most fundamental level, complex huntergatherers are hunter-gatherers who do not fit
Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore’s characterization of hunter-gatherers in the 1968 seminal
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volume Man the Hunter, “We make two basic
assumptions about hunters and gatherers: (1) they
live in small groups and (2) they move around
a lot” (Lee & DeVore 1968: 11). They go on to
list five additional characteristics of hunter-gatherers: first, because of mobility, the amount of
personal property is kept low; second, the
resource base keeps group size very small,
below 50; third, local groups do not “maintain
exclusive rights to territory” (i.e., do not control
property); fourth, food surpluses are small to
nonexistent; and fifth, groups are not strongly
attached to “any single area.” An additional characteristic not listed by Lee and DeVore here is
that these small social groups are strongly egalitarian. These hunter-gatherers approximate stereotypes of hunter-gatherers that were widely
held by scholars and others during the past several centuries. These stereotypes began to break
down in the 1960s and 1970s as the great diversity among hunter-gatherer societies became
clearer as a consequence of archaeological
research. However, the Man the Hunter characterization does accurately describe some huntergatherer groups; those are labeled “generalized
hunter-gatherers” in Table 1. Current definitions
of complex hunter-gatherers often focus on trait
lists of how they contrast with generalized
hunter-gatherers (Table 1).
Certain attributes of complex hunter-gatherers
are more central to our understanding of them
than are others.
C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2,
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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Demography and Group Size
Complex hunter-gatherer societies tend to have
larger populations than do generalized huntergatherers. They also have higher population densities and larger communities. The significance
here is that there are more people in daily face-toface contact.
Corporate Groups
Generalized hunter-gatherer social groups
beyond the nuclear family tend to be very fluid
in their membership. Complex hunter-gatherers
generally have stable, long-lived corporate
groups, often in the form of households.
Residential and Mobility Patterns
Complex hunter-gatherers tend to be partially to
fully sedentary. Mobility across and exploitation
of the landscape tends to be logistical, a pattern in
which long-term residential bases are established
and task groups harvest and process resources at
some distance from the base and return with the
processed material. Generalized hunter-gatherers,
in contrast, shift their residential bases as needed
to position them close to available resources.
Property, Wealth, and Inheritance
Generalized hunter-gatherers usually consume
resources as they are harvested, and while individuals may own objects they make or acquire,
accumulation of property is usually repressed by
social means. Among complex hunter-gatherers,
consumption or use of harvested resources may
be delayed through storage, and corporate groups
and individuals own property which is transferred
from one generation to the next. Recent research
distinguishes among three forms of wealth:
embodied (health, knowledge, skills), relational
(social networks and ties), and material (things,
beings) (Bowles et al. 2010). Among generalized
hunter-gatherers, wealth is generally embodied
or relational (Smith et al. 2010); among complex
hunter-gatherers, wealth is also manifested
through material wealth.
Subsistence and Economy
Subsistence economies are likely to be “broad
spectrum,” that is, harvesting a diverse array of
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
resources, some of which are highly productive
but require significant amounts of labor to realize
their potential (e.g., seeds). The high levels of
labor can be invested in harvesting and/or in
processing. Within the subsistence economy,
there may be a few “keystone” resources which
are fundamental to long-term economic success.
Thus, while a group may harvest a wide diversity
of plants, over the long run, they are most heavily
dependent on just one or two species. Complex
hunter-gatherer economies tend to rely most
heavily on aquatic resources (marine, lacustrine,
riverine) and/or plants.
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Social Organization and Economy
Complex hunter-gatherers are generally characterized by formal, permanent social inequality in
the form of ranking or stratification. The systems
of inequality are supported and reinforced by
political economies which manage the creation
and movement of material wealth through the
society.
Some definitions of complex hunter-gatherers
focus primarily on population size (e.g., Koyama
& Thomas 1981). Another label for complex
hunter-gatherers, “affluent foragers” as originally
defined, emphasized their larger populations. Yet
other definitions exclude all characteristics
except permanent inequality (Arnold 1996),
restricting the term “complex hunter-gatherers”
to only those hunter-gatherer societies with permanent inequality and elite control over non-kin
labor (i.e., the political economy extends beyond
the corporate or kin group). Arnold (2001) proposes applying “affluent forager” to those groups
displaying many of these traits, but lacking permanent inequality. Whichever definition or set of
traits individual scholars prefer, most research
focuses on the development and maintenance of
permanent inequality.
As an alternative to trait-based definitions,
some researchers (e.g., Price 1981, Binford
2001) define hunter-gatherer complexity in
terms of systems’ complexity, that is, as cultural
systems with many subsystems and many links
among subsystems. This carries the implication
that the subsystems are heterogeneous, that is,
different from each other. The nature of this
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heterogeneity is often unspecified. Implicit to this
definition is the notion that generalized huntergatherer cultural systems lack internal differentiation (subsystems) and are consequently
homogeneous.
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Historical Background
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Lee and DeVore’s description of huntergatherers essentially crystallized a view of
hunter-gatherers that was several centuries old
of small, simple, and egalitarian societies.
Anthropologists, historians, and others took for
granted that these societies represented the pristine human condition and that the appearance and
subsequent development of complex societies
required agriculture. A few ethnographically
documented hunter-gatherer societies displayed
traits thought to require agriculture. The classic
example was the hunter-gatherer-fisher peoples
of the Northwest Coast of North America (coastal
northern California, Oregon, Washington, British
Columbia, and southeast Alaska). They had
dense populations, large communities, and an
incipient class system among other things. They
were explained away as the consequence of an
unusually rich environment: the abundance of the
natural environment substituted for the abundance produced by farming. Other exceptions
were explained away as a consequence of contact
with Europeans or other complexly organized
peoples. Hunting and gathering was viewed as
a very ancient lifeway that had persisted
unchanged for millennia, at least since the
appearance of the first modern humans if not
their ancestors. The Man the Hunter Conference,
in fact, grew out of a famous Harvard University
project that conducted research among huntergatherers in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert that
was based on the assumption that these people
were behaviorally the closest modern analogues
to that ancestral state.
The Man the Hunter conference was held at
the University of Chicago in 1966. By the late
1970s–early 1980s, the picture of huntergatherers presented at the conference had become
obsolete. As a consequence of a global expansion
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of archaeological research and knowledge, it was
clear that many ancient hunter-gatherer societies
were far more diverse and complex than anticipated in 1966. The concepts of “affluent foragers” and “complex hunter-gatherers” were
developed in part to encompass and describe
this newly discovered diversity. Three international conferences were crucial. The first of
these was held in 1979 in Osaka, Japan, with the
original purpose of comparing the ancient foraging economies of Japan and California (Koyama
& Thomas 1981). It was at this conference that
the notion of “affluent foragers” was formalized.
As noted above, central to that idea was high
population densities supported by rich environments, which required subsistence economies
capable of supporting those densities. The second
conference was held in Amsterdam in 1980, and
its topic was Archaeological Approaches to Complexity (van der Leeuw 1981). Price (1981)
presented a paper in which he coined the term
“complex hunter-gatherers” and developed the
first set of characteristics distinguishing them
from generalized hunter-gatherers. His list was
based upon comparisons among Japanese, California, and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers. Thus, two of his three examples were
archaeological. He also presented the systems
theory definition of complexity. The third conference again was a major international conference
held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1983
(Price & Brown 1985). It established the concept
of complex hunter-gatherers and laid out the
agenda for much of the research on huntergatherer complexity over the next two decades.
This agenda focused on the causal relationships
among population growth, subsistence and economic intensification (including storage), mobility patterns, and permanent inequality. At the
same time, the importance of corporate groups
(Hayden & Cannon 1982) and the domestic mode
of production (Ames 1985) to the development of
hunter-gatherer complexity was recognized. This
was both a crucial theoretical and methodological
step, since much subsequent research on huntergatherer complexity was framed within household archaeology (e.g., Coupland 1985).
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The initial interest in complex huntergatherers stemmed from three sources: first,
they were a range of societies poorly represented
in the modern ethnographic sample, and neither
how common they were in the past nor their time
depth was known. Research on complex huntergatherers was also research on the diversity
of human cultures. Secondly, they represented
routes to complexity, particularly to permanent
inequality, not dependent on agriculture; they
were in a sense an independent set of cultural
evolutionary experiments in the evolution of
complexity. Investigating them might clarify
how and why permanent inequality and other
aspects of complexity arose from small, egalitarian societies. Thirdly, they were implicated in the
domestication of plants and animals. Research in
the 1960s and 1970s suggested that the preliminary steps toward domestication were taken by
what became known as complex hunter-gatherers. The origins of civilization – complex societies – and of agriculture were major disciplinary
issues globally beginning in the 1950s and were
the subjects of intensive research. Research on
complex hunter-gatherers could provide insights
into both issues. Their presumed role in domestication is now far less clear. They still represent
a diverse set of experiments in cultural evolution,
and research has tended to focus on the hows and
whys of the development of permanent
inequality.
This research has investigated key case studies. In North America, these include the Northwest Coast, the Fraser-Thompson Plateau of
interior British Columbia, the Santa Barbara
Bight of southern California, and western Florida. In these instances, complex societies developed within the last 2,000 years or so, although
on the Northwest Coast they may have evolved as
much as a millennium or two earlier. In these
cases, archaeologists have access to both the
archaeological record and to ethnographic and
ethnohistoric records which can be used as parallel lines of evidence in investigating complexity.
Thus, we know, for example, that permanent
inequality existed in southern California and on
the Northwest Coast based on the ethnographies.
Recently, archaeologists in the southeastern
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
United States have explored a record of fluctuating levels of hunter-gatherer complexity between
about 5,500 and 3,000 years ago. Here, complexity is marked by extensive systems of earthen
mounds, plazas, and in some places large rings
constructed of marine and freshwater mollusk
shells – for example, monumental architecture.
There is no ethnographic record for these
hunter-gatherers.
Globally, among the key case studies are the
Jomon hunter-gatherers of Japan, the Natufian
peoples of the Levant, and the Upper Paleolithic
and Mesolithic peoples of western Europe. These
ancient societies illustrate the difficulties and
ambiguities of investigating complex huntergatherers known only from the archaeological
record. It has proven very difficult, for example,
to demonstrate the presence of permanent
inequality in any of these cases. In fact, Price,
who used the Mesolithic in his original formulation of the complex hunter-gatherer concept, has
subsequently decided Mesolithic societies were
not complex given the ambiguity of the available
evidence (Price 1995).
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Key Issues/Current Debates
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Current debates revolve around the causes of
permanent inequality in these small societies (as
opposed to the causes of permanent inequality in
large societies, such as the Aztec or Incan
Empires), although there are other “key”
unresolved issues, including the subject matter
itself. “Hunter-gatherer” as a category of human
society and subsistence has proven difficult to
define or at least to draw boundaries around.
There are some scholars who argue that the entire
concept of hunter-gatherers needs to be abandoned. Similar suggestions have been made for
the notion of complex hunter-gatherer, perhaps
substituting less economically specific phrases
like “middle range society” or “transegalitarian”
society. Part of the difficulty arises from preconceptions about hunter-gatherers. A particularly
powerful preconception is that they have no significant environmental impact. They harvest wild
foods but do not “produce” foods or create
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“anthropogenic” environments (anthropos –
human; genic, genesis as in created, human created or modified environments). It is now clear
that all environments in which humans live are
anthropogenic to one degree or another, even
those occupied by the most “pristine” generalized
hunter-gatherers. However, most complex
hunter-gatherers actively modify their environments, acting to increase productivity and predictability through practices such as regular
burning or firing the environment, selective
harvesting, tilling, pruning, transplanting, and
landscape engineering. Such practices are difficult to reconcile with the notion of huntergatherers as environmentally passive. Should
people who do these things even be considered
hunter-gatherers?
Setting that issue aside, a second is whether
hunter-gather complexity can be sustained for
long periods of time. T. Douglas Price (1995)
has suggested that most instances of huntergatherer complexity are actually the result of
contact with farmers and that hunter-gatherer
complexity in any case is relatively ephemeral –
that is, it does not last long because huntergatherer economies are not capable of the
sustained economic production complexity
requires. Price may be correct, in long archaeological sequences; complexity among huntergatherers does seem to come, go, and sometimes
come again in a different form, or not at all. Once
complexity develops, it is not necessarily permanent, in some cases disappearing after a few centuries and in other cases persisting for millennia.
A third issue is the notion of egalitarianism.
One definition of egalitarianism is that egalitarian
societies are those with as many positions of high
prestige as their people to fill them and that there
is equal access to resources (of all sorts) necessary for life in the particular culture. Many smallscale societies practice what might be termed
“formal egalitarianism” in which egalitarianism
is highly valued and morally reinforced and antiegalitarian behavior repressed. It is thought that
egalitarianism was essential for small group survival during the Pleistocene with its extreme and
rapid environmental shifts. The balanced or
reciprocal social ties that formal egalitarianism
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reinforces provided a crucial safety net when
local resources failed. Recently, the whole notion
of egalitarianism has been critiqued by anthropologists and others, and this “formal egalitarianism” rethought as a form of reverse dominance
hierarchy in which alliances among subdominants restrain and repress dominance. The issue
then is whether egalitarian societies as once conceived ever existed. If not, it would suggest that
permanent inequality is not, in itself, an attribute
of social complexity but rather an attribute of the
human condition (Ames 2010).
A fourth issue is the trait-based definitions of
complex hunter-gatherers and affluent foragers. It
is argued, correctly, that the lists bundle together
attributes of complexity, causes of complexity,
and the consequences of complexity (Arnold
1996). For example, looking at Table 1, high
populations, food storage, and logistical mobility
are all attributes of complexity, but perhaps, as
Binford (2001) argues, logistical mobility is
a consequence of increased population density.
If that is so, is population density a trait of
complexity or a cause (or perhaps both)?
Distinguishing causes and consequences and
teasing out their relationships are in part epistemological questions, but they are also methodological. In many instances, our chronological
controls are simply not refined enough to know
what comes first.
However, current debates focus primarily on
the origins and causes of permanent inequality
among egalitarian peoples. Prior to about 1990,
most explanations invoked general demographic,
social, or economic causal processes or circumstances. These included population growth,
sedentism, storage, property, and economic
intensification (increased production per capita,
per unit time, or per unit land). Theoretical work
in the 1990s recognized these processes not as
causes but either as consequences or catalysts of
the development of complexity. The search for
causation shifted to human agency, seeing permanent inequality as emerging from the actions
of individuals in particular historical circumstances. Some theories (e.g., Hayden 2001)
invoke the existence of prestige-seeking individuals or aggrandizers (AAA personalities).
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Aggrandizers forcefully act or compete to
advance their own interests and those of their
near kin at the expense of others. Formal egalitarian societies actively repress the actions
of aggrandizers since they would disrupt the
reciprocal social ties necessary for group
survival. The emergence of inequality requires
that repression to end, allowing aggrandizers to
pursue their own ends. Why does the repression
of aggrandizers end?
Answers differ and engender considerable
debate. Maschner (1991) argues that aggrandizers will act whenever the opportunity presents
itself. In contrast, Brian Hayden posits that
repressing aggrandizers is costly in time and
energy and therefore erodes or ends when the
local environment becomes productive and stable
enough to meet everyone’s basic needs. This can
be the result of environmental or technological
changes. When people’s needs are met and when
reciprocal ties are no longer central to survival,
people stop enforcing the rules against aggrandizer behavior, and aggrandizers are free to
manipulate their way to social prestige and
power. Other scholars (e.g., Fitzhugh 2003)
think that inequality develops during times of
stress, which provide aggrandizers opportunities
for self advancement. Others do not invoke
human personality types, suggesting instead that
times of stress facilitate the development of
inequality from the normal jostling and friction
of human social relationships. Yet other explanations look not to human personalities or material
conditions but to changing ideologies and control
of symbolic resources (e.g., Sassaman 2004).
Research on the evolution of inequality among
hunter-gatherers is part of a broader inquiry into
why permanent social inequality is a common
feature of most human societies, regardless of
subsistence economy or size. Recent work suggests that a common thread among all societies
with
permanent
inequality
is
the
intergenerational transfer (inheritance) of wealth
from one generation to the next (Smith et al.
2010). Importantly, this work reconceives wealth
to include three forms: material wealth (what we
normally think of when we think of wealth, i.e.,
property, control of material resources,
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
structures), embodied wealth (physical health,
skills, knowledge), and relational wealth
(exchange partners, social networks, etc.). It
appears that inherited differences in embodied
and relational wealth occur among modern egalitarian hunter-gatherers. However, such differences may be very difficult to observe and
measure among living peoples and even more
elusive among ancient ones known only archaeologically. It also appears to be the case that
strong systems of inequality are based on material
wealth. Archaeologists usually assume that a lack
of evidence for material differences in wealth or
prestige indicates an ancient society is egalitarian. That assumption can no longer be made.
However, more to the point here, this research
suggests a rethinking of the general approach to
the origins and evolution of social inequality is in
order – the key question becomes “under what
circumstances does material wealth develop so
that inequality becomes both archaeologically
visible and stronger?”
Complex hunter-gatherer archaeology has
been strongly materialist since its beginnings in
the 1970s. Research has emphasized either material causes (e.g., demography, subsistence, economy, ecology, environmental change) or those
with relatively clear material consequences
(e.g., corporate groups). This research was also
comparative (searching for cross-cultural regularities). However, for most of that time, there
has been a strong minority among archaeologists
taking an idealist stance, arguing for the primacy
of ideological systems (e.g., spirituality, belief
systems, ethical systems) in shaping huntergatherer (and all human) behavior. This scholarship has also tended to focus on the importance of
local, contingent (non-repeating, unique) events
in shaping cultural history (e.g., Cannon 2011).
This division is not restricted of course to complex hunter-gatherer studies. The tension
between these approaches raises persistent issues.
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International Perspectives
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Although the literature may seem dominated by
a few case studies (e.g., southern California,
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Northwest Coast, Plateau, Japan) and a few theorists (e.g., Hayden, Arnold), research on complex hunter-gatherers has been strongly
international and intellectually diverse since its
inception. Thus, while the Koyama and Thomas’
(1981) volume emphasized the North Pacific
Rim, the Price and Brown volume drew its examples broadly from North America, Eurasia, the
Levant, and Australia and temporarily from the
late Pleistocene through the Holocene. A recent
volume (Grier et al. 2006) includes papers from
East Africa, Australia, Central and South America, and Korea as well as Jomon Japan and the
Northwest Coast. What is new is that while the
original literature was written almost exclusively
by Anglophone (American and British Commonwealth) scholars, that is no longer the case. The
papers are now still primarily in English, but the
authorship is much more truly international.
This is a reflection of the expansion of both
archaeology as a profession and of the known
archaeological record of the past two or three
decades. It is obvious that ancient societies were
far too diverse to be easily accommodated either
by the old stereotypes that all hunter-gatherers
were similar to modern generalized hunter-gatherers, and all more or less complex societies were
agricultural. The difficulties increase as the variability among human subsistence economies and
the degree to which people have modified the
environment in the past are more evident. The
concepts of “complex hunter-gatherers” or
“affluent foragers” provide intellectual and methodological frameworks with which to approach
that diversity. While the trait lists (e.g., Table 1)
may be problematic in terms of mixing causes
and consequences, they provide useful comparative frameworks for conceiving research and
dimensions of variability along which that
research can be conducted (e.g., Grier et al.
2006). There are three significant elements of
this research: it is being conducted within the
frameworks of local research traditions but to
address questions of global interest, it is interested in testing the basic assumptions and hypotheses of the Anglophone literature, and it is
strongly comparative, conducting its tests using
multiple case studies.
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Future Directions
574
Several trends seem likely. At a very general
level, debate will continue over the ontological
status of hunter-gatherers and complex huntergatherers: are they real or figments of the anthropological/archaeological imagination. To that
extent, this debate is useful; it will either sharpen
our understanding of these concepts or help our
understanding of the limits of their usefulness.
For example, it may be that Arnold is right and
that “complexity” is best restricted to hereditary
inequality coupled with control of non-kin labor
or that Price is correct and complexity is most
usefully conceived as a description of
a heterogeneous system. Debate will also continue over whether the past is best investigated
from a materialist or an idealist epistemology. At
some level, these are mutually exclusive, but at
less exalted levels, they can be seen as complimentary, and archaeologists will work to build
bridges between. Thus, for example, while the
sudden appearance of earthen mounds in the
southeastern USA may indeed reflect an equally
sudden ideological shift, their construction had
material consequences in how labor was organized, fed, etc. that also needs to be understood.
The construction of case studies will continue.
To my mind, the most useful will be those that
endeavor to cover very long periods of time, such
as the entire Holocene. Most research tends to
focus on particular examples within relatively
limited time frames. Thus, in coastal southern
California, strong social inequality developed
after 1,200 cal BP. Consequently, research on
the evolution of complexity has tended to focus
most heavily only on the last 2,000 years. However, an examination of the entire 12,000 year
sequence for this region from the perspective of
social complexity would be useful. It would facilitate comparisons with other regions and times,
and it would help to elucidate the dynamics at
work. It is possible, for example, that some
aspects of “complexity” came and went over the
last several thousand years there. Taking
a different example, logistical mobility is widely
seen as a crucial causal element in hunter-gather
complexity. In south central British Columbia, it
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Title Name: EGA
8
appears or develops sometime just after 4,000 cal
BP, but permanent inequality does not develop
until 1,200 cal BP. There is a similar temporal lag
between the development of logistical mobility
and inequality in southern California. Thus, while
logistical mobility may be necessary for the
development of other aspects of hunter-gatherer
complexity, its presence does not seem to trigger
rapid social change. Long sequences will also
answer questions such as whether huntergatherer complexity is inevitably of short duration, always comes and goes, or if in some cases it
is quite durable, and if so, why? At present,
almost all well-documented examples of complex hunter-gatherers are Holocene in age. An
important question is whether such societies
existed earlier. A related question is how, given
the difficulties of the Pleistocene archaeological
record, we can find them. As part of developing
lengthy
sequences,
archaeologists
need
improved, finer-grained chronological controls
which can only come from improved, finergrained excavations, use of new field techniques,
larger samples of radiocarbon dates (e.g., Prentiss
et al. 2007), and alternative methods of independent dating not subject to the problems of radiocarbon dating.
The purpose of long sequences and their comparison, the purpose of any empirical work, is not
only establishing patterns in the past but the testing of explanatory hypothesis and the building of
theories. Research on complex hunter-gatherers
has been one the most significant areas of
research into the origins of inequality in human
societies since World War II, and most of the
theories and hypotheses have been proposed and
tested by archaeologists. This will continue.
Cross-References
▶ Complex Society Development in North
America
▶ Hunter-Gatherer Settlement and Mobility
▶ Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence Variation and
Intensification
▶ Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors:
Frontiers and Interactions
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
▶ Hunter-Gatherers, Archaeology of
▶ Middle Fraser Canyon Complex HunterGatherer Villages
▶ Sacred Traditions and “Art” in HunterGatherer Contexts
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References
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AMES, K. M. 1985. Hierarchies, stress, and logistical strategies among hunter-gatherers in northwestern North
America, in T. D. Price & J. A. Brown (ed.) Prehistoric
hunter-gatherers: the emergence of cultural complexity: 155-180. New York: Academic Press.
- 2010. On the evolution of the human capacity for
inequality and/or egalitarianism, in T. D. Price & G.
Feinman (ed.) Pathways to power: archaeological
perspectives on inequality, Dominance and explanation: 15-44. New York: Springer
ARNOLD. D, J. E. 1996. The archaeology of complex
hunter-gatherers. Journal of Archaeological Method
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- 2001. The Chumash in world and regional perspective, in
J. E. Arnold (ed.) The origins of a Pacific Coast chiefdom: the Chumash of the Channel Islands: 1-20. Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press.
BINFORD, L. R. 2001. Constructing frames of reference: an
analytical method for archaeological theory building
using hunter-gatherer and environmental data sets.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
CANNON, A. 2011. Structured worlds: the archaeology of
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COUPLAND, G. 1985. Household variability and status differentiation at Kitselas Canyon. Canadian Journal of
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FITZHUGH, B. 2003. The evolution of complex hunter-gatherers: archaeological evidence from the North Pacific.
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GRIER, C., J. KIM & J. UCHIYAMA. (ed.) 2006. Beyond
affluent foragers: rethinking hunter-gatherer complexity. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
HAYDEN, B. & A. CANNON. 1982. The corporate group as an
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KELLY, R. L. 1995. The foraging spectrum: diversity in
hunter-gatherer
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LEE, R. B. & I. DEVORE. (ed.) 1968. Man the hunter.
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MASCHNER, H. D. G. 1991. The emergence of cultural
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PRENTISS, A. M., N. LYONS, L. E. HARRIS, M. R. P. BURNS, &
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WIESSNER, M. GURVEN, S. BOWLES, M. B. MULDER, T.
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t1:1
10
Environment
t1:3
t1:5
t1:6
Diet
Mobility
Settlement
size
Demography
t1:7
Food storage
t1:8
t1:9
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Complex Hunter-Gatherers, Table 1 Generalized and
complex hunter-gatherer traits (Modified from Kelly
1985)
t1:2
t1:4
Title Name: EGA
Social
organization
Political
organization
Generalized
Unpredictable or
variable
Terrestrial game
Residential
Small
Complex
Highly predictable or
less variable
Marine or plant foods
Logistical
Large
Low population
density relative to
food
Little to no
dependence
No corporate
groups
Egalitarian
High population
density relative to
food
Medium to high
dependence
Corporate descent
groups (lineages)
Hierarchical; classes
based on wealth or
descent
Common
t1:10
t1:11
t1:12
t1:13
t1:14
t1:15
t1:16
Occupational Only for older
specialization persons
Territoriality Social-boundary
defense
Warfare
Rare
Slavery
Absent
Ethic of
Not tolerated
competition
Exchange
Generalized
reciprocity
Perimeter defense
Common
Frequent
Encouraged
Wealth objects,
competitive feasts