The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum

The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum
ISBN-10
1107607612
ISBN-13
9781107607613
Category
Social Science
Pages
375
Language
English
Published
2013-04-15
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Author
Robert L. Kelly

Description

In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity, and downplays attempts to model the original foraging lifeway or to use foragers to depict human nature stripped to its core. Kelly reviews the anthropological literature for variation among living foragers in terms of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, technology, exchange, male-female relations, division of labor, marriage, descent, and political organization. Using the paradigm of human behavioral ecology, he analyzes the diversity in these areas and seeks to explain rather than explain away variability, and argues for an approach to prehistory that uses archaeological data to test theory rather than one that uses ethnographic analogy to reconstruct the past.

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