Antiquity

Review Article

Hunter-gatherers 'on the move'?

Chantal Conneller
Queens' College, Cambridge, England

Antiquity 78 no. 302 December 2004


LARS LARSSON, HANS KINDGREN, KJEL KNUTSSON, DAVID LOEFFLER & AGNETA ÅKERLUND (ed.) 2003
Mesolithic on the move: papers presented at the 6th International Conference on the Mesolithic in Europe, Stockholm 2000
Oxford: Oxbow
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COLETTE & JEAN-GEORGES ROZOY 2002
Les camps mésolithiques du Tillet: analyses typologique, typométrique, structurelle et spatialle (Société Préhistorique Française Travaux 2)
Paris: Société Préhistorique Française
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FRÉDÉRIC SURMELY (ed.) 2003
Le site mésolithique des Baraquettes (Velzic, Cantal) et le peuplement de la moyenne montagne cantalienne, des origines à la fin du Mésolithique (Société Préhistorique Française Memoir 32)
Paris: Société Préhistorique Française
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FRÉDÉRIC SÉARA, SYLVAIN ROTILLON & CHRISTOPHE CUPILLARD (ed.) 2002
Campements mésolithiques en Bresse jurassienne: Choisey et Ruffey-sur-Seille
Paris: Maison des sciences de l'Homme
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NENA GALANIDOU & CATHERINE PERLÈS (ed.) 2003
The Greek Mesolithic: problems and perspectives
London: British School at Athens
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BEN FITZHUGH & JUNKO HABU (ed.) 2002
Beyond foraging and collecting: evolutionary change in hunter-gatherer systems
New York (NY): Kluwer / Academic Plenum
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Mesolithic in Europe
Mesolithic on the move is the publication deriving from the sixth international conference on the Mesolithic in Europe. The publications resulting from this conference, which is held every five years, provide an illuminating snapshot of the state of Mesolithic research. What is immediately noticeable is the large size of this latest volume: it includes 92 contributions from 136 authors. This compares with 30 articles in the first volume (Kozlowski 1973) and indicates the increasing quantity of, and interest in, Mesolithic research. As might be imagined for a volume of this size, the quality of the contributions is mixed; many however are very impressive. Lack of space prevents mention of all the articles I found particularly stimulating but highlights include: Nyree Finlay's discussion of microliths and multiple authorship; Liv Nilsson Sturtz's study of Mesolithic burial practices, employing the French taphonomically based approach anthropologie de terrain; and Jimmy Strassburg's lively polemic describing the different standards applied to similar phenomena in the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Mention must also go to those with the thankless task of undertaking preliminary investigations and syntheses in those regions without a tradition of Mesolithic research. Such studies, of which there are several in this volume, are expanding our knowledge of the variation in ways of life in different areas of Europe and challenging received stereotypes.

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This volume is also useful in that it reveals new theoretical and methodological trends and new foci of interest in Mesolithic research. In many ways, it departs from previous volumes in its level of theoretical divergence. In addition to traditional, functional and structural-functionalist accounts, an increasing variety of 'post-processual' approaches are in evidence. In previous volumes, a few lone voices dabbled with symbolic and structuralist narratives (i.e. Larsson 1990); in this volume, there are similar symbolic and structuralist relicts of 80s post-processualism, but also a welcome increase in papers from authors steeped in more recent social theory. Strassburg bemoans the paucity of such contributions; however even this small number should be welcomed. Greater theoretical diversity is a happy change from the rather tedious structural functionalism that has until recently dominated Mesolithic archaeology. This approach has proved more heavily entrenched within Mesolithic narratives than in other periods of prehistory, so any evidence that it is finally being disrupted is to be welcomed. This greater theoretical diversity offers new possibilities and directions for existing evidence. Burial evidence can been discussed in terms other than those relating to social stratification and rank (i.e. Nilsson Sturtz) and faunal material in terms other than those relating to economy (i.e. Hansen, Ahlbäck).

In comparison with the previous volumes, a number of themes stand out. First is the increasing reliance on ethnographic analogy. Though analogy was in evidence from the first volume onwards (e.g. Price 1973), in Mesolithic on the move there is a large increase in papers drawing on ethnographic material. This has been the case elsewhere in Mesolithic studies, with accounts of all theoretical persuasion, relying increasingly heavily on ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers. The theoretical and methodological justification for this reliance is rarely articulated. Thus Peter Jordan's thoughtful discussion of the use of ethnographic analogy represents a timely exploration of this issue. He notes that the manner in which post-processualists use ethnographic analogy can mean that 'Mesolithic lives come to be explored through reference to a series of, at times, banal phenomenological truisms' (p. 130) - a charge that can certainly be levelled at several of the papers in this volume. Jordan urges that, instead, archaeologists should engage with the specificity of their evidence and use analogy as a point of departure, actively seeking differences as well as similarities between ethnographies and archaeological data sets. It is unfortunate that, at the end of this rigorous discussion, Jordan recommends the sensitive use of direct historical analogy - in this case that, because of similar landscapes and 'long-term cultural links' (p. 137), his fieldwork on Khanty landscape enculturation provides more appropriate analogies for understanding prehistoric Fennoscandia. The concept of direct historical analogy seems to combine elements both of processual views of the determining effects of the environment and Sollasian views of culture history. Jordan's work is more subtle than this; however, similar arguments are increasingly being used in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology to justify the use of direct analogies, particularly in the identification of shamanism and very specific sets of beliefs. Any thorough examination of analogy needs to consider the dangers of direct historical analogy in perpetuating views of hunter-gatherers as people lacking history.

Another interesting development noticeable in the volume is an attempt at the rehabilitation of the concept of ethnicity. Several papers in the volume deal with this topic to a greater or lesser extent (Bergsvik, Bergsvik & Olsen, Knutsson et al., Hallgren) and include a theoretical discussion of the concept and an awareness of its problems. However, all conclude that the term retains some validity for the understanding of regional variation in artefact forms. This focus on ethnicity is part of a renewal in interest in lithic studies. During the days when the Mesolithic was only an economic and ecological phenomenon, lithic studies were seen very much as second best to faunal analysis, to the extent that Peter Rowley-Conwy suggested that it was not worth excavating sites lacking organic material. Instead of treating lithics as economic indicators, the foci of these approaches to lithic materials are diverse, ranging from (to name but a few) an examination of the aesthetics of artefact production (Himmerson Berglund), artefact biographies (Finlay), the social values of lithic production (Lindgren, Knutsson et al., Carlsson et al.), exchange (Bengtsson, Bergsvik & Olsen), and procurement (Yven) to artefact function (Iovina). As in all previous Mesolithic in Europe volumes, typological analyses are also in evidence. This variety of approaches testifies to the level and range of information that can be obtained through a detailed study of lithic material.

Also noticeable in the volume is an increasing reliance on stable isotope studies. Such studies have tended to focus on the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition but, in this volume, there is greater range of enquiries. Erikson & Zagorska compare the stable isotope data from dog tooth pendants and humans buried at Zvejnieki to suggest that dogs (or their teeth as pendants) were traded from coastal areas, Schulting uses data from Téviec and Hoëdic to suggest patrilocal marriage patterns in Brittany, while both Fischer and Ahlström look at stable isotope data for the whole of the Mesolithic period.

Missing topics are also interesting. The near absence of any mention of complex hunter-gatherers suggests that Mesolithic archaeology's enthusiasm for this topic is waning. This represents a significant change from the competitive complexity identification of the 70s and 80s: at the height of the complexity boom, the discovery of a single bead appeared to be sufficient to propel one's Palaeolithic or Mesolithic group into the ranks of complex hunter-gatherers. The absence of complex hunter-gatherers may be part of the trend already noted amongst the papers in the volume to emphasise the diversity and the specific regional context of Mesolithic ways of life.

To a certain extent, the volume also reveals national trends in Mesolithic research. The more radical papers are Swedish in origin; the Danish and British papers are divided between the functional and environmental approaches that have traditionally dominated Mesolithic research in both countries and approaches that are more aware of recent theoretical trends; while the French papers focus on lithic typology, technology and raw material. Similar regional traditions of Mesolithic and, or, hunter-gather research are very much in evidence in the other books reviewed here.

French tradition
The three French site reports, for example, Tillet, Bresse and Baraquettes, represent an interesting mix of the technological, typological and 'palaeoethnographical' strands in French research. These volumes combine detailed technological and spatial analysis aimed at reconstructing the activities that generated the sites, with (usually) an unthinking equation of different microlith styles with particular regional groups. The reports also have their differences: Baraquettes is strongly functional in tone, while Bresse stresses the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach.

Unlike the contributors to Mesolithic on the move who at least discussed the problems of relating artefact styles or types with ethnic groups, the authors of Tillet and Bresse automatically equate different microlithic styles with some very detailed regional groupings. In the former volume, J-G. & C. Rozoy even use Bordes-style cumulative frequency graphs for typological analysis to detect cultural signatures (in Britain differences in proportions of tool types represented would only ever be seen in functional terms). Only Surmely on Baraquettes questions these assumptions, noting that different microlith types grade into each other and that the dubious identification of different forms has led to the erroneous elucidation of particular regional groups. Surmely suggests that more careful, systematic work needs to be undertaken on microlith form and that instead microlith shape could well be due to functional considerations.

A second quibble with all three volumes is that they automatically refer to microliths as armatures. Use-wear has demonstrated that microliths (as one might expect of the flexible components of composite tools) had more varied uses. Surmely does quote one of these studies in a throw-away line, but he then discusses microliths as armatures for three pages; the other authors seem unaware of these studies. Viewing microliths only as armatures causes problems in functional analyses such as these; sites dominated by microliths are seen as reflecting hunting activities, rather than as the product of a more varied range of tasks. This of course reinforces stereotypes of the Mesolithic as dominated by important male hunting activities (Finlay 2000) for which J-G. Rozoy himself has been a prime offender, dubbing the Mesolithic 'the age of bowmen and of red deer' (Rozoy 1984).

In contrast to these typological problems, the technological studies in these volumes are impressive. Each volume draws upon slightly different approaches and interests to elucidate different aspects of Mesolithic life. The Rozoys examine the differing life histories of tools and waste products and investigate individual technical variation. Delphine Borgeois, the author of the typological study of the Bresse sites is inspired by the technological studies of Upper Palaeolithic material to reconstruct the technical choices made in Mesolithic châines opératoires. Surmely is particularly adept at reconstructing Mesolithic technical economies - the sources exploited, the state in which the material was brought to site (as a nodule, a preform, or as finished blanks), what was manufactured and used on site and what was removed when people left.

The influence of Palaeolithic studies is also evident in the concern of two of these volumes to produce a work of 'palaeoethnography', a term coined by Leroi-Gourhan for his spatial studies at Pincevent. For the two sites studied in Bresse, this work is carried out, as is traditional, through refitting. The authors investigated 'Mesolithic' organisation of space and compared this with Pincevent and other late Palaeolithic sites in the Paris basin. Refitting was impossible at Tillet due to the huge quantity of lithics recovered. Instead, the Rozoys used detailed typometric analysis to isolate different occupations at Tillet and locate hut structures and different activity areas.

Similar commitment to a high standard of research on lithic technology is evident in The Greek Mesolithic. This is undoubtedly a legacy of Perlès' excellent work at Franchthi Cave and it is interesting to see how this French tradition is now a matter of course in Greek lithic analysis. The volume is a general synthesis of what is known of the Greek Mesolithic, composed of general chapters on vegetation, radiocarbon dating and analysis more specific to particular sites. Franchthi still dominates much of the discussion, but new data emerging from more recently excavated sites is beginning to emphasise that the Greek Mesolithic was more varied that syntheses extrapolated from Franchthi would suggest.

Mobility strategy
Beyond foraging and collecting is temporally and spatially more general, but thematically more specific than the other volumes discussed. Rather than concentrating on the Mesolithic, it has a more general focus on hunter-gatherers of a variety of different areas and periods. The volume is dedicated to an examination of Binford's (1980) forager/collecting model of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies. In brief: foragers can be characterised as people moving to resources, while collectors move resources to people. Forager settlement systems will be characterised by site homogeneity, while collectors will generate a number of different site 'types': residential base camps, overnight camps, a variety of specialist extractive camps, caches etc. This understanding of logistical strategies is based on Binford's (1978) work with the Nunamiut. This model has been an important resource for archaeologists in the way they understand hunter-gatherer settlement. Aldenderfer (p. 387) calls it 'foundational to modern archaeological practice'. I suspect this is more true for North American archaeologists than their European counterparts, but it certainly indicates the influence of the model.

The volume consists of papers that attempt to identify particular settlement strategies in the archaeological record (Habu, Savelle), those that attempt to refine elements of Binford's model or point out gaps in it (Ames) and those that attempt to explain particular settlement patterns or changes in settlement pattern (Fisher, Kipnis, Zeannah, Fitzhugh, Cannon, Junker). The volume is divided into three sections: the first contains papers that follow most closely the concerns of Binford's original model; the second part of the volume has a cultural ecological spin; and the final section contains three papers which incorporate elements of history and ideology into their models. In addition the book contains a foreword by Binford & Johnson on the forager/collector model and an afterword by Price discussing approaches to hunter-gatherers over the past 50 years, which were amongst the most interesting papers in the volume.

The scale and methodology employed in these papers are similar; most are concerned with transformations occurring over scales of a couple of millennia and almost all employ models (not simply the original foragers/collector model; also models such as optimal foraging theory) to interrogate their data. The combination of these long-term scales and the methodologies employed create rather interesting effects. The explanatory factors many of the authors invoke as producing change (usually environmental fluctuations or population pressure) are obviously partly an effect of the scale they are working at. But within the book there are conflicting ideas about scale and how it operates within these explanations. In the foreword, Binford & Johnson state that Binford did not answer Weissner's (1982) critque of his forager/collector model (which suggested that social considerations affected settlement strategies) because she was 'working at the wrong scale' (p. ix), i.e. that her arguments focused on individual families (which were affected by social choices), rather than camps (which were affected by environment and demography). Binford seems to conceive scale as rather like an onion, with levels of scale like layers of onion skin, separate from and unaffected by actions or processes in the lower layers. A similar belief that one can either look at singular events and the action of individuals (equated in this volume with the interests of post-processualists and particularists) or predictable generalities that will inform other cases (the interests of processualists and model-builders) appears to underpin many (though not all) of these papers. Several papers (i.e. Kipnis, Cannon, Aldenderfer), however, do cite Weissner approvingly and obviously believe that shorter-term events and processes can have effects on longer-term patterns and that one can move satisfactorily between these two polarised scales. Aldenderfer's contribution is interesting in this regard: though he can characterise other patterns via longer-term explanatory processes, he fails to find an explanation for the sudden shift between foraging and herding in the Central Andes and thus suggests that, in this case, factors such as history, agency, contingency and past ontologies need to be taken into consideration.

As a more general point, the equation, noted above, of post-processualism with events and individuals seems to wilfully misunderstand the scales at which many of its practitioners are operating. Furthermore, the equation of long-term patterns with grand theory and detail with particularism, which is brought up a number of times in this book, is misleading. Explanations of long-term patterns can produce mere banalities, while analysis of events and small-scale evidence has frequently generated grand theory. The point is that 'big' ideas can be generated by analysing 'small' things; and that the analysis of data that are temporally or spatially bounded does not have to lead to ideas and theories that are concomitantly parochial.

The scale at which we work is, at one level, a matter of personal choice, and work at any scale can be perfectly internally consistent. However, I feel there is a problem with longer-term scales when they are coupled with the use of hypothetico-deductive modelling. Models are relied on extensively in the volume, from the forager/collector model to optimal foraging theory. As Kipnis (p. 183) points out, modelling's 'goal is to understand the sources of observations that deviate from the modelled expectations, not to show that observations fit the models', and some contributors do point out difference from their expectations. However, there is little awareness amongst these papers of the extent to which the expectations of the model determine the data themselves. Data do not just exist in a way that will speak for itself and challenge aspects of the model under consideration. As a perusal of these papers shows (and as Binford & Johnson themselves note (p. xi)), the model often drives the interpretation of the data. A couple of papers are particularly sloppy in their use of the evidence; others do not present enough evidence to evaluate their use of the data or are based on surface surveys and minimal testing which is unlikely to be robust enough for the questions and interpretations the model demands. For example, there has been considerable archaeological literature on the difficulty of interpreting site types from size, faunal remains or tool functions and of reconstructing the seasonal round (e.g., Binford 1978, 1980, Jochim 1991). However several authors in this volume do just this, in a manner their model dictates, with little or no discussion of the ambiguities. In such cases, models become self-serving: if long-term factors such as demography and environment are considered the only valid explanations for change on long-term scales, these are what will be found.

This is not to say that all use of modelling is inevitably bad archaeology. There are well argued papers in this volume that seek both similarities and differences between model and data (e.g. Ames), and the strongly model-focused papers of Kipnis and Fitzhugh were the most interesting in terms of their theoretical discussion. Both processualism and post-processualism produce their fair share of both careful and careless archaeologists. Analogy in post-processualism, in fact, works in a similar way to modelling in processualism, in that both can encourage careless interpretation of material evidence and the generation of banal truisms. The concern is simply that modelling can draw attention away from the archaeological evidence, which must be at the heart of archaeological interpretation. And this concern with evidence returns us to Binford's forager/collector model. I would argue that this model has had such influence for precisely this reason; that it is based on extensive engagement with material evidence (it even presents evidence that is inconsistent with the author's theoretical position). Binford's Nunamiut ethnoarchaeology (1978) is a masterpiece of detail from which the forager/collector model is an abstraction. Abstraction is a necessary part of interpretation, but the forager/collector model is so powerful an abstraction because it is so materially based. In contrast, I find that several papers in this volume do not work because the abstraction occurs prior to the encounter with the evidence and determines the form of engagement with it.

In comparison with Mesolithic on the move, I found the focus of this volume rather narrow. In comparison to the theoretical diversity and the different regional traditions in evidence in Mesolithic on the move, Beyond foraging and collecting used predominantly theory drawn from processualism and cultural ecology and was North American in tradition (even though contributors were very slightly more international). The third section (beyond ecological approaches) seemed a token nod to new approaches and it did not help that this was the weakest of the three sections - though Junker's paper was more successful in evoking a different time and place than many of the mid-high latitude hunter-gatherer stereotypes of other papers. Perhaps it was because these papers were reassessing an old and familiar model, but the volume seemed to lack the vitality of some of the Mesolithic papers. It seems instead that it is the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers that are truly 'on the move'.

References

  • BINFORD, L.R. 1978. Nunamuit ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press.
  • - 1980. Willow smoke and dog's tails: hunter-gatherer settlement systems and archaeological site formation. American Antiquity 45: 4-20.
  • FINLAY, N. 2000. Deer prudence. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 17.1: 67-79.
  • JOCHIM, M.A. 1991. Archaeology as long-term ethnography. American Anthropologist 93: 309-319.
  • KOZLOWSKI, S.K. (ed.). 1973. The Mesolithic in Europe. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press.
  • LARSSON, L. 1990. Dogs in fraction - symbols in action, in P.M. Vermeersch & P. van Peer (ed.) Contributions to the Mesolithic in Europe: papers presented at the 4th International Symposium on the Mesolithic in Europe. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
  • PRICE, T.D. 1973. A proposed model for procurement systems in the Mesolithic of northwestern Europe, in Kozlowski 1973, 455-76.
  • ROZOY, J-G. 1984 The age of red deer or of bowmen. Mesolithic Miscellany 5: 14-16.
  • WEISSNER, P. 1982. Beyond willow smoke and dogs' tails: a comment on Binford's analysis of hunter-gatherer settlement systems. American Antiquity 47: 171-78.