Anarchaeology.com

[TexasGuy]

Myth of the Hunter-Gatherer
By Kenneth Ames
(Taken from Archaeology Magazine, September/October 1999, pages 45-49)
On september 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 b.c., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern north America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels.
The Times was amazed. Watson Brake, it wrote, 11 chalIenges traditional ideas about early American cultures and suggests that pre-agricultural, pre-ceramics hunting societies were more socially complex than previously thought." Most people think of hunter-gatherers as small bands of people roaming the landscape in search of food, incapable of such ambitious project I but over the past two decades archaeologists have learned that many hunter-gatherers did the same things that only agricultural societies were supposed to have done. They built large buildings, had big settlements with permanent chiefs, developed elaborate artistic and technological traditions, made war, Lind managed their land to get as much food out of it as possible. In short, they were socially complex.
"Traditional ideas" about hunter-gatherer were rooted in two classic stereotypes. One was that they lived in desperate want, with food hard to come by, starvation frequent, and life was nasty, brutish, and short," in the immortal phrase of the seventeenth -century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In some nineteenth-century versions, they were not even quite human. For Hobbes and his followers, the glories of civilization required agriculture, Western civilization and advanced technology were inevitably good, and modern European people were the apogee of human evolution. The second stereotype held that hunter-gatherers were close to nature, that life before civilization, agriculture, and private property was pure-the romantic vision of the noble savage put forth by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Agriculture led to population growth and environmental and human degradation, while private property caused the development of social inequality and poverty.
By the late 1960s archaeology had abandoned many of these ideas, but it still viewed hunter-gatherers as socially and politically simple. In 1968, anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore Summarized the thinking of the day: "We make two assumptions about hunters and gatherers: (1) they live in small groups, and (2) they Move around a lot." Not much later, Marshall Sahlins, in his 1972 book Stone Age Economics, described them as the "original affluent society." Their affluence had a Zen quality: they were affluent not because they had a lot, but because they did not need or want very much. In the 1968 volume Man the Hunter, edited by Lee and DeVore, hunter-gatherers are described as living in small societies of perhaps 25 to 50 people who moved often to harvest food and had no permanent settlements. Their possessions were few, limited to what they could carry, though their technologies (given that limitation) were quite sophisticated. They had little or no private property, and social relationships were egalitarian, with no permanent inequality. Their population densities were quite low.
Even as the Man the Hunter picture was coalescing, archaeologists and anthropologists recognized that some hunter-gatherers did not fit this picture. Chief among these were the Indians of the Northwest Coast of North America. These people, whose descendants still inhabit the region, lived in permanent towns of up to 1,000 people. They developed an elaborate and rich technology and one of the world's great artistic traditions, and they had I specialists such as wood-carvers, canoe-makers, and whalers, as well as permanent social classes comprising slaves, commoners, and a chiefly elite. They built fortresses and carried out warfare and long-distance trade. These traits were universally regarded by anthropologists as requiring agriculture. But the Northwest Coast was blessed with a rich environment, legendary for its once massive salmon runs. Environmental wealth, it was argued, had permitted these peoples to transcend their economy and develop a complex society otherwise impossible without agriculture. They were an anomaly, the exception that proved the rule. The discovery of complex hunter-gatherers happened during the 1970s, when archaeologists tried to apply the Man the Hunter model to modern and ancient cultures. They found that many such societies had more in common with the Northwest Coast peoples than with small, mobile groups. Among them were the Natufians in the Levant (13,400-10,500 B.C.), the Jomon in
Japan (10,000-300 B.C.), and the Calusa in Florida (A.D. 800-1600). Watson Brake's unknown builders are an important addition to this list.?
Social complexity cannot exist unless I it is supported by a productive subsistence economy. Peoples on the Northwest Coast made use of literally hundreds of species of fish (especially salmon), sea mammals, land mammals, plants, and marine mollusks. As early as 1000 B.C., the Indians of western Oregon were burning extensive areas to encourage the growth of good deer forage and oak groves for acorns. Farther north, people burned to maintain berry patches. Women collected roots, weeding and tilling to increase productivity. This food was processed so it would keep, and storage facilities were needed to prevent it from being eaten by rodents, insects, or other vermin.
For the Natufians, subsistence included harvesting the wild forebears of wheat and collecting almonds, acorns, and other wild seeds and fruits. They may also have culled antelope herds, selecting particular animals to kill to maintain the health and quality of the herds. While it is extremely likely that Natufians stored grain, remains of storage facilities are rare. By ca. 9700 B.C., they began cultivating the progenitors of grains such as barley einkorn, and emmer wheat and established farming villages, making them the first people known to have domesticated plants.
Jomon subsistence practices were diverse, and varied throughout the Japanese archipelago depending on local environments. Because acidic Japanese soils rarely preserve remains of food, these differences are primarily reflected in too] kits. For example, stone axes, plant-processing tools, and net weights are common in western Japan, while stone projectile and spearpoints, along with net weights, are found in the vicinity of Tokyo. There is occasional evidence for their use of plants, such as buck wheat, that were later cultivated, but there is no evidence for farming. We likely are seeing the effects of Jomon peoples' active manipulation of their environment, including the planting of cultigens in small amounts to supplement wild food resources, a practice that was common among complex hunter-gatherers.
The Calusa hunted land mammals, but fishing in shallow bays and estuaries was the foundation of their economy. While they caught as many as 30 species of fish, they focused on capturing small fish in very large numbers using nets and traps. They also ate a wide array of plants, including peppers, acorns, papaya, water lilies, and tubers.
Intensive exploitation of food sources supported relatively large populations. By the seventeenth century, the Chinooks living in what is now the area of Portland, Oregon, had 16 towns ranging from fewer that 100 to more than 1,800 people. Northwest Coast villages had up to a score of massive rectangular houses, some more than 400 feet long, built of red cedar planks. The construction of one such house at the Meier site near Portland, about A.D. 1400, required 50,000 to 75,000 board feet of lumber, the equivalent of five to seven modern single-family houses. Rebuilt at least 18 times over its 400-year occupation, it would ultimately have consumed 500,000 to one million board feet. Many of these houses, like the one at Meier, were occupied for long periods. At sites like Blue jackets Creek, Boardwalk, Namu, and Pender Island, all in British Columbia, people buried their dead for hundreds of years, suggesting the existence of social groups with strong territorial ties that lasted for many generations. Natufian and Jomon cemeteries indicate they also probably had such social groups.
Natufian living quarters were semisubterranean houses with stone foundations. Extensive midden deposits and rebuilt houses indicate villages were occupied and reoccupied over long periods. Jomon village sites are sometimes quite large (up to 95 acres), with houses having been rebuilt many times, but not in exactly the same spot, suggesting that villages were regularly abandoned and reoccupied. Jomon villages were comprised of substantial pithouses throughout the 10,000-year-long Jomon period, though aboveground longhouses were also sometimes built. The Jomon also built elaborate stone and cobble pavements and erected stone slabs, labor-intensive undertakings whose purpose remains a mystery. Our knowledge of Calusa settlements is based primarily on early Spanish accounts. Villages and towns may have been rather large, but most houses appear to have been small huts. Larger buildings may have been for public ceremonies or rituals.
The relative permanence of their villages allowed owed many complex hunter-gatherers to develop more elaborate technologies than more mobile hunter-gatherers. This is often seen, as on the Northwest Coast, in a proliferation of large, durable, and heavy ground-stone tools, such as mauls, heavy celts (adz blades); stone bowls, mortars, and pestles; and even stone sculptures. Specialized tool kits on the coast included, for example, tackle for use only against particular kinds of sea mammals, such as whales and seals. Much of the region's magnificent art was the work of specialists; others were skilled at felling trees, hunting particular animals, healing the sick, or fighting.
Natufian technology included tools related to harvesting plants, such as sickle blades, along with an array of ground-stone, bone, and antler tools. Among the groundstone tools are boulder mortars, weighing as much as 330 pounds, for which the raw material was transported up to 60 miles. Natufians decorated objects, such as sickle hafts and bone spatulas, carved elaborate designs on limestone slabs, and made personal ornaments like shell and stone necklaces.
While the Natufians were investing a great deal of labor moving boulders, the Jomon were inventing pottery-the oldest reliably dated and among the most elaborately decorated ceramics in the world. While some vessels might be simply decorated with cord marking, others would be ornamented with a combination of techniques, including appliques in elaborate motifs. Final Jomon (1200300 B.C.) was also characterized by stylized pottery figurines.
The Calusa also appear to have had skilled artisans who specialized in craft production, including woodworking. Early Spanish accounts indicate that at least some specialists were paid. They also had other kinds of experts, including a small "army" of warriors maintained by paramount chiefs (who were themselves full-time political specialists).
Regional interaction seems central to the evolution and persistence of complex hunter-gatherer societies. Distinct local cultures came to share some values, ceremonies, social and political organization, and other traits as the result of trade or other types of exchange, ritual occasions, warfare, and so on. For example, during the past 3,500 years the Northwest Coast was divided into at least three such interacting regions that encompassed local cultures. The best evidence for exchange on the coast is the distribution of obsidian, or volcanic glass, which can be traced to its source by its chemical signature. Further evidence includes copper and celts of nephrite, a type of jade, and marine shells, especially the shells of dentalium, a marine mollusk that forms a long tube from which beads can be fashioned. These were collected on the west coast of Vancouver Island and traded widely throughout western North America.
Throughout the Jomon period, Japan was divided into several zones, marked by characteristic pottery styles, which cut across the main island of Honshu. These pottery zones likely represent regions of interaction. For the Natufians and Calusa, there is evidence of long-distance trade and exchange of resources such as stone for tools and shells for personal ornaments.
Political organization is key to social complexity. Among mobile hunter-gatherers, leaders have no power over other group members; they have to lead by persuasion, example, manipulation, and begging, or by creating social bonds and debt-but they cannot force anyone to do anything. In contrast, at least some complex hunter-gatherers had permanent systems of social ranking with marked differences in the status, prestige, and power of individuals and groups within the society.
The pyramids of Egypt and the palaces of Rome clearly point to the existence of elites, but the chiefly families of the Northwest Coast did not leave such obvious monuments. The presence of prestige items in burials, however, suggests that an elite existed there by about 500 B.C. Distinctive wear marks on the teeth of a small minority of people, both males and females, indicate they wore stone labrets (lip plugs). At Prince Rupert Harbor in northern British Columbia, elite grave goods include copper items as well. The development of this elite was accompanied by the rise of warfare, indicated by the presence of weapons, fortifications, and skeletons with violence caused trauma. The existence of a standing Calusa army suggests that warfare played an important role in their history, though, in contrast with the Northwest Coast, there is presently no evidence for fortifications. The role of warfare during the Jomon and Natufian has not been studied, although some Jomon villages are in defensible locations.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Northwest Coast societies were divided into two classes, free and slave. Free people were ranked into three groups: a chiefly elite' other relatively high-class people, and commoners, free individuals with little or no social standing. While chiefs had life and death power over slaves, they had little or no power to force free people to do their bidding. Several eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century societies had so-called great chiefs, but their presence does not seem to have led to the formation of formal, territorial political units.
In the late 1970s, several researchers suggested that the distribution and quality of grave goods in Natufian burials was evidence for a permanent elite, but this idea has not been supported by recent reanalyses of the burial record. What these studies do show is that Natufian society was probably organized into multigenerational kin groups with territorial ties. Clusters of burials in residential sites, though not in occupied houses, suggest family or kin groupings. They also raise the possibility that some people had greater wealth, and greater access to exchanged goods, than others.
While there is no evidence in the burial record for a Jomon elite, other lines of evidence, including variations in the size of houses and the wealth of their contents, have yet to be explored. By contrast, the Calusa developed a much more stratified society than other hunter-gatherer groups. Their chiefs appear to have had some degree of direct control over food and industrial production. In addition, only the Calusa among complex hunter-gatherers the world over are known to have had a multi-village political unit under the rule of a single, paramount chief who had the power to extract tribute and maintain a standing military force.
Though we have come a long way in our understanding of complex hunter-gatherers in the past couple of decades, we still have a great deal to learn. One important question is whether they can be considered hunter-gatherers at all, given their subsistence economies and land-management practices. It would be a mistake to see them as transitional between pure foragers and farmers. Many complex hunter-gatherers never evolved into farmers, and many, such as those in southern California, did not adopt agriculture, even when they traded with farmers.
Another central issue is why some, but apparently not all, such societies developed elites. Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University has argued forcefully that permanent social inequality will inevitably arise in any society where humans have the opportunity to wheel and deal for personal advantage. This will happen first where food is abundant, so complex hunter-gatherers develop either where the environment is rich enough or when subsistence systems produce enough to allow it. Herbert Maschner of Idaho State University argues equally forcefully that warfare and other forms of direct competition on lead to inequality; warfare was endemic, for example, on the Northwest Coast. Others, including Jeanne Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, argue that these complex hunter-gatherer societies evolve when conditions, such as environmental stress, allow certain people to gain control over the labor of others.
What about the people who built Watson Brake? At present, we know little about them, but we can speculate. If they were complex hunter-gatherers, they probably built houses somewhere in the region, and were organized around households as their basic social and economic unit. We know they visited the mound site regularly during summer, so they had some kind of pattern of annual movements. They probably also spent a period of each year in permanent hamlets or villages, and there may be cemeteries associated with these settlements, though the mounds themselves may have marked people's ties to their territory. It is reasonable to anticipate that they had large populations, a relatively elaborate technology, and a broad-based and intensive subsistence economy. We do know that they fished, hunted, and collected freshwater mussels. They also harvested plants such as goosefoot, knotweed, and marsh elder that were domesticated much later. It is reasonable to expect that they were not the only complex hunter-gatherers in the area and that they were probably linked to other local cultures throughout the region through trade, exchange, and social interaction.
The discovery of complex hunter-gatherers, a kind of society and economy now virtually extinct, is one of the major archaeological advances of the last two decades. As a discovery it is not widely appreciated, but it shows us that the range of human social and economic organization was much greater in the past than we had once thought. And it forces us to rethink fundamental questions, such as why plants and animals were domesticated and why inequality developed in human society. 0
KENNETH M. AMES, professor of anthropology at Portland State University, is senior author with Herbert Maschner of Peoples of the Northwest Coast, Their Archaeology and Prehistory (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). The author would like to thank William Marquardt, Ofer BarYosef, and Junko Habu for their assistance in the preparation of this article.
_________________
"Reality is that which, even when you stop believing, does not go away."

[DavidCampbell]

Well, that certainly got my attention, TG. I found an archaeological survey done by an archaeologist I have met and spoken with a few times. I think I will post some exerpts from it on the Rockwall forum. He found a shell mound there too but not quite as old as Watson Brakes, if I read it right. He also mentions the fact I learned about ten years ago; northeast Texas was abandoned long before the Anglo colonists arrived in the early 19th century. Skinner notes that a sudden evironmental change probably precipitated the abandonment.
_________________
David Campbell
"The going's getting weird, so I'm turning pro."

[frank harrist]

[TexasGuy]

there is ample evidence of climate being a cuase, but I think it is likely that both played a role. what strikes me is that so far, I have found no references from Native populations to support the disease theory. though if it struck before meeting the anglo's it could have been a Curse from the gods sorta thing. either way I tend to think your both correct..

dont you love middle of the road stuff LOL

Jon
_________________
"Reality is that which, even when you stop believing, does not go away."

[frank harrist]

Very diplomatic. That's one of the problems in archaeology is that people try to assign one cause to everything when there were usually several reasons for decline of any society. Any culture that would fall that easily coudn't have been very robust in the first place so it usually takes a combination of things to bring about their ruination if they were a viable entity. There are seldom simple, cut and dry, explanations for this kind of thing. My theory is based on my own experience and the disease theory from Mann's book. What was the climate change that ya'll are talking about?
_________________
We have not inherited the earth from our fathers. We are borrowing it from our children. (Amish Farmer)

[frank harrist]

BTW, I do recommend "1491" by Mann if you haven't read it already. I haven't finished it yet, but so far he's offered theories from all camps on any particular subject as well as his own views and theories. It seems very well researched. He talked to all the experts and the mavericks. I'm enjoying it a lot.
_________________
We have not inherited the earth from our fathers. We are borrowing it from our children. (Amish Farmer)

[DavidCampbell]

Here's the exerpt from Alan Skinner's report on the survey which extended fron the northernmost part of Kaufman County, through Rockwall County on the east of Lake Ray Hubbard and up to Lake Lavon in Collin County. The groups he mentions in the last part are displaced groups such as the Cherokee, Delaware and Shawnee who killed off remnants of Caddos and Wacos in the area from historical references I have read.

Bonham-Alba, Scallorn and Catahoula arrow points are more common in the
earlier portion of the Late
Prehistoric I than the later. Late Prehistoric II
seems to occur about the time that the
climate of northern Texas became drier. Diagnostic
traits include an emphasis on bison
hunting, Washita, Fresno and Harrel arrow points,
bison scapula hoes, "Plains-like" lithic
artifacts, and settlements on sandy terraces above the
floodplains (Late Prehistoric I
people had lived on floodplains). It is important to
note that Prikryl suggested that site
placement is suitable for agriculture, even though
there appears to be no evidence of
agriculture except for the bison scapula hoes. Todd
(1999) believes that some form of
agriculture existed in the Upper Trinity River basin
drainage based upon the presence of
shell hoes. Experiments proved the shell hoes would
have worked to till sandy and loamy
soils.
At the end of the Late Prehistoric period, there
appears to have been a general
abandonment of the North Central Texas area based on
an absence of sites with trade
goods that might have been obtained from French,
Spanish or English traders (Skinner
1988). This simplistic interpretation is tied to a
general drying trend and attempts to
factor in negative information generated by
professional and avocational archaeologists
who have conducted numerous site surveys throughout
the region. There is very little
evidence of historic era Native American occupation
anywhere in the counties although
historic accounts indicate that groups were present in
the early 1800s.
_________________
David Campbell
"The going's getting weird, so I'm turning pro."

[frank harrist]

Ok so you're talking about a ways west of me. It doesn't seem to have affected the people in my area as much. It's still fairly wet here most of the time. Well, except for the last 2 or 3 years we've been way short of rainfall.
_________________
We have not inherited the earth from our fathers. We are borrowing it from our children. (Amish Farmer)

[dmboerne]