The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers
The Foraging Spectrum

Challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity.

Robert L. Kelly (Author)

9781107024878, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 April 2013

375 pages, 58 b/w illus. 1 map 29 tables
26 x 18.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.94 kg

'Using Latin America as a case study, Kaplan clearly explains the interplay between economics and politics in the international arena … A thoroughly analytical work with the potential to transform thinking about globalization and austerity measures worldwide. Summing up: highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections.' L. O. Imade, Choice

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.

1. Hunter-gatherers and anthropology
2. Environment, evolution, and anthropological theory
3. Foraging and subsistence
4. Mobility
5. Technology
6. Sharing, exchange, and land tenure
7. Group size and demography
8. Men, women, and foraging
9. Non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers
10. Hunter-gatherers and prehistory.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA], Archaeology [HD], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]