The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers PDF Author: Richard B. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521571098
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
Hunting and gathering is humanity's first and most successful adaptation. Until 12,000 years ago, all humanity lived this way. Surprisingly, in an increasingly urbanized and technological world dozens of hunting and gathering societies have persisted and thrive worldwide, resilient in the face of change, their ancient ways now combined with the trappings of modernity. The Encyclopedia is divided into three parts. The first contains case studies, by leading experts, of over fifty hunting and gathering peoples, in seven major world regions. There is a general introduction and an archaeological overview for each region. Part II contains thematic essays on prehistory, social life, gender, music and art, health, religion, and indigenous knowledge. The final part surveys the complex histories of hunter-gatherers' encounters with colonialism and the state, and their ongoing struggles for dignity and human rights as part of the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers PDF Author: Richard B. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521571098
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hunting and gathering is humanity's first and most successful adaptation. Until 12,000 years ago, all humanity lived this way. Surprisingly, in an increasingly urbanized and technological world dozens of hunting and gathering societies have persisted and thrive worldwide, resilient in the face of change, their ancient ways now combined with the trappings of modernity. The Encyclopedia is divided into three parts. The first contains case studies, by leading experts, of over fifty hunting and gathering peoples, in seven major world regions. There is a general introduction and an archaeological overview for each region. Part II contains thematic essays on prehistory, social life, gender, music and art, health, religion, and indigenous knowledge. The final part surveys the complex histories of hunter-gatherers' encounters with colonialism and the state, and their ongoing struggles for dignity and human rights as part of the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples.

The Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers

The Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers PDF Author: Vicki Cummings
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000189538
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
This book provides a basic introduction to key debates in the study of hunter-gatherers, specifically from an anthropological perspective, but designed for an archaeological audience. Hunter-gatherers have been the focus of intense anthropological research and discussion over the last hundred years, and as such there is an enormous literature on communities all over the world. Yet, among the diverse range of peoples studied, there are a number of recurrent themes, including not only the way in which people make a living (hunting, gathering and fishing) but also striking similarities in other areas of life such as belief systems and social organisation. These themes are described and then explored through archaeological case-studies. The overarching theme throughout the volume is the use of ethnographic analogy, and how archaeologists should be critical in its use.

Demography and Evolutionary Ecology of Hadza Hunter-Gatherers

Demography and Evolutionary Ecology of Hadza Hunter-Gatherers PDF Author: Nicholas Blurton Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316425215
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The Hadza, an ethnic group indigenous to northern Tanzania, are one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations. Archaeology shows 130,000 years of hunting and gathering in their land but Hadza are rapidly losing areas vital to their way of life. This book offers a unique opportunity to capture a disappearing lifestyle. Blurton Jones interweaves data from ecology, demography and evolutionary ecology to present a comprehensive analysis of the Hadza foragers. Discussion centres on expansion of the adaptationist perspective beyond topics customarily studied in human behavioural ecology, to interpret a wider range of anthropological concepts. Analysing behavioural aspects, with a specific focus on relationships and their wider impact on the population, this book reports the demographic consequences of different patterns of marriage and the availability of helpers such as husbands, children, and grandmothers. Essential for researchers and graduate students alike, this book will challenge preconceptions of human sociobiology.

Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World

Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World PDF Author: Megan Biesele
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782381589
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
In an age of heightened awareness of the threat that western industrialized societies pose to the environment, hunters and gatherers attract particularly strong interest because they occupy the ecological niches that are constantly eroded. Despite the denial of sovereignty, the world's more than 350 million indigenous peoples continue to assert aboriginal title to significant portions of the world's remaining bio-diversity. As a result, conflicts between tribal peoples and nation states are on the increase. Today, many of the societies that gave the field of anthropology its empirical foundations and unique global vision of a diverse and evolving humanity are being destroyed as a result of national economic, political, and military policies. Although quite a sizable body of literature exists on the living conditions of the hunters and gatherers, this volume is unique in that it represents the first extensive east-west scholarly exchange in anthropology since the demise of the USSR. Moreover, it also offers new perspectives from indigenous communities and scholars in an exchange that be termed "south-north" as opposed to " north-north," denoting the predominance of northern Europe and North America in scholarly debate. The main focus of this volume is on the internal dynamics and political strategies of hunting and gathering societies in areas of self-determination and self-representation. More specifically, it examines areas such as warfare and conflict resolution, resistance, identity and the state, demography and ecology, gender and representation, and world view and religion. It raises a large number of major issues of common concerns and therefore makes important reading for all those interested in human rights issues, ethnic conflict, grassroots development and community organization, and environmental topics.

Basics in Human Evolution

Basics in Human Evolution PDF Author: Michael P Muehlenbein
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128026936
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
Basics in Human Evolution offers a broad view of evolutionary biology and medicine. The book is written for a non-expert audience, providing accessible and convenient content that will appeal to numerous readers across the interdisciplinary field. From evolutionary theory, to cultural evolution, this book fills gaps in the readers' knowledge from various backgrounds and introduces them to thought leaders in human evolution research. - Offers comprehensive coverage of the wide ranging field of human evolution - Written for a non-expert audience, providing accessible and convenient content that will appeal to numerous readers across the interdisciplinary field - Provides expertise from leading minds in the field - Allows the reader the ability to gain exposure to various topics in one publication

Nurturing Our Humanity

Nurturing Our Humanity PDF Author: Riane Eisler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190935731
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings--largely overlooked--from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end. A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.

The Diversity of Hunter Gatherer Pasts

The Diversity of Hunter Gatherer Pasts PDF Author: Bill Finlayson
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785705911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This thought provoking collection of new research papers explores the extent of variation amongst hunting and gathering peoples past and present and the considerable analytical challenges presented by this diversity. This problem is especially important in archaeology, where increasing empirical evidence illustrates ways of life that are not easily encompassed within the range of variation recognized in the contemporary world of surviving hunter-gatherers. Put simply, how do past hunter-gatherers fit into our understandings of hunter-gatherers? Furthermore, given the inevitable archaeological reliance on analogy, it is important to ask whether conceptions of hunter-gatherers based on contemporary societies restrict our comprehension of past diversity and of how this changes over the long term. Discussion of hunter-gatherers shows them to be varied and flexible, but modeling of contemporary hunter-gatherers has not only reduced them into essential categories, but has also portrayed them as static and without history. It is often said that the study of hunter-gatherers can provide insight into past forms of social organization and behavior; unfortunately too often it has limited our understandings of these societies. In contrast, contributors here explore past hunter-gather diversity over time and space to provide critical perspectives on general models of ‘hunter-gatherers’ and attempt to provide new perspectives on hunter-gatherer societies from the greater diversity present in the past.

Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods

Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods PDF Author: Barry S. Hewlett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351514148
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
In the vast anthropological literature devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the place of hunter-gatherer children. Children often represent 40 percent of hunter-gatherer populations, thus nearly half the population is omitted from most hunter-gatherer ethnographies and research. This volume is designed to bridge the gap in our understanding of the daily lives, knowledge, and development of hunter-gatherer children.The twenty-six contributors to Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods use three general but complementary theoretical approaches--evolutionary, developmental, cultural--in their presentations of new and insightful ethnographic data. For instance, the authors employ these theoretical orientations to provide the first systematic studies of hunter-gatherer children's hunting, play, infant care by children, weaning and expressions of grief. The chapters focus on understanding the daily life experiences of children, and their views and feelings about their lives and cultural change. Chapters address some of the following questions: why does childhood exist, who cares for hunter-gatherer children, what are the characteristic features of hunter-gatherer children's development and what are the impacts of culture change on hunter-gatherer child care?The book is divided into five parts. The first section provides historical, theoretical and conceptual framework for the volume; the second section examines data to test competing hypotheses regarding why childhood is particularly long in humans; the third section expands on the second section by looking at who cares for hunter-gatherer children; the fourth section explores several developmental issues such as weaning, play and loss of loved ones; and, the final section examines the impact of sedentism and schools on hunter-gatherer children.This pioneering volume will help to stimulate further research and scholarship on hunter-gatherer childhoods, th

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers PDF Author: Vicki Cummings
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191025275
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1361

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Book Description
For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology

Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology PDF Author: William Balée
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231509618
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This collection of studies by anthropologists, botanists, ecologists, and biologists is an important contribution to the emerging field of historical ecology. The book combines cutting-edge research with new perspectives to emphasize the close relationship between humans and their natural environment. Contributors examine how alterations in the natural world mirror human cultures, societies, and languages. Treating the landscape like a text, these researchers decipher patterns and meaning in the Ecuadorian Andes, Amazonia, the desert coast of Peru, and other regions in the neotropics. They show how local peoples have changed the landscape over time to fit their needs by managing and modifying species diversity, enhancing landscape heterogeneity, and controlling ecological disturbance. In turn, the environment itself becomes a form of architecture rich with historical and archaeological significance. Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology explores thousands of years of ecological history while also addressing important contemporary issues, such as biodiversity and genetic variation and change. Engagingly written and expertly researched, this book introduces and exemplifies a unique method for better understanding the link between humans and the biosphere.