Coming into the Country: Early Paleoindian Hunting and Mobility

Abstract

Hunter-gatherer adaptations to long-term fluctuations in regional resource structure require mechanisms to cope with periodic subsistence stresses. Among documented groups, a common response to such stress is temporary movement into adjacent occupied areas-moving in with "relatives" when things go wrong. However, in the case of early (ca. 12,000-10,000 B.P.) Paleoindian groups in the Americas, the availability of neighboring groups with a detailed knowledge of local resource geography could not be relied upon. Post-Pleistocene environmental changes and the low initial population of the New World are important factors conditioning a lifeway characterized by a dependence on hunting (though not exclusively of megafauna), and by high residential, logistical, and range (territorial) mobility. Early Paleoindian groups had to adopt a subsistence technology that could be employed regardless of the specific resource microstructure. In some regards, Paleoindians seem to have behaved like tropical foragers while in others like arctic collectors. Use of high quality lithic raw materials from large quarry sources, reliance on a bifacial technology, limited use of caves and rockshelters, and a low level of processing of food products for storage all may be indicative of such a subsistence technology, which would have been unlike that of any modern hunter-gatherers.

On Vastness and Variability: Cultural Transmission, Historicity, and the Paleoindian Record in Eastern South America

“…Kelly and Todd 1988, Odell 1998, Parry and Kelly 1987. Unless we regard the Paleoindians from Lagoa Santa as sedentary since 12,500 calBP, the mobility/technology model does not explain such a generalized technology without formal artifacts.…”

Agency and politics in hunter-gatherer territory formation

“…In two landmark reviews of hunter-gatherer research, Kelly (2007) and Binford (2001) note that models of territorial organization have been alternatively favored, rejected, and modified in an effort to derive clear patterns from the vast range of observed variation in land and resource use. Debates have often centered on whether or not extant hunter-gatherer societies whose territorial organization may derive from the interaction with nationstates actually furnish a valid analog to Agency and Politics in hunter-Gatherer Territory Formation pre-contact hunter-gatherers (e.g., Wilmsen, 1989;papers in Leacock and Lee, 1982;cf.…”

“…Although the overwhelming theoretical thrust of studies of hunter-gatherer resource use, land tenure, and territoriality is on evolutionary and behavioral ecology (e.g., Bettinger, 1991;Casimir and Rao, 1992;Dyson-Hudson and Smith, 1978;Eerkens, 1999;Kelly, 2007;Kornfeld, 2003;Winterhalder and Smith, 1981;Surovell, 2000), a growing interest in the emergence of hunter-gatherer complexity has brought a host of other facets of land and resource use to bear on the issue of territorial organization; in particular, the dynamics of unequal access to vital resources and its social and political consequences (e.g., Ames, 1991;Arnold, 1996;Fitzhugh, 2003;Prentiss and Kuijt, 2004;Price and Brown, 1985;Sassaman, 2004). These studies expand the sociopolitical dimensions of human-land interaction of past and present foragers, offering a fresh processual take on social evolution because they demonstrate that hunter-gatherer trajectories do not preclude the development of territoriality.…”

“…Even though scholars have identified and described numerous expressions of territoriality among historic and modern hunter-gatherer groups, in particular with respect to resource exploitation (see Barnard, 1988;Cashdan, 1983;Kelly, 2007;Turner, 1979), there is comparatively sparse analysis of the evolution of territorial identities and birth-rights. Part of the problem resides in a lack of consensus as to what a hunter's territory is and how it should be approached archaeologically.…”

“…The initial movement of Paleoindian groups to and throughout the Ame-ricas has been debated for over a century; common themes include the timing of initial arrival and settlement, routes, parent populations or cultural groups, mobility, and resource use, among others (e.g., Anderson and Gillam, 2000;Hoffecker et al, 1993;Kelly and Todd, 1988;Sellet, 1998;Torroni et al, 1991;Walthall, 1998). Archaeologists generally characterize Clovis as highly mobile, big-game hunters who spread throughout the Americas in relatively short period of time (Kelly and Todd, 1988) or whose technologies were widely adopted by sparse and scattered in situ pre-clovis populations (Waters and Stafford, 2007). Clovis hunters came to the continent with a coherent ontology that allowed them to readily establish relationships with places and resources in an unknown landscape with very few, if any, neighbors in sight.…”