Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to the Present [and Comments and Replies]

Abstract

It is widely assumed that modern hunter-gatherer societies lived until very recently in isolation from food-producing societies and states and practiced neither cultivation, pastoralism, nor trade. This paper brings together data suggesting a very different model of middle to late Holocene hunter-gatherer economy. It is argued that such foraging groups were heavily dependent upon both trade with food-producing populations and part-time cultivation or pastoralism. Recent publications on a number of hunter-gather societies establish that the symbiosis and desultory food production observed among them today are neither recent nor anomalous but represent an economy practiced by most hunter-gatherers for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Psychological and political reasons for Westerners' attachment to the myth of the "Savage Other" are discussed.

Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past

“…Within the Philippines, all negritos speak Austronesian languages, yet they differ from non-negrito (hereafter "Malayic") Austronesian speakers in two salient characteristics: physically they are shorter and darker, with hair that tends to be curly or frizzled, and culturally they were invariably foragers at first European contact, an economic adaptation that in some cases has persisted until very near the present day (Headland and Reid 1989;Headland 2002). Many Philippine languages have a word Agta(ʔ), Ayta/Aeta, Alta, Arta, Ata, Atta, Ati, or the like, reflecting Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *qaRta, "outsiders, alien people" (Blust 1972), that refers exclusively to a particular negrito group or to the negrito population of the archipelago as a whole.…”

Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy

“…Any answer to this question is bound to be controversial (Schrire 1984;Headland et al 1989;Wilmsen 1989;Lee 1992), yet there are clear logical reasons why our knowledge of the past must be partially based on observations of modern peoples. It is perhaps a bit paradoxical that, while archaeologists wish to understand the past, the only available bodies of knowledge with which to make inferences about the past must come from the present-because we live in the present.…”

Making Friends in the Rainforest: “Negrito” Adaptation to Risk and Uncertainty

“…Respondents have largely refuted this: among other reasons, the "wild yam hypothesis" does not take into account the heterogeneity and diversity of the rainforests, or hunter-gatherer agency in managing their so-called wild resources (Bahuchet 1992;Brosius 1991;Colinvaux and Bush 1991;Endicott and Bellwood 1991). Ethnographers and archaeologists have commonly described forager-farmer relationships as "symbiotic" (Endicott 1984;Headland and Reid 1989;Hutterer 1988). The symbiotic model assumes divergent specialization, with foragers and farmers inhabiting complementary niches.…”

“…The implication is that negritos are just holding on to their final refuges and that the hunting-and-gathering way of life is doomed to extinction. But as others have pointed out, one reason that negrito groups cannot be "a direct and totally static window on the Pleistocene past" is their adaptability-they have persisted by "adapting to changing circumstances and pressures" (Bellwood 2007: 132; see also Headland and Reid 1989). Without committing to any position on the cultural identity of early hunter-gatherers, the ethnographies show today's hunter-gatherers to be extremely resilient; this could almost be the new orthodoxy (see, e.g., Chan 2007;Griffin 1996b;Kent 1996;Puri 2005;Widlok 1999).…”