The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum

by Robert L. Kelly

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.

Genres: History, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Science, Sociology, Prehistory, Archaeology

375 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2013

About the author

Robert Laurens Kelly (born March 16, 1957) is an American anthropologist who is a professor at the University of Wyoming. As a professor, he has taught introductory Archaeology as well as upper-level courses focused in Hunter-Gathers, North American Archaeology, Lithic Analysis, and Human Behavioral Ecology. Kelly's interest in archaeology began when he was a sophomore in high school in 1973. His first experience in fieldwork was an excavation of Gatecliff Rockshelter, a prehistoric site in central Nevada. Since then, Kelly has been involved with archaeology and has dedicated the majority of his work to the ethnology, ethnography, and archaeology of foraging peoples, which include research on lithic technology, initial colonization of the New World, evolutionary ecology of hunter-gatherers, and archaeological method and theory. He has been involved in research projects throughout the United States and in Chile, where he studied the remains of the Inca as well as coastal shell middens, and Madagascar, where in order to learn about farmer-forager society, Kelly has participated in ethnoarchaeological research.A majority of his work has been carried out in the Great Basin, but after moving to Wyoming in 1997 he has shifted his research to the rockshelters in the southwest Wyoming and the Bighorn Mountains.

Outside of his research in archaeology, Bob Kelly also promotes tourism to historic and archaeological sites in Wyoming. In doing so, he has given many lectures around Wyoming and helped create a website to promote Wyoming’s heritage. The website, funded by the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund and maintained by the University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology, acts as a directory for information about Wyoming Prehistoric and Historic Sites. Kelly also served as an Amicus Curiae in the Kennewick case.. He has served as President of the Society for American Archaeology from 2001 to 2003.

Reviews

[Roslyn Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book because I thought it was about the "spectrum" of hunter-gatheres, the variety of what is out there. That is NOT what this book is about, but I still enjoyed it immensely.

This book is the study of human behavioral ecology. It begins with the same assumption that The Origins of Political Order did–human societies evolve to have certain characteristics the same way human bodies do. Societies are the way they are because those characteristics won the battle of natural selection over time.

This book attempts to answer a question I have been seeking an answer to for a long time: What is the actual ORIGIN of political order? Or as this book correctly calls it–hierarchy. Mobile hunter gatherers are almost always hard-core egalitarians. When and why did that change? Who was the first person to accept inequality, and why on Earth did he?

The author postulates that there are four things that had to be in place for a society to morph from people who are disgusted by status-seeking behavior to people who live in social hierarchies with hereditary leadership, political dominance and inequality.

1) sedentism: People chose to settle when there was an abundant renewable resource, like a river and they didn't need to move for food.
2) a controllable resource: People settled near a bend in a river with a great fishing spot that the tribe could guard
3) a resource that must be controlled: If the tribe followed their hunter-gatherer ethos of allowing anyone to come fish as much as they like, they themselves would starve, so they MUST control the resource.

This is how the first lower-class of people happened. Group A has maximized the amount of people that can live happily around this one fishing hole. Group B suffers some calamity and comes seeking food from group A. Group A has no motivation to share, so they offer to share with group B provided group B gives half of what they catch back to group A. Group B is paying taxes! And group A doesn't have to work as hard and suddenly inequality is born.

And finally, the most interesting factor:

4) child spacing: Mobile hunter gatherers space their children four to five years apart. Sedentary peoples tended to have children every one to two years. When this change happened, the group ethos changed because children got less attention from their parents, especially their fathers, and were raised largely by their siblings rather than a community. In mobile groups there was rarely more than one person of every age, so there was little competition between children. (When a two-year-old was going through his "mine" phase, he could be completely indulged because there were no other two-year-olds with whom to fight.) When a mom has four kids under the age of five, personalities shift and become more competitive and also less individualistic.

Weston A Price would add that due to this kind of child spacing, the mother wouldn't have enough nutrients to pass onto each child (except the first born) which would have contributed to a different genetic personality–nutritionally stressed out fetuses tend to be stressed out, competitive people.

Regardless of all the different possible reasons why, children spaced closely together exhibit a different kind of personality and therefore grow up to create a different kind of society than children born four to five years apart.

So how can we create a more equal world and a world in which people are less interested in status-seeking and competition and have higher self-esteem? We can space our children five years apart, not put them into schools where they spend all day with people of the same age therefore heightening competition as a personality attribute, and continue to create a society that can be highly mobile. The more easily people can move to different locations, the less any one location can suck (because then everyone would move or “vote with their feet.”)

Another thing I found interesting in this book is that the author is very clear that the study of hunter-gatherers is the study of people who exist TODAY. It is entirely possible that they developed their strong sense of egalitarianism in reaction to the hierarchy of modern social structures rather than the other way around.

Note that when an egalitarian society fights a hierarchical one... the hierarchical one wins. Egalitarianism is NOT a good strategy, as much as we all like it.

I liked how this book explained why men hunt and women gather. Women nurse for five years so they can only do things that they can do WITH their children. This is NOT hunting.

I enjoyed how hunter-gatheres consider a man and a woman with two children incapable of surviving on their own without help. I think this is still true today.

One thing I did not like about this book is all the math. I love math but the math in this book was based on too many assumptions, and it just wasn't necessary. The author makes a mathematical equation about every decision hunter-gatherers have to make (should we stay here at this camp or move?) The problem is that there is not really enough data in any one category to develop the decision making formulas in a way that would give me confidence they were actually fact. The author acknowledges this every step of the way, yet he continues to make assertions (everyone would want to move if they had to walk longer than 6km because these six tribes do) and then formulas for how a tribe would make decisions. This reminds me of the problems inherent in the way we currently study things: Everything must be measured, there must be a numerical value. A researcher can't just write about things that he saw, he has to quantify them. I think this method lacks humanity. I want STORIES with my data, so I can draw my own conclusions.

Another thing I did not like about this book is that the author talks about gender inequality and how women were forced to marry men they didn't want to in societies with marriages arranged by elders. I don't understand how this is a female inequality issue--the guy is being forced to marry a girl he didn't pick too.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful, critical look at various modern day societies that sheds light on human behavior broadly. Mr. Kelly largely avoids the facile euro-centric assumptions of the Enlightenment that place human societies on a spectrum of less complex/evolved/advanced on one side and empires or states on the other. His nuanced presentation allows that no society is a monolith. He grants that all societies today are modern societies influenced by everything in and around them, and are not stand-ins for ancient societies. While reading this book, I also started The Day Before Yesterday by the celebrated author Jared Diamond, and I only wish Mr. Diamond's approach were as nuanced and critical as Mr. Kelly's.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is interesting and well supported by research, but it's eclipsed by equations and DENSE facts which makes the content less accessible and honestly just boring. I read it for class and it was by far the worst piece of reading that was assigned in terms of engaging the reader, to the point that the professor ended up removing it from the syllabus half way through the semester. But again, after digging through unnecessary context, the key bits of information were interesting. An awesome text to cite in your paper, but I pity the fool who did more than skim the first dozen or so pages of any given chapter.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book on modern foragers that takes an explicit ecological/evolutionary perspective. One thing I really liked about it is that it first gives a historical overview of anthropology and explicitly argues for this perspective along with explaining how it arose in the history of the field. Then there are chapters devoted to different aspects of forager life, from group size and mobility to social structure, each offering hypotheses on how variation in ecological conditions have shaped variation in these aspects across forager groups, and then listing the empirical evidence that we have in support of these hypotheses. The evidence is often scant and muddled, not in the last place because all modern forager groups are influenced by contact with larger societies. But I really appreciate the general attitude, and I think we do learn some things that for me were not that clear, especially with respect to the impact of reducing variance in foraging success (especially relevant in the context of hunting) on demographics and relations between groups. The author finishes with a discussion of how much all this tells us about our own evolutionary history, and I think he hits the right tone, cautious but also optimistic about using a solid theoretical basis for investigating this question. The one thing that I was missing is a discussion of what might have changed ecologically to have caused the evolution of agricultural societies from forager groups. It seems to me that the authors approach is a great point of departure to try to start answering that question, but this was likely beyond the scope of this book so it doesn't detract from this work at all. All in all, I found it a methodologically solid book in a highly murky field, that also gives a real sense of the history of the field. While the former caused it to be perhaps a bit dry at times, I appreciate this approach a lot and enjoyed reading it.

[Baybars · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book begins with a very thorough and detailed analysis of theoretical inclinations in ethnography and anthropology, throughout their history as fields. It then examines HG societies from different perspectives to arrive at the conclusion that these societies don't have an essential form (e.g. egalitarian).

Must read for anyone annoyed from Marxists' reconstructing of humanity's past attempting to link every modern sociological problem to "the emergence" of capitalism. This book is not politically motivated; this is just how I've used it - it also aids against reactionary primitivists.