Hunter-gatherer adaptations and assemblage structure

Abstract There is a growing tendency to conceive of hunter-gatherer adaptations as points on a yardstick, with foragers at one end and collectors on the other. Such a view limits our perspective and may trap anthropologists into seeing these categories as steps in an evolutionary progression. It is more productive to think of human adaptation as an N-dimensional space, with individual cases occurring at the intersections of the various dimensions. When this viewpoint is taken, it becomes clear that a search for a single dimension in archaeological data that can be used to characterize all prehistoric adaptations is unlikely to be fruitful. This paper explores the multidimensionality of hunter-gatherer adaptive behavior and reviews those archaeological manifestations that are empirically or logically linked with various dimensions of three components of adaptation: mobility, predation, and technology. Those manifestations with the greatest potential for characterizing prehistoric hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies are identified as measures of mobility type, frequency, stability, scheduling, demography, and range; predation mode, breadth, and scheduling; and the time budgeting and storage dimensions of technology. A subset of these measures is evaluated by comparing assemblages from the late prehistoric Columbia Plateau with expectations derived from ethnographies written on the same local area.

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