Before the development of agriculture all humans lived by hunting, gathering and fishing. Today, this way of living has largely disappeared. Colonisation, urbanisation and globalisation have collectively disrupted and altered the lives of all but a very few hunter-gatherers. Despite the considerable impact of these external forces, hunter-gatherer communities remain a primary source of knowledge for building hypotheses about how earlier humans may have lived.
We as archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of the ethnographic record of historic and current hunter-gatherers for interpreting the past. Used with caution, however, this body of information can help us think about how prehistoric hunter-gatherers might have organised their lives and solved basic problems of making a living, raising children and resolving conflicts within and between communities. Over the next few weeks we’ll take a comparative approach which means looking at a variety of hunter-gatherer societies living from the tropics to the Arctic to see what they have in common and what areas of their lives differ. We’ll be looking for patterns in adaptations that might be useful for thinking about how prehistoric hunter gatherers may have lived, and how we can test those models given the many limitations of the ethnographic record. There is a deeper purpose to this course and that is to raise our awareness that there are, and were, different ways of living.