Susan Kent

As the world continues to shrink owing to globalization, the need to understand the diversity of culturally distinct societies and their interactions with neighboring groups becomes greater than ever. Susan Kent has invited an international team of experts to present their insights into how one type of society, African hunter-gatherers, has managed to survive long past the first contact between foragers, farmers, and pastoralists. The contributors explore many issues, including culture change, trade, tribute, inter-group relations, autonomy, dependence, and differential contact histories and rates of change. They consider why the association of hunter-gatherers with non-hunter-gatherers has sometimes led to trade between autonomous societies and in other cases has led to assimilation. Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the "Other" illuminates both past and present foraging societies by presenting new data and reinterpreting previously collected data within the framework of inter-group interactions.

Association or Assimilation in Africa

Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the "Other"

Columbia University

An Ethnoarchaeological Approach

Method and Theory for Activity Area Research

An Ethnoarchaeological Study of the Use of Space

Analyzing Activity Areas

Gender in African Prehistory provides methods and theories for delineating and discussing prehistoric gender relations and their change through time. Sites studied range from Egypt to South Africa and Ghana to Tanzania, while time periods span the Stone Age to the period just prior to colonialization.

Gender in African Prehistory

Francoise Audouze

John Disney Professor of Archaeology Cyprian Broodbank

Nathan Schlanger

Colin Renfrew

Timothy Taylor

Professor of Anthropology Norman Yoffee

Wendy Ashmore

Andrew Sherratt

Professor of Archaeology Tim Murray

Farmers as hunters analyses from an essentially ethnographic perspective the role of hunters in small-scale farming societies. The twelve contributors examine the effects of hunting and mobility on behaviour, diet, economy and material culture at both culture-specific and cross-cultural levels. The influence of sedentism and the increasing use of domesticates is also explored across a wide range of societies from the American southwest and Amazonian to Africa, New Guinea and the Phillipines. Differing perceptions of the status of animals and plants are reviewed and cultural values are throughout given due weight in a field where discussion too often verges on the economically deterministic.

The Implications of Sedentism

Farmers as Hunters

Susan Kent

Books

Your next favorite book is out there