Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 259

Animals are central to our understanding of most archaeological problems in one way or another, including and beyond the development of agriculture itself. All the Big Questions, as the American Lewis Binford once phrased them, involve animals, from the emergence of modern humans, to settling down and the development of social complexity. Even if you prefer a series of smaller questions in more complicated narratives of long-term social change, it is hard to keep animals out of the frame, as prey, resource and capital on the one hand, and as partners, actors in their own right, and conceptual focus on the other. The International Council of Archaeozoology has been going since the 1970s as the principal international forum for the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. Every four years it holds an international conference, whose scope and significance, as these three volumes indicate, is steadily increasing. The three volumes (handsomely published by Oxbow) nicely illustrate two important dimensions of such activity: advances in specialist research, and wide-ranging, critical reflection on long-term change.

The volumes edited by Ruscillo and Mashkour show the way to the first theme. Archaeozoologists do a lot of unsung hard work, but which lies at the heart of wider archaeological and historical interpretations. Reliable ageing and sexing of animal bones are central to characterizing animal bone assemblages, and beyond them the nature of human activities in given times and places. Recent advances offers a close insight into these processes, papers working away at growth rings, dentition, epiphyseal fusion, body size and other issues. Equids gives an even more concentrated look at a single species, the contributions ranging from geographical and Pleistocene data to the ongoing debate about the nature and timing of horse domestication. Marsha Levine shows how studies of mitochondrial DNA are adding to the possible picture of restricted times and places for the first domestications (probably somewhere on the Eurasian steppe, and certainly by 2000 BC) by suggesting the continuing incorporation of wild populations into domestic herds. Here are both Grand Narratives (the origin story of first domestication) and smaller and more local histories (the messy business of action at any number of local scales).

That tension, or combination of scales, is also evident in Beyond affluent foragers. ‘Affluent foragers’ is a term with baggage. It echoes the characterization by Sahlins in the 1960s of mobile foragers as the ‘original affluent society’ because of the ease with which they satisfied their needs and wants. It more strongly reflects the subsequent characterization in the late 1970s by Koyama and Thomas of coastal fisher-hunters in productive environments, with features of rich resources, highly organized social structures and high degrees of sedentism. Both sets of connotations have proved problematic, and perhaps the single most important strand in the last thirty years’ research on foragers has been the demonstration of their diversity. ‘Complexity’ has been a tricky word, and many definitions prove to imprison rather than clarify.

Beyond affluent foragers takes these debates onwards. Eleven papers (with supporting introduction and conclusion) present richly documented studies from Japan, Korea, North and South America, and Australia, combining archaeological and ethnographic research. Diversity is again underlined. From the very wide range of these contributions, we can note the contrast between the eel-fishing Gunditjmara of temperate south-west Australia (paper by Builth), who were probably sedentary and had hereditary chiefs, and the people of the Lower Paraná wetlands of Argentina (paper by Loponte, Acosta and Musali), who exploited a rich if uneven resource base of fish and vegetables, with coordinated labour and periodic population aggregation, but without significant social hierarchy. Likewise, Uchiyama shows in a study of the prehistoric Japanese Jomon culture that, rather than year-round residence in one place, there was an unstable alternation between what he calls ‘clumped’ and ‘dispersed’ systems of residence, perhaps reflecting or responding to local environmental changes; even in the clumped phase, one midden site, Torihama, can be seen (based, as noted above, on careful analysis of animal remains, including dentition) as a residential base in summer and autumn, but as a wild boar hunting camp in winter and spring, when the residential base probably fissioned. As a final example, Grier’s study of north-west coast (of America) foragers stresses that affluence is a social construct, a dynamic promoted by social actors and fostering inequality; the economy is a political one, with agendas and interests firmly embedded in households and other key groupings.

The long-term shift from foraging to agriculture is not likely to have been straightforward. Even mobile foragers could have had a complicated network of subsistence practices, patterns of residence and social relations. In some cases, incoming farmers may have replaced and disrupted forager societies, but in others foragers may have been sufficiently robust, or sufficiently similar, to resist either the lure or the compulsion to become agricultural. In yet other settings, there must have been intense interactions and fusions between foragers and farmers. Beyond affluent foragers helps to show us how and why.