Provider: Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic

TY  - JOUR
JO  - Anthropologie (Brno)
TI  - Wild things in the north? Hunter-gatherers and the tyranny of the colonial perspective
AU  - Layton R
AU  - Rowley-Conwy P
Y1  - 2013
VL  - 51
IS  - 2
PB  - Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic
SN  - 0323-1119
SP  - 213
EP  - 230
KW  - Hunter-gatherers
KW  - Social evolution
KW  - Research history
KW  - Social complexity
KW  - Origins of agriculture
KW  - Ertebølle
KW  - Mesolithic
KW  - Neolithic
N2  - 
N2  - The paper argues for a synthesis of Darwinian and Marxist theories of evolution. We challenge claims that hunter-gatherer societies evolve via a natural progression from simple to complex, arguing instead that huntergatherer social strategies are adaptations to specifiable ecological conditions, while having emergent consequences that shape the political structure of hunter-gatherer society. We review the various theories of which we make use, and those that we challenge, and test them against data from the ethnographic and archaeological literature on hunter-gatherers, discussing the evidence for variation in technology, mobility, territoriality and egalitarianism versus social inequality. We conclude that human societies do not evolve via a natural progression from simple to complex forms, and that complex hunter-gatherers are not necessarily incipient farmers. Many of the assumptions that colour common views of the development of hunter-gatherer complexity and the appearance of agriculture in prehistoric Europe have their roots, consciously or unconsciously, in nineteenth-century European colonialism.
ER  -