I’ll accept that Otzi could well have been a part-time farmer (there was probably no such thing as a full-time farmer then), but not to call him also a hunter/gatherer seems overly pedantic, especially when it appears that hunting was a significant part of his life. In fact, insisting that he was not a HG is committing the same sin I did in saying he wasn’t a farmer.
I only mentioned recreational hunters, the ones who go out for one or three weekends a year for sport. And no, I’m not going to provide or even look for evidence. What part of “This degree of mobility is not characteristic of other Copper Age Europeans” isn’t good enough for you?
Nope, it would be precise and accurate. “Hunter-Gatherer” is an anthropological descriptor of an entire society, not a job description. **An entire people **are either hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists. Mutually exclusive. Logical XOR. Never the twain shall meet. Ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road. The anti-Earl Warren. etc.
The bit where you blithely skip over the next sentence, “Ruff proposes that this may indicate that Ötzi was a high-altitude shepherd”? Shepherds ain’t HGs.
If you’re doing any significant agriculture, that’s it. You’re not hunter-gatherers any more. Hunter-gatherers are defined as societies who get most or all of their food from wild sources. So yeah, it depends what you mean by “most”. But “some of each” isn’t it.
I would guess a rough rule of thumb would be “society mostly stays put to tend the fields, some hunting trips”… vs. most HG which have to keep moving as they exhaust local resources or scare away the good food sources. Permanent settlements might distinguish farmers from HG proto-farmers who basically plant some stuff and hope it’s still there when they return, no real “tending fields”.
Another example is the Iroquois and Huron, who had long-house settlements surrounded by fields of corn, even though yes, they did do a lot of deep-forest hunting - with their range extended by canoe travel. Notice that with agriculture also comes the ability to build large, more permanent structures; while HG tend to be nomads in tents. But… that’s because once agriculture became known and widely disseminated, only the marginal land was HG territory? In my wild-assed-guess opinion, the problem is that to rich a land, before agriculture, would result in an overpopulation and resource exhaustion. The HG group could not remain in one place - unless, like a delta marsh or the northwest coast Indians, the food came to them on a regular basis.
“Otzi … shepherd” this whole discussion has skipped the herdsman which may or may not be an intermediate step on the way from HG to field agriculture.
So a tribe that does a lot of hunting and gathering but also grows some things, is, by this way of defining it, an agricultural society? I will have to go back and read the posts again, as I certainly wasn’t interpreting it this way.
So when it was asserted that it was impossible to live as a hunter gatherer in a rainforest, what was really meant was that one has to use some amount of agriculture – even if it is only a small amount?
Do you know exactly what the breakdown is by percentage for any rainforest tribes? I was under the impression that they do move around quite a bit. Would they then be considered proto-farmers?
It’s not a small amount. Around 80% of the calories of “rainforest” people come form farming.
Not in any possible sense. They have been obtaining the vast majority of their food from agriculture for thousands of years. They are no more “proto farmers” than people in Helsinki.
Where does the idea come from that Hunter-Gatherers are nomadic?
Hunter-Gatherers have permanent territories. They can’t wander the Earth, because if they enter another group’s territory, they’ll be killed. They might not stay at one locality all year, a seasonal round is typical. That is, during the fish run you’re at the fish camp, during berry season you’re at the berry patches, in fall you’re in the hills to hunt sheep, during winter you’re at your permanent houses, in spring you’re at the marsh to hunt migrating birds, and repeat.
But this isn’t wandering around with no fixed address. You might have temporary housing in some places and permanent housing in others, but you have a fixed territory. The only time you leave your territory is if you’re trading or fighting with some other group. And if you find someone from another group in your home territories without permission, you kill them.
Hunter-gatherers have wars, although they tend to resemble gangland-style driveby shootings and ambushes than setpiece battles. You can’t assemble large armies because how are you going to feed them if you don’t have farmers back home producing surplus grain? With the introduction of agriculture you get things that seem more like wars to us–groups of men from enemy villages confront each other in no-mans-land and yell insults at each other and throw the occasional rock, spear, or arrow, and tough guys challenge each other to fight, and then everyone goes home congratulating themselves on how they showed those guys.
From every anthropological, ethnographic and archeological article ever written about HGs. This is something that is not in dispute. Aside form the people of the Pacific NW, HGs are all nomadic.
That is precisely what nomadism means. And BTW, it’s very rare for HGs to have a permanent house.
By this standard there is no such thing as a nomad, which is silly since the term was invented to describe human populations who wandered around within a fixed territory.
That’s pretty much the story of the Polynesians. Island hopping to new concentrations of resources - prey animals with no natural predators, and no real dangerous creatures to attack the hunting party. Led to massive hunting and eventual extinction of the Moa.
Also, there are copious accounts and archaeological sites that show bison “jumps” - large cliffs that native hunters would drive the bison over. Once they were at the bottom, others would come along and kill the survivors. Contrary to common legend, they did not always use every part of the bison. They had uses for all parts of a bison - but they didn’t always use every part. I bring this up as an example that it depends on the size of the land in question. Larger areas of high production that are spread out, limit population growth. It’s not always a case of the quantity of food total that can be produced, but how much a HG culture has immediate access to. The Midwest can support more than our entire nation with grain, but only because we have the technology and population already in place to exploit it. I think that’s what you mean by saying “too rich a land before agriculture”, but it’s an important point that should be highlighted, lest we get a skewed view of productivity.
They’re the same thing, essentially. Herdsmen usually require larger amounts of grazing for their animals because of land productivity limitations - shepherds usually either A) Have access to better grazing lands and so can keep their animals close, or B) Have sufficient infrastructure in place to import enough food. It’s a difference based on the quality of land, not any level of technological advancement per se.
“Nomad” does not mean they never live in the same place. It means they have impermanent shelters. Doing a season round is nomadic. The only differences between nomadic pastoralism and transhumance is A) Whether the houses they use are permanently fixed, and B) How close they are to last year’s site.
If they go to the same place every time and stay in firmly built cabins, they’re transhumance. If they travel between elevations depending on the seasons with little regard for exact position in yurts, they’re nomadic pastoralists. If they have a permanent house in the hills for winter but a transient location in the valley, they’re transhumance. All can be described as degrees of nomadic. It’s more than just sleeping in a horse’s saddle.
If a large community of people of both genders and all ages wander outside a largely fixed area for any reason, it’s a migration, not nomadism.
Not always. Much more common was either letting the other group travel through your land unmolested, or exchanging daughters and goods. Why waste the opportunity to score some sweet chicks? You’re most likely never going to see that group again if you’ve never seen them before, and they don’t have the manpower to be able to go around causing trouble any time someone steps on their toes. War wasn’t glorified as a choice you could use to puff your chest out, it was glorified as a terrifying necessity that the bravest faced with dignity.
The way I always understood it is that during the HG period, humans were at the mercy of nature. They essentially had to wander around in ever larger circles getting their food daily, when the area within walking distance was exhausted (which was inevitable,) they had to move. This meant that the maximum number of people in a group had to be small, and all members had to spend all their time looking for food. A small group meant less chance of survival and more work for each member.
The switch to agriculture means that the equation is reversed: now man controls nature. This leads to larger settlements which lead to more security and less moving. Also, I believe this was when the barter system started, which also signaled the beginning of trade. Spending less time on food means more time for invention, arts, etc.
From what I can understand, the HG period was a pretty miserable time for all involved, and they spent most of their time hungry anyway. It wasn’t like you could go out, punch a deer in the face and use it to feed 5 people day in and day out. Catching anything wasn’t easy, and there was no guarantee you could get consistent amounts every day.
So it’s an academic distinction. Someone who hunts and gathers isn’t necessarily a Hunter/Gatherer™ to an anthropologist. It’s good to know what you’re getting at, finally.
It’s more than that. There’s a real cultural distinction to be made, and while it is possible for individuals to transition between a HG society and an agricultural one (this happened with the Khoi and San in Southern Africa), the two cultures remain distinct, with different lifeways.
You make it sound like it’s just a labelling distinction, or something. It really isn’t. Just because it’s a Term of Art doesn’t make it only useful to specialists. It’s an information-rich distinction that has all sorts of implications for lifestyles etc.
OK, this sort of thing is what I was complaining about. The notion that hunter-gatherers wandered randomly around in circles, always looking for some new source of food, never knowing where they were going to end up.
Most hunter-gatherers lived their whole lives in one territory. They might not camp in the same spot for a whole year, but that’s not the same thing. You can’t just wander the continent randomly, because every place with abundant resources already has grumpy strangers living there who don’t take kindly to outsiders.
It seems when explorers (Lewis & Clark, or guys in pith helmets, etc.) encountered tribes of various sorts - herdsmen, hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers - they generally found them to be very friendly, until/unless their typical European behaviour pissed them off. (Thinking Magellan here). The logic is simple - a bunch of obvious strangers, who seem to be passing through, are not a large group, and do not seem to be serious exploiting your local resources - these are a pleasant and interesting diversion. A tribal family group or bigger, obviously living the same lifestyle and horning in on your hunting grounds, is a threat to be taken seriously.
There is an excellent, but hard to find movie, “Black Robe” about the Jesuits trying to convert the Indians of New France. Unlike the (alleged) motivation of charity and generosity, or the chivalrous spirit of Europeans, the natives were seen as vicious and sadistic killers. As one chief explains in the movie, you must show you are strong even as you die. If you act charitable, that just shows you are weak. If you let your enemies live they will come back to kill you. There is no room for generosity or good samaritans in a subsistence warrior society.
Yes, HG had territories and knew where they were going. Odds are they knew the seasons and the geography, and when and where they could count on finding different food sources. They were nomads but they were not stupid.
Is a herdsman really the same as HG? I would think it is a distinct step which may or may not lead to agriculture. Herdmen probably realized that their corrals could be expanded to bigger pens for specific tasks (giving birth). Once habitats were permanently fixed, the scale and size of pastures could be expanded. Somewhere there’s a trade between using a full-time herder and fencing in pastures; I’m guessing this happened as the “personal land” shrank. WIth reduced area, fencing became easier, and herd size became smaller. With a family-sized farm, the number of people available to watch the herd became less, and all hands were needed for field tending rather than herd-watching.
OTOH, the expression “Tragedy of the Commons” comes from the situation (IIRC, from a study of sub-sahara villages) that even with agriculture and allocated fields, pasture land was still communal. (A situation in some places in medieval Europe too).