Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- One Hunter-Gatherers and Anthropology
- Two Environment, Evolution, and Anthropological Theory
- Three Foraging and Subsistence
- Four Mobility
- Five Technology
- Six Sharing, Exchange, and Land Tenure
- Seven Group Size and Demography
- Eight Men, Women, and Foraging
- Nine Nonegalitarian Hunter-Gatherers
- Ten Hunter-Gatherers and Prehistory
- Notes
- References
- Index
Five - Technology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- One Hunter-Gatherers and Anthropology
- Two Environment, Evolution, and Anthropological Theory
- Three Foraging and Subsistence
- Four Mobility
- Five Technology
- Six Sharing, Exchange, and Land Tenure
- Seven Group Size and Demography
- Eight Men, Women, and Foraging
- Nine Nonegalitarian Hunter-Gatherers
- Ten Hunter-Gatherers and Prehistory
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The main activities requiring skill, patience, and the expenditure of a vast amount of real labor were the building of canoes and houses. With nothing beyond a few bone and stone tools they built large, fairly comfortable carpentered houses of planks and hewed large seaworthy canoes from massive logs.
(Olson 1936: 66, on the Northwest Coast Quinault)Lacking nails, bolts, and screws, and having little to use for adhesives, the Paiute Indians tied their world together. They tied their wood and willows in bundles to carry them into camp; they tied small game onto their waist bands; they tied the tules to make boats, and cattails to make houses; they tied babies in baskets, and arrowheads to shafts. They used cords in place of buttons and safety pins, to make traps, to catch fish and hang them to dry. In addition to the tough rope of cattails and sagebrush bark, they made strong string of sinew and human hair.
(Wheat 1967: 55, on the Toedökadö Paiute)We began this book with Thomas Hobbes's famous seventeenth-century description of human life in a time before “society.” It is not a pretty image, and we will repeat the less well-known portion of it here: “no place for Industry…No navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society…” Although Hobbes did not even know of the existence of “hunter-gatherers” when he wrote Leviathan in 1651, his memorable passage came to typify nineteenth- and early twentieth-century definitions of foragers. And part of that definition was that hunter-gatherers lacked things: technology.
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- The Lifeways of Hunter-GatherersThe Foraging Spectrum, pp. 114 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013