Archaeology of Hunting

Pequeño trabajo que detalla los útiles líticos, técnicas de caza y fauna en el Neolítico, generando conclusiones sobre el estado de la investigación de las actividades cinegéticas en este periodo. Todo ello asociado a yacimientos de distintas etapas y periodos.

When I was a boy I loved role-playing "Cowboys and Indians". I always wanted to be a "Red Indian" (Native American), and was especially fond of mock-fighting with a bow and arrows. In one overgrown English garden I fashioned my own flightless arrows from the straight stems of Goldenrod (Solidago sp.), and have looked at this plant wistfully ever since. In many parts of East Africa archery is much more than child's play or a weekend sport, and its technology is correspondingly complex. Like many other aspects of African technology, it is also woefully understudied, as I discovered when I set about investigating Mbeere practice in (what was then) Embu District with the help of Silas Kibwece and other local research assistants in 1992-93. I've never found time to finish writing up the results, though I have posted some notes online (Nyaga 1992; Kibwece 1993; Walsh 1993). Last year I tried photographing a selection of the materials that I'd purchased from rural markets or had made for me at the time (unfortunately I've managed to lose my collection of Mbeere bows). Some of the results are shown below. I prefer the close-ups.
Mbeere

During the early Holocene the Mesolithic campsites at Friesack in northern Central Europe were located on an island amidst a wetland landscape: a swampy valley rich of reeds with generally slowly flowing water (with the exception of spring), forests dominated by birch and pine, sandy hills covered with pine, and open grasslands. Due to excellent preservation conditions thousands of mammal remains could be excavated in the refuse areas of the site Friesack 4 by B. Gramsch and his team between 1978 and 1989. 826 identified mammal remains derive from the oldest, mid-Preboreal layers of the station, 1200 bones from the following late Preboreal layers, and further 3082 remains from the subsequent early Boreal horizons. The main game species of the inhabitants of Friesack 4 were red deer, roe deer, and wild boar. Based on the bone weight, red deer was the most relevant and important species in all the Mesolithic stages of occupation. In the course of the c. 1500 years of habitation investigated on this site the economical relevance of wild boar increased gradually, whereas in particular elk lost its importance. Significantly, red deer hunting always focused on older juveniles or young adults. Based on the number of identified specimen, remains of roe deer dominate the mammal bone assemblage in all the occupation stages, and their frequency continuously increases from the oldest to the youngest Mesolithic horizon. Roe deer hunting occurred especially in May and June and was purposefully dedicated to young females. Similarly, hunting red deer was not focussed on strong, older deer, as at some contemporane-ous sites, but on young adults. Both species show that the hunter's strategy at Friesack 4 was in these cases not to get a maximum of food resources per hunting expedition, but rather to secure a successful hunt. In wild boar, in contrast, the analyses give evidence of a selective hunting of full-grown and quite old individuals, thus of wild boars for meat. Remarkably, the hunter's wild boar prey was nearly all female. A résumé of all seasonal indications concerning the mammal bones shows that Mesolithic people stayed at the location nearly exclusively in the months between May and October. There is no evidence for human presence during late autumn and winter/early spring. The portions of the body parts of the different game species show concordantly that the animals were slaughtered elsewhere. Friesack 4 was only the place of consumption. Partly, however, some valuable parts of the prey are missing at the campsite-potentially these parts were reserved for the successful hunters, who consumed them already at the kill site.

The Albert Porter Pueblo great house, located in the central Mesa Verde region, was surrounded by numerous residential structures during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III periods. Using a variety of exploitation measures of wild game and turkeys,we test three hypotheses to see if there are meaningful similarities or differences in the faunal assemblages from the great house and the domestic households that surrounded it. Although the great house was a unique and prominent architectural featureat AlbertPorter Pueblo, thefaunas from the great house are generally similar to those from surrounding structures. However, there is some evidence that more meat of cottontails and turkeys was consumed in the great house compared to domestic structures during Pueblo III. Overall, all members from Albert Porter had equal access to animal food and those used in rituals and ceremonies. We explore different interpretations of social organization suggested by faunal remains.

In the last decade, we have witnessed a revolutionary development of digitally supported information and computer technologies that enable us to acquire highly accurate models of different aspects of the environment. Through advanced technology of three dimensional (3D) printing, it is now possible to reproduce small and large artefacts with high precision and hence reproduce objects at a user selected scale.
The article describes the case of comparison and analysis of five 3D models of the hunting tool from the Ljubljanica River found near Sinja Gorica. The 40,000 years old Palaeolithic point, was made out of yew wood. Five 3D models of the point were taken throughout ten years, two before and three after the conservation process. The comparison of the 3D models serves two purposes. The primary goal is to evaluate the changes of the artefact that occurred during this period and, accurately, to compare its shape before and after the treatment. Conservation of waterlogged wood is still a delicate and somewhat uncertain process in regards to the long-term survivability of such artefacts. The second goal is to asses which software tools are currently available for such comparison, what are technical problems that need to be addressed, and how to effectively present or visualise the sometimes small but critical changes of shape.
To educate the general public about the technology and objects used in the past, a certified copy of the object based on available 3D technology can provide a convenient and less expensive way to reach the same goal. At the same time, it is not necessary that the owner of valuable objects give up the possession of those objects which reduces the risk of their damage. Most importantly, it allows the primary object to stay in the original place which gave in the past the necessary environment for its preservation and enables further scientific study on unperturbed objects. We must rethink therefore the philosophy and ethics of conservation and implement new concepts of preservation and presentation of wooden artefacts for educational purposes, which remains the mission of any museum.

Defining the distinctive capacities of Homo sapiens relative to other hominins is a major focus for human evolutionary studies. It has been argued that the procurement of small, difficult-to-catch, agile prey is a hallmark of complex behavior unique to our species; however, most
research in this regard has been limited to the last 20,000 years in Europe and the Levant. Here, we present detailed faunal assemblage and taphonomic data from Fa-Hien Lena Cave in Sri Lanka that demonstrates specialized, sophisticated hunting of semi arboreal and arboreal
monkey and squirrel populations from ca. 45,000 years ago, in a tropical rainforest environment. Facilitated by complex osseous and microlithic technologies, we argue these data highlight that the early capture of small, elusive mammals was part of the plastic behavior of Homo sapiens that allowed it to rapidly colonize a series of extreme environments that were
apparently untouched by its hominin relatives.

For the past 13,000 years, Native Americans in the North American Great Plains hunted bison (Bison bison and B. antiquus) in communally-organized drives. While many of these operations took only a handful of animals at a time, some of the most spectacular kills reached almost industrial proportions, taking literally hundreds of animals in a single massive event. I briefly describe the taxonomy of fossil and living bison, the behavior of modern bison, and what is known from ethnohistoric and archaeological sources about the ways that Native Americans conducted these drives, including the use of foot surrounds, arroyo traps, pounds (corrals), and cliff jumps. I conclude by considering whether such drives were conducted annually in the late fall and/or early winter as a means of winter provisioning; or instead took place periodically, but not necessarily annually, at many different times of year, and served not only as a way of providing meat and hides, but also as a critical sociopolitical mechanism for integrating otherwise widely dispersed and highly mobile hunting bands.

Аннотация: после перехода к производящему хозяйству человеческие
общества продолжали воспринимать охоту как важный источник
продовольствия и материалов для ремесла. Такие археологические объекты
как поселения и погребения позволяют исследователям определять виды
зверей, практическое использование человеком добычи, реконструировать
орудия охоты. Для бесписьменных обществ весьма важным источником
служат также наскальные рисунки, они живо демонстрируют сам процесс. В
настоящей работе мы рассмотрим некоторые яркие петроглифы со сценами
охоты из Северного Китая.
Ключевые слова: петроглифы, Внутренняя Монголия, Северный Китай.
Summary: human populations continued to regard wild game as a critical
resource for subsistence and raw materials for handicraft production even after the
transition to food-producing economies. Archaeological sites including settlements
and burials have yielded animal bones identifiable to the species level, allowing the
enhanced understanding of procurement strategies employed by ancient humans
and the reconstruction of their hunting technology. Rock art is an extremely
important source of information for the study of preliterate societies, because it
often depicts large game and the technologies and behaviors of hunters. In this
paper, we consider the significance of some of the known petroglyph occurrences
of hunting scenes in North China.
Key words: petroglyphs, Inner Mongolia, Northern China.

Cutting-edge interdisciplinary research of the last 10-15 years has clearly demonstrated that aquatic resources have constituted an essential part of the economic base of the early and mid Holocene hunter-gatherers of Northern Europe and, therefore, it may be better to refer to these groups as hunter-fisher-gatherer communities. New research has revealed archaeological sites also in submerged and wetland conditions, which has led to the discovery of well-preserved fishing equipment as well as the recovery of larger quantities of small-sized and fragmentary fish remains. In addition, isotopic research on human bones and bio-archaeological analyses of early pottery have attested to the considerable consumption of aquatic resources by early forager communities. Some novel approaches have also been developed, for example, in studying the sedimentary record of open-air sites suggesting systematic utilisation of fish even in areas where the direct evidence confirming this is scarce or non-existing.
The fishing topic seems to be central for the understanding of various hunter-fisher-gatherer communities, and therefore this session aims to distribute information about novel and cutting-edge scientific methodologies for furthering our knowledge about the subsistence and cultural development of the early and mid Holocene populations. The purpose here is to convene specialists who work actively on fishing-related topics in Northern Europe, between the North Atlantic and the Urals. Presentations will be highly appreciated on topics concerning, e.g., the application of novel and/or interdisciplinary approaches for improving our understanding of the importance of fishing as well as on how to proceed within fishing studies and what methodologies and cooperation (inter/multidisciplinary) ought to be established and developed further.

Possible reasons for using kites to kill gazelles are comprehensively reviewed in this article. Even though they are now well inventoried and documented, desert kites are still not well understood, as exemplified by the recurrent controversies about their function and dating. According to the dominant view, kites were hunting structures used to drive and to mass kill large herds of wild ungulates, particularly gazelles. Although kites were intensively used during the Early Bronze Age, some of them could have been built and used before that. Beyond these issues, the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of the kites phenomenon are even less understood and therefore we focus on changing reasons for the long-lasting use of kites as hunting devices. We contend that the reasons why they were used during the period of utilization for hunting gazelles changed, in most cases, in response to socio-economic development. It is hypothesized, for example, that, as a result of urban development, kites may have been increasingly (but not exclusively) used to kill gazelles to trade their products with urban communities and farmers, even though they had other uses as well which are also considered. The main hypothesis presented in this article enables diverse opinions about the types of uses and reasons for utilizing desert kites to be reconciled, including in particular varied reasons given in the literature about why they were used for killing gazelles.

Since the discovery of desert kites during the 1920s in southwestern Asia (where they are widely distributed) their possible functions have received much attention from archaeologists. Two main functions have been hypothesized, namely, kites primarily used either as game traps or as structures used for livestock husbandry. Two papers published in the 1990s expressed opposing views about the relevance of these different uses. During the last two decades much information has been gathered on kites as a result of archaeological excavations and satellite imaging. However the function or functions of desert kites remains uncertain. Starting from the 1990s debate, we revisit this controversial issue by reviewing the academic literature published since then. On the basis of this literature and other considerations, we conclude that although some (or all) may have been used for hunting, their main use was for the mustering of livestock. This favors the hypothesis of Echallier and Braemer (1995). In addition, it seems likely that kites were used for a third function, namely the capture of some wild or feral species of animals, particularly goats.