Demonstrating the wide variation among complex
hunter-gatherer communities in coastal settings
This book explores the forms and trajectories of social
complexity among fisher-hunter-gatherers who ...lived in coastal,
estuarine, and riverine settings in precolumbian North America.
Through case studies from several different regions and
intellectual traditions, the contributors to this volume
collectively demonstrate remarkable variation in the circumstances
and histories of complex hunter-gatherers in maritime
environments.
The volume draws on archaeological research from the North
Pacific and Alaska, the Pacific Northwest coast and interior, the
California Channel Islands, and the southeastern U.S. and Florida.
Contributors trace complex social configurations through
monumentality, ceremonialism, territoriality, community
organization, and trade and exchange. They show that while factors
such as boat travel, patterns of marine and riverine resource
availability, and sedentism and village formation are common
unifying threads across the continent, these factors manifest in
historically contingent ways in different contexts.
Fisher-Hunter-Gatherer Complexity in North America
offers specific, substantive examples of change and transformation
in these communities, emphasizing the wide range of complexity
among them. It considers the use of the term complex
hunter-gatherer and what these case studies show about the
value and limitations of the concept, adding nuance to an ongoing
conversation in the field.
Contributors: J. Matthew Compton | C. Trevor
Duke | Mikael Fauvelle | Caroline Funk | Colin Grier | Ashley
Hampton | Bobbi Hornbeck | Christopher S. Jazwa | Tristram R.
Kidder | Isabelle H. Lulewicz | Jennifer E. Perry | Christina Perry
Sampson | Thomas J. Pluckhahn | Anna Marie Prentiss | Scott D.
Sunell | Ariel Taivalkoski | Victor D. Thompson | Alexandra
Williams-Larson
A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal
Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson and Scott M.
Fitzpatrick
La recente letteratura sulla “sovranità marina” suggerisce la necessità di considerare da una nuova prospettiva i modi di gestione e la governance dell’Oceano Pacifico, per far fronte ai cambiamenti ...ecologici degli ultimi decenni, ma anche per riconoscere la coesistenza di ontologie diverse. Questo articolo tenta di fare affiorare la densità di presenze e la poli-cronia che caratterizza l’ontologia acquatica dei Belema, gli abitanti delle isole Belep (Kanaky Nuova Caledonia). Per i Belema l’oceano è molto più di una superficie da attraversare per raggiungere altre terre o il contenitore di importanti risorse economiche. L’oceano è uno spazio denso: visibile e invisibile si intrecciano nella sua profondità opaca; passato e presente, vita e morte si toccano; umano e non umano si incontrano. La geografia acquatica (un’idro-grafia, scandita da villaggi e percorsi sottomarini), le genealogie (in cui i primi antenati sono animali marini) e le continuità e corrispondenze tra esseri acquatici e terrestri rivelano la forza plasmante dell’oceano. Esso dà forma alla società belema e contribuisce a farne una società più che umana.
The recent literature on “marine sovereignty” encourages to consider the ways of management and governance of the Pacific Ocean from a new perspective, in order to face the ecological crisis and ...acknowledge the coexistence of different ontologies. In this paper I aim to convey the density and the poly-chrony that characterize the aquatic ontology of the Belema people, the inhabitants of the Belep Islands (Kanaky New Caledonia). For the Belema, the ocean is more than a surface to cross or the source of important economic resources. The ocean is a dense space: visible and invisible intertwine in its opaque depth; past and present, life and death mingle; human and non-human meet. The aquatic geography (a hydrography, punctuated by underwater villages and paths), the genealogies (in which the first ancestors are marine animals) and the continuities and correspondences between aquatic and terrestrial beings reveal the force of the ocean. It shapes the Belema society and contributes to making it a more-than-human society.
In this research, we address the relationship that exists between the development of certain unsustainable fishing practices among professional small‐scale fishery, industrial fishery and ...recreational fishing and the historical and social changes observed in the configuration of maritime fishing communities in Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain). We also explore the impact that European, Spanish and regional policies have had on the strategies of exploitation of the marine environment and the forms of social organisation of these communities. To do this, we apply a multiproxy approach that includes several kinds of data: field research, photographic archives, oral interviews, local newspapers, legislation, official reports and published literature. The anthropological and historic viewpoints applied in the research delve into how the disappearance of traditional professional small‐scale fishing and the surge of both a bottom‐trawl fleet and recreational marine fishing have not only promoted a loss of sustainability and environmental balance in such coastal environments but have also led to a significant loss regarding key cultural and identity assets.
Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes examines how settlements along South America’s Pacific coastline played a role in the emergence, consolidation, and collapse of Andean civilizations from the ...Late Pleistocene era through Spanish colonization. Providing the first synthesis of data from Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, this wide-ranging volume evaluates and revises long-standing research on ancient maritime sites across the region.
These essays look beyond the subsistence strategies of maritime communities and their surroundings to discuss broader anthropological issues related to social adaptation, monumentality, urbanism, and political and religious change. Among many other topics, the evidence in this volume shows that the maritime industry enabled some urban communities to draw on marine resources in addition to agriculture, ensuring their success. During the Colonial period, many fishermen were exempt from paying tributes to the Spanish, and their specialization helped them survive as the Andean population dwindled. Contributors also consider the relationship between fishing and climate change—including weather patterns like El Niño.
The research in this volume demonstrates that communities situated close to the sea and its resources should be seen as critical components of broader social, economic, and ideological dynamics in the complex history of Andean cultures.
A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson
Anthropologists have written a great deal about the coastal adaptations and seafaring traditions of Pacific Islanders, but have had much less to say about the significance of rivers for Pacific ...island culture, livelihood and identity. The authors of this collection seek to fill that gap in the ethnographic record by drawing attention to the deep historical attachments of island communities to rivers, and the ways in which those attachments are changing in response to various forms of economic development and social change. In addition to making a unique contribution to Pacific island ethnography, the authors of this volume speak to a global set of issues of immense importance to a world in which water scarcity, conflict, pollution and the degradation of riparian environments afflict growing numbers of people. Several authors take a political ecology approach to their topic, but the emphasis here is less on hydro-politics than on the cultural meaning of rivers to the communities we describe. How has the cultural significance of rivers shifted as a result of colonisation, development and nation-building? How do people whose identities are fundamentally rooted in their relationship to a particular river renegotiate that relationship when the river is dammed to generate hydro-power or polluted by mining activities? How do blockages in the flow of rivers and underground springs interrupt the intergenerational transmission of local ecological knowledge and hence the ability of local communities to construct collective identities rooted in a sense of place?
From a maritime anthropology perspective, this article analyzes how artisanal fishermen of the San Andrés Archipelago are propelled to the forefront of conflicts between commoning and sea grabbing. ...In doing so, it questions how this contributes to document the process of the maritimization of societies. Built on six months of ethnographic work in fishing cooperatives, the article questions the positioning of artisanal fishermen as new guardians of the sea, by crossing several scales of analysis. The article first considers the recent upgrading of the social status of fishermen and then the place of their “good practices” as symbolic forms of localized appropriation of fishing territory. It then points out the contradictory dimension of the fishermen’s role of guardians of the sea at regional and sub-regional scales. In a context of regional border conflict and competitive access to oil exploration, the role assigned to fishermen by national institutions is one of heritage before being one of environmental citizens. The Biosphere Reserve fulfills above all a geopolitical function, making fishermen guardians of national frontiers rather than guardians of the biodiversity.
Nature/Culture/Seawater Helmreich, Stefan
American anthropologist,
March 2011, Volume:
113, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Seawater has occupied an ambiguous place in anthropological categories of "nature" and "culture." Seawater as nature appears as potentiality of form and uncontainable flux; it moves faster than ...culture— with culture frequently figured through land-based metaphors— even as culture seeks to channel water's (nature's) flow. Seawater as culture manifests as a medium of pleasure, sustenance, travel, disaster. I argue that, although seawater's qualities in early anthropology were portrayed impressionistically, today technical, scientific descriptions of water's form prevail. For example, processes of globalization— which may also be called "oceanization"— are often described as "currents," "flows," and "circulations." Examining sea-set ethnography, maritime anthropologies, and contemporary social theory, I propose that seawater has operated as a "theory machine" for generating insights about human cultural organization. I develop this argument with ethnography from the Sargasso Sea and in the Sea Islands. I conclude with a critique of appeals to water's form in social theory.
The dredger Carse, Ashley
History and anthropology,
03/2022, Volume:
33, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The dredging of navigable waterways is a critical but often overlooked precondition for global trade. Focusing on the figure of "the dredger"-which can refer to a machine that excavates underwater ...sediment or a person who does that work-this short article links the modern maritime industry, colonial expansion, and terracentric anthropological thought. I argue that the figure of the dredger is useful for understanding the collective geological agency of humanity.
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