Hunter-Gatherers and Abundance

Marshal Sahlins’s (1972) paper “The Original Affluent Society” was the first highly influential anthropological application of concepts of abundance to hunter-gatherers. In that paper Sahlins pointed out that ethnographic research and early reports by explorers indicated that hunter-gatherers spent a relatively small amount of time hunting, collecting, and processing foodstuffs and that this work yielded ample returns with significant time remaining for leisure. The classic perception of hunter-gatherers as leading meager lives of hardship and want, Sahlins contended, was rooted in a “Bourgeois ethnocentrism” based on market economics and an assumption of scarcity. While Sahlins’s (1972) interpretation simplifies the food quest in unrealistic ways that fail to account for the true effort expended in the full gamut of social, ideological, and technological aspects of hunting and collecting, his paper does illustrate the degree to which some hunter-gatherers perceive of food as abundant.

The perceptions and dispositions Sahlins (1972) captured in his notion of “the original affluent society” are further developed in Bird-David’s (1990) discussion of “the giving environment.” According to Bird-David, certain immediate-return hunter-gatherers like the Nayaka of South India conceive of “nature as parent” rather than “nature as ancestor.” Hunter-gatherers whose social relations are based on presumptions of giving rather than assumptions of reciprocity tend to have very little personal property, and the property they do have has value derived from the social relations it evokes rather than from some inherent worth arising from perceptions of scarcity. For these groups, the lifeworld provides all the resources they need, and objects are abundant (Bird-David 1990).

Not all hunter-gatherers think this way; certainly, there are recorded examples of so-called complex hunter-gatherers whose political economies were structured by unequal access to resources and for whom abundance led to socially imposed scarcities (e.g., Hayden 1994; Kim and Grier 2006; Sassaman 2004). But for much of human history, it is likely that most hunter-gatherers maintained significant political autonomy (Crothers and Bernbeck 2004; Ingold 1988, 1999; Kelly 1995; Leacock and Lee 1982). For these groups, the food quest was as much about relations with animals, spirits, and other non-human persons as it was about social relations among people (Ingold 2000; see also Zedeño, this volume). Among some hunter-gatherers, perceptions of abundance are linked to behavior, in that abundance is the predictable outcome of properly maintaining relationships with other organism-persons. In a giving environment, however, expectations of abundance are even stronger and not always predicated on assumptions of conduct. Just as parents are expected to provide for their children regardless of how they behave, in a giving environment where nature is parent, nature is always an abundant provider who has no expectations of receiving anything in return (Bird-David 1990).

Perceiving of nature as a giving parent has profound implications. For archaeologists, it means that neoclassical models based on the notion that humans have unlimited wants cannot be uncritically applied to the past. If nature is giving and objects abundant, then scarcity must be imposed. Models that assume scarcity in the absence of institutionalized hierarchies will have no relevance (Dugger and Peach 2009; Hoeschele 2010). For hunter-gatherers, a perception of abundance modifies the human-object relationship; rather than perceiving this relationship in economic terms, humans are free to enter into social relationships with things. A perception of abundance articulates well with an animic ontology wherein actions are more important than ownership and objects are often agents (Bird-David 1999; Ingold 2006; VanPool and Newsome 2012).

Knowledge

For hunter-gatherers for whom objects of worth link individuals to others both past and present (e.g., Bird-David 1990:193), there is no value in accumulating personal possessions for their own sake. When strategic resources such as food and tool stone are freely available and shared by all, there is little logic in accumulating goods that are naturally concentrated or processed in bulk and shared communally. Rather than invest in the accumulation of goods or the construction of facilities, these groups invest in knowledge—knowledge of the land, knowledge of the spirits, knowledge of stories and myths, knowledge of all kinds (Crothers and Bernbeck 2004; Ridington 1982). Objects of worth are often social persons, and no two are alike; true value derives from one’s knowledge.

Situating knowledge and perceptions as central to analysis is a defining characteristic of a dwelling perspective. Defined by Ingold (2000:153) as “a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence,” a dwelling perspective recognizes that hunter-gatherers often do not perceive of themselves as separate and distinct from their environments but instead consider themselves part of an integrated lifeworld that is always in the process of becoming (Ingold 2000; Moore and Dekle 2010; Moore and Thompson 2012). Ingold (2000) contrasts this with a “building perspective,” the classical anthropological idea that worlds are constructed both mentally and physically before they are lived in. Whereas a building perspective conceives of persons and environments as partible phenomena, a dwelling perspective is a relational perspective wherein humans, landscapes, and other organism-persons are interdependent and indivisible; “each component enfolds within its essence the totality of its relations with each and every other” (Ingold 2000:191).

Hunter-gatherers in an abundant environment appear not to perceive the world in dualistic terms of mind versus body or culture versus nature; rather, the mind is at the “cutting edge” of the emergence of the organism-in-its-environment. Thoughts are embodied, and perceptions are projected as part of an ecology of dwelling. Rather than nature existing as an external and opposing presence or backdrop against which humans act, the environment emerges in an entangled relationship with the dividuated person (Bird-David 1999; Fowler 2010; Hodder 2012; Ingold 2000; Strathern 1988). There is but one lifeworld, “saturated with personal powers, and embracing both humans, the animals and plants on which they depend, and the features of the landscape in which they live and move” (Ingold 2000:47).

Techniques are transported in the mind and deployed using local materials; the artifacts so produced are the “products of knowledge and will” (Ridington 1982:477). They are deployed in the process of creating and maintaining social relations, for among hunting societies, animals are perceived as allowing themselves to be taken. For these groups, tools are not a means of control but a means of divining the intent of the animal with whom one wishes to enter into a social relationship through the food quest (cf. Shipman 2010). In this sense, tools are like gifts in that they “mediate an active, purposive engagement between persons and their environments” (Ingold 2000:319).

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004), this relational ontology, central to a dwelling perspective, characterizes Native peoples throughout North and South America. Amerindians, Viveiros de Castro contends, conceive of a uniformity of the spirits or souls of all beings. This idea, referred to as Amerindian Perspectivism, posits that at their core, beings are identical in form; they are differentiated only on the basis of corporeality. While identical in substance, different organisms have different corporeal experiences and affects that provide them with unique perspectives and capabilities. Knowledge is not something that one possesses but something that one feels; it consists of “skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through the long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular environment” (Ingold 2000:25). In fact, among mobile hunter-gatherers like the Athapaskan Dunne-za (Beaver Indians), material culture is a burden and technology consists of knowledge rather than objects. For these groups, knowledge is powerful, and a person who “knows something” is a person of power (Ridington 1982, 1988).

Knowledge of organisms and their varied perspectives permits certain individuals (typically shamans and other ritual specialists) to utilize certain objects as a means of directly engaging non-human organism-persons and, through shamanic transformations, adopting their perspectives (Conneller 2004; Eliade 1964; Guenther 1999; VanPool 2009; Zedeño, this volume). Objects do not merely represent the world (any more than shamans in costumes are “representing” animal-persons). Rather, they construct the world through interactions and, like other organism-persons, contribute to the construction of the web of relations that is the lifeworld. Agency is not assigned to objects by humans; all objects are inherently invested with the potentiality for personhood. The degree to which that potentiality is realized and held to be significant by humans is variable; nevertheless, objects are agents, beings-in-the-world (Alberti and Marshall 2009; Ingold 2006, 2007; Olsen 2003; VanPool and Newsome 2012).

For hunter-gatherers like those discussed by Viveiros de Castro, the world is animate and composed of entangled relationships among animals, people, landscapes, spirit beings, and meteorological and astronomical phenomena (Bird-David 1999; Ingold 2000, 2006; Knight 2012). Animate beings are those who breathe, transform, and move or who resemble those who do (Jordan 2001). The process of “being alive” itself is emergent; beings “come alive” through interactions with other beings in the process of dwelling (Alberti and Marshall 2009; Ingold 2006). This understanding of the world as composed of relationships, or what Ingold (2000, 2006) refers to as an animic ontology, is widespread among hunter-gatherers and other non-Western societies. For these groups, success in life equates to success in maintaining relationships by conducting oneself appropriately while interacting with others.

Creating and maintaining relationships with other people and organism-persons is a process in which all members of society participate in different ways, but it inevitably has a material component. For instance, John Knight (2012) argues that hunters must develop personal relationships with what he describes as Animal Spirits to ensure their success on the hunt. Among the Khanty of Siberia, this means disposing of or consuming elk and bear remains in particular ways or at special places such as deep pools or holy sites (Jordan 2001, 2003). Among the Dunne-za, animals had to give themselves to hunters in dreams before they could be killed. Furthermore, social relations were intertwined such that acting bad toward one’s kin damaged relations with animals, and treating animals inappropriately created bad relations among kin (Ridington 1982). Similarly, hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest systematically dismantled fishing weirs and traps after a successful harvest as an intentional means of managing social relations with salmon organism-persons (Losey 2010). While objects and resources may be abundant, the world does not consist solely of people and things. People must strategically deploy their knowledge of other organism-persons and the specific objects associated with them if they are to be successful persons characterized by power and abundant meaningful social relations with other organism-persons (Bird-David 1990; Ridington 1982, 1988).

Abundance

Animals, plants, and tools used to process them were abundant in the Green and lower Ohio River Valleys during the Archaic. Medium- to high-quality chert resources available both locally and regionally include the Ste. Genevieve, Wyandotte, Muldraugh, Vienna, and St. Louis chert types (Cantin 2008; DeRegnaucourt and Georgiady 1998; Gatus 2005), access to which was available by way of the region’s many riverine transportation routes. Sandstone and siderite used to manufacture a variety of plant-processing tools are also abundant in the Green and Ohio River Valleys (Janzen 2008; Moore 2011). Access to more socially valued objects such as marine shell and copper masks, headgear, necklaces, and other kinds of ornamentation may have been more restricted because of a lack of access to these non-local items, but the recovery of these objects with burials of biological males and females and individuals of all ages suggests that, contra Winters (1968), access was not systematically restricted to particular classes of individuals (Rothschild 1979; Watson 2005).

Evidence for the abundance and lack of restricted access to resources is perhaps best exemplified by the quantity of lightly used artifacts found at large shell and dirt/rock midden sites in the region. For instance, excavation of approximately 8,900 ft² of the Late Archaic Chiggerville (15Oh1) shell midden in Ohio County, western Kentucky, by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) without the use of screens resulted in the recovery of 1,485 chipped stone, 388 groundstone, and 1,275 bone and antler artifacts (Moore 2011; Webb and Haag 1939). Excavation of 60,000 ft² at the much larger and multi-component Middle to Late Archaic Indian Knoll (15Oh2) shell midden, just downstream from Chiggerville, yielded a stunning 13,806 chipped stone, 3,270 groundstone, and 12,769 bone and antler artifacts (Rolingson 1967; Webb 1974). This pattern is repeated throughout the Green and lower Ohio Valleys, where dozens of sites have yielded large quantities of artifacts, many of which were discarded long before their use-lives were completely expended (Janzen 2008; Jefferies 2008; Watson 2005). For example, 137 diagnostic Late Archaic Saratoga points from Chiggerville ranged in length from 21 mm to 87 mm, with blade lengths ranging from 8 mm to 75 mm. The mean blade length of these points was 33 mm ± 14.2 mm, indicating that the average Saratoga point discarded at Chiggerville still had as much as 2.5 cm of usable blade available when it was deposited in the midden (Moore 2011:508).

Food resources were also abundant, as evidenced by the large and diverse quantity of plant and animal remains found at Archaic sites with good preservation. From the subsistence and coprolite evidence, important dietary resources during the Archaic included deer, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, turkeys, turtles, catfish, freshwater drum, mussels, acorns, hickory nuts, black walnuts, and a variety of fleshy fruits and starchy and oily seeds (Cassidy 1984; Crawford 2005; Crothers 2005; Glore 2005; Patch 2005; Simon 2009; Styles, Ahler, and Fowler 1983; Styles and Klippel 1996; Wagner 1996). These resources may at first seem disparate, but most share a common trait—they were readily available over wide areas.

Dental micro-wear texture analysis of human teeth indicates that the foods were poorly processed and highly abrasive, which led to severe tooth wear and antemortem tooth loss (Schmidt 2001). However, the diet was not particularly cariogenic, so those with dental disease were older people who had accumulated more tooth wear over time. The data also indicate that males and females had very similar diets. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic evidence indicates that meat from terrestrial animals made up a sizable portion of the diet. Overall, as with many hunter-gatherer groups living in resource-rich zones (e.g., Zeder 2012), the eastern North American Archaic diet was broad and founded on abundant resources.

The Archaic diet was abundant, but it had to be collected or hunted, which means injuries, particularly lower-limb fractures, were common. Scarcity was situational and when it did occur, resources were channeled to those in need, as seen in the care of those who would have been unable to provide for themselves (see also Varien, Potter, and Naranjo, this volume). For those who did suffer injury or became ill through infection, significant evidence indicates that the infirm were well cared for. Access to medical knowledge, healing, and healthcare was unrestricted. For instance, two mortuary sites in southern Indiana have adult males who suffered traumatic leg injuries. The first comes from the Late Archaic Kramer Mound site (12Sp7), where an individual fractured his femur just below the femoral neck (Bergman, Peres Lemons, and Schmidt 2014). The fracture spiraled inferiorly and completely separated the proximal end from the rest of the bone. Over time the fracture healed; however, it did not return to its normal anatomical position, and tension from the muscles of the thigh pulled the lower part of the bone up so the two broken aspects slightly overlapped. This person would have been in severe pain and almost completely immobile for weeks; yet he survived and lived well into adulthood.

An adult male from the Firehouse site (12D563) likely fell and fractured both his right tibia and fibula in two places, just below the proximal end and just above the distal end. Again, the bones healed, but they were slightly out of alignment. Like the individual from Kramer Mound, this man would have been in severe pain for an extended period of time. On average, bones heal over a period of about six weeks, which is ample time for a person to expire from starvation or dehydration; yet both men fully recovered and lived on for years.

Finally, a young adult female from the Meyer site (12Sp1082) suffered from a significant infectious condition that altered the appearance of her mid-face, causing her to lose all of her upper incisors and eroding away much of her lower jaw. In fact, her entire skeleton was extremely gracile, indicating that her daily activities were greatly restricted. The condition lasted for approximately ten years, and although the woman did eventually succumb to the disease, there is no doubt that she was fed and cared for throughout (Casserly et al. 2013).

Importantly, the diversity of artifactual and ecofactual remains recovered from Archaic sites in the Green and lower Ohio River Valleys testifies to the abundance of local knowledge possessed by the region’s hunter-gatherers. Archaic peoples knew the kinds of animal resources available to them in the region and possessed the technical know-how to manufacture and construct tools to harvest those resources. They had knowledge of the region’s plant resources and knew which plants were edible; which could be used to manufacture twine, matting, and baskets; and which could be used for poultices and medicines. They had access to transportation technologies and knowledge of local geography; they knew where the rivers ran and who lived in those areas, and likely they could predict when streams would rise and fall. It is also not hard to imagine that Archaic peoples had access to abundant social and ideological knowledge related to the passing of the seasons, the distribution of kinship networks, and the presence of spirits and other supernatural entities (Moore and Thompson 2012).

Entanglement

The socio-spatial outcome of dwelling in an abundant environment is the creation of a cultural landscape infused with meaning and all the sentimental values of home. We contend that the Archaic peoples of the Green and lower Ohio River Valleys were the inhabitants of an ancient landscape ripe with cultural memories that were passed on from generation to generation and that created a shared sense of identity and a connection to place (Moore 2015). Middens at sites such as Chiggerville and Indian Knoll contained the bodies of the ancestors, whose spirits were likely alive in the landscape. Burial grounds, hickory groves, and mussel shoals were persistent places where groups aggregated to fish, laugh, find marriage partners, and exchange knowledge and goods (see also Claassen 2016). These events structured future gatherings and created a temporal rhythm that connected the present to the past and the past to the future (Moore and Dekle 2010; Moore and Thompson 2012).

The region’s natural abundance facilitated this social process, probably from the moment people first began to colonize it. As Monica Smith (2012) points out, humans are drawn to abundance; naturally abundant locations near transportation hubs like the Green and Ohio River mussel shoals would have quickly become desirable sites of human occupation. As objects and evidence of past human-animal-plant interactions increased throughout the Archaic, so did evidence of the region’s abundance. Persistent places became marked by the accumulation of trash, including discarded food refuse, artifact manufacturing debris, and minimally used artifacts (Smith 2011, 2012). But the ethnographic record of later hunting-and-gathering societies suggests that this was not just any trash—it was deployed in the creation of meaningful relationships between Archaic inhabitants and other organism-persons; after it was discarded, the ancestors were buried in it, people lived on it, it became places of power recorded in stories and myths. The middens reified in material form the abundant lifeworlds of the hunter-gatherers who lived there.

This process of the material, social, and ideological becoming intertwined and indistinguishable facets of human life is a central quality of dwelling. Ian Hodder (2012) refers to it as entanglement, a concept that encapsulates the interconnectedness of humans and things. According to Hodder, humans both depend on things to achieve goals and become dependent on things, thus limiting or constraining their options. Sometimes these entanglements are the product of history and sometimes they are the product of choice, but in either case the structuring nature of increased entanglement makes maintaining one’s material and social interconnections appear inevitable (Hodder 2012). So long as resources remained abundant, so long as the giving environment continued to give, the Archaic hunter-gatherers of the Green and lower Ohio River Valleys continued to maintain their connections to place and their social relations with one another, with the spirits, and with the landscape (figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Ohio Valley Archaic tanglegram. Illustration by Christopher R. Moore, inspired by Hodder (2012).

If this interpretation of Archaic lifeways is correct, then evidence of increasing entanglement and perceptions of abundance should be traceable to the region’s earliest Paleoindian or Early Archaic inhabitants. Examples might include the dozens of large (ranging in length from 8 cm to 19 cm) bifaces and adzes recovered from Sloan and other Dalton period sites in Arkansas (Morse 1997), the increasing diversity and abundance of plant remains evident in Paleoindian and Archaic contexts at Dust Cave in Alabama (Hollenbach 2009), and the overwhelming quantity of debitage and minimally used bifaces (i.e., complete, un-retouched points and preforms) at the Early Archaic Swan’s Landing site in Indiana (Smith 1995).

Accessing the region’s resources made resource-rich areas meaningful places, and discarding debitage and tools at places provided a visible material connection between people and place, past and present. Individual ties to places and things extended outward through kinship networks, friendships, trade partnerships, and other social connections to link entire groups to one another. Stories, myths, burials, and objects linked these groups to the landscape. Animals were not just food but partners. The forest was not just home but caregiver. If you had need, the spirits provided. If you injured yourself, your friends and family were there to take care of you. Material necessities were abundant. An entangled lifeworld bred security and comfort; life was good.

Conclusion

The archaeological record of the Green and lower Ohio River Valleys of the midwestern United States indicates that the region’s Archaic hunter-gatherers had ample access to material resources such as tool stone and food. This condition structured the Archaic lifeworld, contributing to the construction of a material landscape marked by evidence of abundance—large shell and dirt/rock midden sites containing the remains of food refuse, tool manufacturing debris, minimally used artifacts, and the bodies of the ancestors. By using and reusing these persistent places, the region’s Archaic peoples infused them with meaning and embedded them in their memories, creating a robust and dynamic cultural landscape of interconnected peoples, places, and things—an entangled lifeworld.

So, what happened? At different times and in different places over several hundred years following the end of shell and dirt/rock midden formation along the Green and lower Ohio Rivers, Woodland groups began to settle in more permanent villages, giving up degrees of autonomy in exchange for more structured leadership positions and creating new cultural landscapes centered on other places. While we do not yet know all the factors involved in this process, some likely contenders include (1) social changes that developed from more complex entanglements originating in increasingly complex long-distance trade networks and growing populations (e.g., Crothers 2008), (2) environmental changes that introduced stressors and challenged perceptions of nature as a giving parent (Anderson 2001; Kidder 2006; Thompson 2010), and (3) population movements that resulted in conflicts evident in increasing evidence of interpersonal violence during this time (Mensforth 2001; Schmidt et al. 2010). Whatever the factors involved, they never completely modified the Archaic lifeworld, as shamanic practices and an animic ontology continue to be evident in ethnohistoric and early ethnographic accounts of midwestern Native peoples.