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Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to the Present
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CURRENTANTHROPOLOGYVolume 30, Number I, February 1989
Q 1989by The Wenner-GrenFoundationfor Anthropological Research.All ri.ghtsreserved oo11-3~04/89/3001-ooo1$2~~0
Hunter-Gatherers and
Their Neighbors from
Prehistory to the
Present1
by
Thomas N. Headland and
Lawrence A. Reid
It is widely assumed that modem hunter-gatherer societies lived
until very recently in isolation from food-producing societies and
states and practiced neither cultivation, pastoralism, nor trade.
This paper brings together data suggesting a very different model
of middle to late Holocene hunter-gatherer economy. It is argued
that such foraging groups were heavily dependent upon both
trade with food-producing populations and part-time cultivation
or pastoralism. Recent publications on a number of huntergatherer
societies establish that the symbiosis and desultory food
production observed among them today are neither recent nor
anomalous but represent an economy practiced by most huntergatherers
for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Psychological
and political reasons for Westerners' attachment to the
myth of the "Savage Other" are discussed.
THOMAS N.HEADLAND is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Linguistics
at the University of exasat Arlington and an International
hthr0~0loeVConsultant of the Summer Institute of Lineuistics
(7500W. Wisdom Rd., Dallas, Tex. 75236, u.s.A.~Born in
1935,he was educated at Bethel College in St. Paul (B.A., 1960)
and at the University of Hawaii [M.A., 1981; Ph.D., 1986).His
research interests are human ecology in the tropics and Holocene
hunter-gatherers. Since 1962he has spent 18years doing
fieldwork among Negritos in the Philippines. His publications include
"The Wild Yam Question: How Well Could Independent
Hunter-GatherersLive in a Tropical Rainforest Ecosystem!"(Human
Ecology I 5:465-931, "Kinship and Social Behavior among
Agta Negrito Hunter-Gatherers" (Ethnology26261-801, "Cultural
Ecology, Ethnicity, and the Negritos of Northeastern Luzon"
[AsianPerspectives 21:127-39), and, with JanetD. Headland, A
Dumagat (Casiguran)-EnglishDictionary (Canberra:The Australian
National University, 1974).
I. An earlier version of this paper was read by Headland at the Fifth
I
Annual Visiting Scholar's Conference, Southern Illinois University,
April 15-16, 1988. We thank the following for written critical
comments on earlier drafts: Alan Barnard, Matthias Guenther,
Janet Headland, Susan Hochstetler, Karl Hutterer, Richard Lieban,i
Carol McKinney, and William Scott. We feel a special debt of gratitude
to Bion Griffin and Agnes Estioko-Griffin for their substantial
input over many years and to Leslie Sponsel for detailed comments
.i
on several earlier versions. Richard Crawford, Ronald Edgerton,
i Pedro Gil Munoz, Rudolf Rahmann, and John Slonaker assisted us
in our archival research. We had help in translating certain documents
from Hella Goschnick, Marianne Finkbeiner, and Hartmut
Wiens (fromGerman)and Charles Peck, William Scott, and Martha
Shirai (from Spanish).
LAWRENCE A.REID is Professor of Linguistics at the University of
Hawaii. He was born in 1934 and received his Ph.D. from the University
of Hawaii in 1966.His research interests are Philippine
languages and linguistics and the comparative syntax of Austronesian
languages. Among his publications are "Diachronic Typology
of Philippine Vowel Systems," in Current Trends i n Lznguistics,
vol. 11, edited by Thomas Sebeok, pp. 485-506 (TheHague:
Mouton, 19731; Philippine Minor Languages: Word Lists and
Phonologies [Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications 8);BontokEnglish
Dictionary, with English-Bontok Finder List (PacificLinguistics
C 36);and "The Early Switch Hypothesis: Linguistic Evidence
for Contact between Negritos and Austronesians" (Man
and Culture i n Oceania 3[special issue]:41-601.
The present paper was submitted in final form 18v 88.
Westerners today commonly think of tribal peoples in
general, and hunter-gatherers in particular, as primitive
and isolated-incomplete, not yet fully evolved, and
outside the mainstream. This view has been supported
throughout this century by the writings of explorers,adventurers,
missionaries, government agents, journalists,
and, until very recently, anthropologists. Tribal peoples,
and especially nomadic foragers, are often described as
"fossilized" remnants of isolated late Paleolithic huntergatherers
who have just emerged, through recent contact,
into the 20th century. "Modem foragers tend still
to be viewed in most of the current anthropologicalliterature
as sequestered beings whose very existence is due
to the fact that they live beyond the reach of the trade
routes of foreign powers. They are depicted as quintessential
isolates, whose world was merely glimpsed in
passing by explorers, and who remained remote until
anthropologists penetrated their lives" (Schrire 1984:2).
The literature is full of recent "discoveries" of
"isolated" tribal groups. Stereotyped descriptions of
such peoples are found in popular writings such as Burroughs's
Land That Time Forgot (1963 [1918])and Gibbons's
The People That Time Forgot (1981)and in anthropological
works such as Primitive Worlds: People
Lost in Time (Breeden 1973). Redfield's 1947 classic
"The Folk Society," which idealizes tribal systems as
"isolated," helps through its reprintings (mostrecently
in Bodley 1988)to keep the myth alive in anthropology
classrooms. Other anthropological examples are Huxley
and Capa's (1964)Farewell to Eden, describingtheir visit
to some Indians in the Amazon as "a trip that was to
take us back thirty-five hundred years in time" (p. 13),
and the 1984 educational film on the Mbuti pygmies
titled Children of the Forest (see review by Morelli,
Winn, and Tronick 1986).Schebesta's 1947work on the
Philippine Negritos is calledMenschen ohne Geschichte
(Peoplewithout HistoryJ,and the author of a 1981 book
on the "Auca" of the Ecuadorian rain forest calls them
.an "isolated" people who'se "way of life has changed
little since their ancestors migrated from Asia across the
Bering Strait" (Broenniman 1981:17).
Perhaps the best-known case, made famous by some
20 ethnographic films produced in the 1970s by Napoleon
Chagnon and Timothy Asch, is that of the Yanomamo,
a horticultural people of the Amazon. In the
44 ( CURRENT A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, Number r, February 1989
third edition of what is probably the most widely read
anthropology book in the United States today, Chagnon
(1983:1) continues to portray these "fierce people" as
living in pristine isolation from Western influence at the
time of his initial visit to them in 1964-and this despite
the fact that American missionaries have been
working with the Yanomamo in his area since 1950 (pp.
3, 9).He even calls them "our contemporary ancestors"
in the final sentence of his book (p.214).(Fora contrastive
view of Yanomamo prehistory, see Colchester 1984;
see also Ramos 1987.)
These works and many others perpetuate a view of
tribal peoples as having lived until relatively recent
times in isolation from their neighbors. There is, however,
conclusive evidence that this "isolate model" is
incorrect-that most, if not all, tribal peoples have typically
been in more or less continuous interaction with
neighboring groups, often including state societies, for
thousands of years. We will call this view the "interdependent
model" and support it with recent ethnographic
descriptions of several hunter-gatherer societies traditionally
considered "isolated" and "primitive."
We are not the first to question the myth of the primitive
isolate. Spielmann ( I986:305)~for example, criticizes
anthropologists for their "unrealistic and misleading"
tendency to analyze egalitarian societies as closed
systems, and Wolf (1982:18)points to anthropology's
"mythology of the pristine primitive." It is part of what
Strathern (1987)refers to as the "persuasive fictions of
anthropology." Our argument here is in fact influenced
by recent writings of several anthropologists who began
to challenge it at about the same time as we did (e.g.,
chapters in the volumes edited by Leacock and Lee 1982,
Francis, Kense, and Duke 1981, and especially Schrire
1984).More generally, our model was inspired by the
writings of Roger Keesing, Frederick Dunn, and Karl
Hutterer, who describe the prehistoric world as one in
which tribal peoples have been in intense interaction
with one another for a long time. Keesing calls the isolate
model "the mosaic stereotype" and critiques it in
detail (198I: I I 1-22). He proposes instead a "systemic
view" of the prehistoric tribal world in which simple
tribal societies, complex societies, and even states coexisted
and evolved together. He believes that most prehistoric
foraginggroups were parts of complex regional systems
tied together by trade, exchange, and politics-that
"for several thousand years the 'environments' of most
hunters and gatherers have included surrounding agriculturalists,
pastoralists, and in many cases kingdoms
and empires" (p. 122).What we are calling the isolate
model is a view of "a world that never existed" (p. I 14).
It continues, however, to be taught to anthropology students
and to the public.
Case Studies
THE PHILIPPINE NEGRITOS
Most practice minor desultory cultivation and intense
trade of forest products with non-Negrito agricultural
populations. Two models of their prehistory may be proposed.
The older and more generally accepted "isolationist
stance" (toborrow a term from Gordon 1984:220)is
that the first human inhabitants of the Philippines were
some type of Pleistocene Homo sapiens that evolved
some 20,000 years ago into the Negrito found in the
archipelago today (Solheim I 981:25; Rambo 1984:240-
41; Omoto 1985:129-30; Bellwood 1985:74, 113);that
their original languages were not Austronesian; that
they were "pure" hunter-gatherers; and that they had at
most only infrequent contact with the Austronesianspeakers
who began migrating into the Philippines
around 3000 B.c.'
This isolate model is reflected, for example, in the
report of a psychological anthropologist who studied the
Ayta in western Luzon in the late 1930s that these Negritos,
living "an isolated life in the equatorial rain forests,
where millennia slip away with so little change . . .
are probably living the way our own ancestors did some
hundred thousand years ago" (Stewart 1954:23)and that
"nowhere were the Negritos known to have agriculture"
(p. 24).The anthropologist Eder (1978)describes the recent
past of the Batak Negritos of Palawan Island in a
similar framework, assuming without evidence that
they "once lived in self-contained isolation" (p.55),that
"in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" they
were still "isolated . . . from all but sporadic contact"
with outsiders (1978:ix; see also IZ),that they "began
cultivating rice only during the latter part of the 19th
century" (1978:58),and that trade of commercial forest
products "to obtain desired consumer goods ...may also
have begun at this time" (p. 58). Warren (1984:3)also
assumes that the swidden cultivation he observed
among the Batak in I95o was "obviously newly acquired
from their neighbors." Fox (1953:175) noted that the
Ayta Negritos "are today all shifting cultivators" but
believed that they "were once able to live without recourse
to cultivation" (p.245),judging that their "association
. . . with cultivated plants must be reckoned in a
few hundred years-excepting perhaps the taro and
yams" (p.27, emphasis added).And Reynolds (1983:166)
has recently stated, "For thousands of years, the Negritos
in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia had
managed to maintain a traditional life by withdrawing
from prolonged contact with non-Negritos." Rails ( I982)
ethnography presents Agta Negritos in northeastern Luzon
as "relatively isolated" in pre-Hispanic and early
Spanish times, with only "marginal" and "peripheral"
trade with outsiders until the last two or three centuries
(pp.139-40, 145-46, I 52, 154)and formal trade "at most
only as old as the beginning of this century" (p.I 56).He
2. The latest archaeological and linguistic evidence favors the hypothesis
that the originalhomeland of Proto-Austronesianwas Formosa
and that a group speaking a daughter language of ProtoAustronesian
arrived in the northern Philippines from Formosa
The Philippine Negritos, some 25 ethnolinguistically around 3000 B.C. (Pawleyand Green 1973:52-54; Blust 1978:2201
Harvey 1981;Scott 1984:38-39, 52; Bellwood 1985:107-21, 130,
different groups numbering in about ISiooot are 232).For recent opposing views on the location of the homeland,
hunter-gatherers in various stages of culture change. see Solheim (1984-85)and Meacham (1984-85).
H E A D L A N D A N D R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 45
surmises that "the Agta may have been practicing some
degree of horticulture for the past two centuries" (p.
166).
Negritos, then, according to the isolate model, were
pure hunter-gatherers with a near-Pleistocene economy
throughout most of the Spanish era and perhaps even
into the early part of this century.
We propose a more complex interdependent model
that better represents the history of the Negritos in the
late prehistoric period. Symbiotic interaction3with outsiders
probably began soon after the first Austronesianspeaking
people began migrating into Negrito areas-for
some populations as early as 3000 B.C.For the protoAgta
groups in northeastern Luzon it may have been
somewhat later but was likely well established by 1400
B.c., when humans who were probably not Negritos
were cultivating rice in that area (Snow et al. 1986).
The Agta are the least acculturated of all Philippine
Negritos (seeGriffin and Headland 1985 for bibliography
and Headland 1986, Reid 1987, 1988a and b, Headland
and Reid n.d.). Called Dumagat by outsiders, the Agta
ethnolinguistic groups of eastern Luzon typically reside
in small nomadic camps in the rain forests of the Sierra
Madre. The most salient activity of Agta men is hunting
wild pig, deer, and monkey with bow and arrow. Among
the Casiguran Agta, in a typical year about a quarter of
the households cultivate tiny swiddens, averaging only
one-sixth of a hectare in size. Rice is the main staple,
wild starch foods being part of only 2% of meals (Headland
1987).Almost all of this rice is acquired by trading
wild meat, minor forest products, or labor with neighboring
agriculturalists; less than 5% comes from their
own small fields.
Proponents of the isolate model would claim that
these Agta bands were until recently almost completely
separated from non-Agta farming populations, since
even during Spanish times very few non-Negrito people
lived in that inhospitable area, with its rugged mountains,
stormy weather, and rough seas.They would argue
that the Agta's involvement in agriculture, desultory as
it is, is a recent "contamination" resulting from contact
with farmers and the pressure of shrinking hunting territory.
Negritos have been widely described as "people
without cultivation" even into this century (e.g., Borrows
1908:45-46). Estioko-Griffin and Griffin (1981:55),
for example, present the agricultural practices of the
Agta they studied in the 1970s as "new," with the more
acculturated Agta only "in their second or third generation
as part-time marginal [swidden] farmers." They
state that Agta cultivation practices are still little
known and that in the traditional Agta system there was
a "lack of use of cultigens" (p.61).The ethnohistorical,
archaeological, linguistic, and botanical evidence fails to
support these views.
Ethnohistorical evidence. Early reports substantiate
beyond question that the Agta were making swiddens
and that symbiotic relationships with nearby farming
3. At least seven types of symbiosis are recognized (see,e.g.,Sutton
and Harmon I 973: I 84):mutualism, cooperation, commensalism,
amensalism, competition, predation, and parasitism.
communities were well established throughout the
Spanish period. When Dean C. Worcester, U.S. Secretary
of the Interior of the Philippines, made a quick steamer
trip down the east coast of Luzon in 1909, he depicted
the Agta on the remote northeast coast as primitive and
untouched: "In this region, and in this region alone, the
[Agta]Negrito ...has had little or no contact with white
men or with Christian [i.e., non-Negrito] Filipinos"
(Worcester I 912:833).It is clear, however, that he failed
to grasp the significance of the many trade items he
found in theirabandoned lean-tos: coconut shells, clay
~ o t s .metal fishhooks. metal arrowheads. bolos, and. r
commercial cloth (p.8k1).Furthermore, on'e of his' photographs
"taken [in these Agta camps] on the northeast
coast of Luzon" (p. 837) shows a wooden mortar for
pounding corn or rice, a small clay pot, and a tin can.4In
1909 the Agta bands in this area were probably the most
remote and "primitive" hunter-gatherers in the Philippines,
but the trade goods just mentioned show that they
were certainly not independent of other Filipinos or of
agriculture.
A number of 18th-centurvreDorts make clear that the, .
Agta were involved in intense symbiosis, including patron-client
relationships, with Christianized farmers
and trading forest products for rice, tobacco, metal tools,
beads, and pots (AFIOMS 89/60 1745; Santa Rosa 1746,
cited in Perez 1928:87,94, 106 and 1927:294).It is clear
from many other records that this system was widespread
by the 19th century (see, e.g., Semper 1861:252,
255-56; 1869:51-52; de Medio 1887, quoted in Report
1901:391; Plater0 n.d., quoted in Report 19o1:391;
Segovia 1969 [1goz]:103;Eighth annualreport 1903:334;
Garvan, March 12 1913, in Worcester 1913:105-7; Lukban
1 9 1 4 : ~ ~4, 6-9; W. Turnbull 1929:177, 237-38;
1930:782, 783; Vanoverburgh 1937-38:149, 922, 928;
Lynch 1948; Amazona 1951:24; Tangco 1951:85; and
Schebesta 1954:60, 64).Likewise, there is solid evidence
that the Agta were making swiddens of their own by the
1740s (AFIOMS 89/60; Santa Rosa 1746, cited in Perez
1928:87, 88, 92-93, 96), in the 19th century (Semper
1861:252, 255-56; de Medio 1887 and Platero n.d., cited
in Report I ~ o I : ~ ~ o - ~ I ) ,and in the early years of this
century (Worcester 1912:841; Lukban 1914:~;Whitney
1914; Turnbull 1930:32, I 10, 782, 794; Vanoverburgh
1937-38:922, 927; for English translations see Headland
19861.~. ,
Archaeological evidence. The archaeological evidence
establishes that extensive international trade in forest
4. This photograph, taken on August 30, 1909,is in the Worcester
Photographic Archives of the Museum of Anthropology, University
of Michigan, File No. I-Z-I.It shows another trade item, a
small clay pot to the right of the mortar, that was cut from the
reproduction published by Worcester (1912~837)
5. Eder (1987:23,45-46, 48-49] cites a number of archival references
showing that the Batak Negritos also engaged in interethnic
trade and some agriculture during Spanish times. Endicott
(1983:224-26; 1984:30]cites 19th-century references indicating
that trade, labor barter, and occasional horticulture "have long
been regular features of the economies of the nomadic Semang
(Negritos]"in Malaysia (p.30). Brosius (1983:138;see also 139-401
indicates that the Ayta Negritos had been making swiddens "for a
very long time, almost certainly prior to the arrivalof the Spanish."
46 1 C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, ,?umber I , February 1989
products has been going on throughout much of insular
Southeast Asia for at least the last thousand years and
that nomadic forest peoples, including Negritos, have
been the collectors and primary traders (Hall 1985:1-z,
21, 23-24! 226). Dunn (1975)argues that such trade in
Malaya, mostly to China, began in the 5th century A.D.
Rambo (1981:140) agrees, saying that Malaysian Negritos
may have evolved into specialist forest collectors
for maritime traders as early as 5,000 years ago. Hoffman
(1984, 1986)argues that Chinese sailors were trading for
forest products in Borneo before the 5th century. Their
arguments dispel any suggestion that Paleolithic people
were living isolated in the jungles of these islands on the
eve of the Europeans' arrival.
Hutterer's (1974, 1976, 1977, 1983)description of extensive
prehistoric trade in the Philippines supports our
interdependent model for these islands. He and others
(Fox1967; Landa Jocano 1975:145-53; Scott 1981; 1983;
1984:63-84) review the evidence for trade between the
Philippines and China by at least the time of the Sung
dynasty (A.D. 969-1279), with Negritos having intense
symbiotic relationships with outsiders at that time
(Hutterer 1974296).Mindoro, in the central Philippines,
was part of the international Asian trade routes by A.D.
972 (Scott1983:1]and "was itself the central port for the
exchange of local goods on a Borneo-Fukien route" by
A.D.1270 (p. IS). According to Scott, "the total impression
is one of continual movements of rice, camotes,
bananas, coconuts, wine, fish, game, salt, and cloth . . .
to say nothing of iron, gold, jewelry, porcelain, and
slaves" (p. 24).
Looking specifically at the Agta areas of northeastern
Luzon, archaeological studies indicate that there were
non-Negrito populations here long before the Spanish
era. Peterson ( 1 9 7 4 ~ ~b) excavated what was almost
surely a non-Negrito habitation site in the center of today's
Agta area that he dates at 1200 B.C.or earlier and
considers "incipient agricultural." It has yielded pottery,
mortars, and evidence of the reaping of grain (1974b:I 3I,
161, 162, 225, 227).Another archaeologist presents evidence
that humans were living in another part of this
area by the end of the Pleistocene and by 5000 B.C.were
using "grass reaping blades" (Thiel 1980).These blades
should probably be associated with a Negrito population;
the brass needle found at the same site in an archaeological
level dated 2000 B.C.and a burial cave dated
1500 B.C.are probably not Negrito.
The evidence is solid that people were cultivating rice
in northeastern Luzon by 1400 B.C.(Snow et al. 1986).
This site is also on the western edge of today's Agta area
and just a few kilometers from Thiel's. It is probable that
the ancestors of today's Agta were interactingwith these
farmers by the middle of the zd millennium B.C. Finally,
recent archaeological research establishes that there .
were ceramic manufacturing cultures in northeastern
Luzon as early as around 3000 B.C.(Snow and Shutler
1985:I).The archaeological record, then, suggests that
rice-farming populations and Negrito hunters were living
within a day's walk of each other in northeastern
Luzon for at least the last 3,000 years.
Linguistic evidence. Our interdependent model proposes
that these Agta hunters carried on intense interethnic
relationships with Austronesian-speaking
farmers at the earliest periods. The linguistic support for
this view has been outlined elsewhere (Headland
1986:17-19,174-78; Reid 1987, 1988a,b; Headland and
Reid n.d.1 and will be only briefly reviewed here.
All Philippine Negrito groups speak languages that,
like those of their non-Negrito neighbors, belong to the
Austronesian language family. These Negrito languages
are, for the most part, unintelligible to their agricultural
neighbors; they are not simply dialects of those neighbors'
languages as has frequently been suggested. They
are neither aberrant nor distinctive as a group among
Philippine languages. Now, since Austronesian-speaking
people did not begin migrating into the Philippines
until around 3000 B.c.,and since the ancestors of today's
Negritos had lived in those islands for thousands of years
before that time and therefore presumably spoke languages
that were not Austronesian, the question is when
and under what circumstances they gave up their original
languages and began speaking Austronesian ones.
At some time in the prehistoric past, the ancestors of
today's Negritos must have established some type of
contact with the Austronesian-speaking immigrants in
the course of which they lost their own languages and
adopted those of the newcomers. In order for a language
switch of this magnitude to have occurred, more was
probably involved than trade. There must have been periods
of intimate interaction long enough for bilingualism
to develop and then for the original Negrito languages
to be replaced. The linguistic data suggest that all
this happened a very long time ago. While it is theoretically
possible for early Negritos to have abandoned their
original languages in the space of three or four generations,
the degree of language differentiation that has subsequently
taken place could not have occurred in such a
short period of time. This divergence implies a period of
independent development of well over a thousand years
in the case of the Negrito languages that are today most
similar to their non-Negrito sister languages and of
many thousands of years in the case of those that are
least similar.
Our hypothesis, then, is that well over ~,oooyears ago,
and quite possibly 3,000 years ago, the ancestors of today's
Negritos were interacting with non-Negrito speakers
of an Austronesian language.This interaction was so
intense that the Negritos adopted the language as their
own. Later these ancient Negritos separated themselves
from their non-Negrito neighbors but retained the language
they had borrowed from them. Over time, through
the normal processes of language change, separate dialects
and finally separate daughter languages developed.
There is no other plausibl'e explanation for the linguistic
facts. For example, some Negrito languages have retained
archaic features, such as case-marking particles
and verbal affixes, that are not found today in most other
Philippine languages but existed in some very early
daughter languages of Proto-Austronesian. These archaic
forms indicate that these Negrito languages were
H E A D L A N D A N D REID Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 47
first learned when such forms were still present in the THE SAN
protolanguage spoken by the non-~egritopeople with
whom they were then in contact. (For details see Reid
1987, Headland and Reid n.d.)
Botanical evidence. The reason that prehistoric Negritos
attached themselves so readily to non-Negrito
farming populations was, we suggest, a critical nutritional
need. As one of us has argued elsewhere (Headland
1987)) tropical rain forests are not the food-rich
biomes they are sometimes assumed to be. While faunal
resources are usually sufficient there, these may not provide
sufficient lipids to supply the nutritional needs of
humans in the absence of wild plant starches. The late
Pleistocene human populations of the Philippines seem
to have been living in areas that were then wooded
savannas, not rain forest (Thiel 1980; see Scott 1984:14,
142 for a review of the evidence). The prehistoric Agta
probably did not move into the rain forest before they
had at least seasonal access to cultivated starch foods.
We propose, then, that the symbiotic relationship we
find today between tropical forest hunter-gatherers and
farmers evolved long ago as an adaptive strategy for exploiting
the tropical forest. This aspect of our model accords
well with Rambo's (1988) "adaptive radiation
model" for the ethnogenesis of Southeast Asian Negrito
culture: that Negritos evolved culturally into what they
are today as they moved into the forest to collect wild
products to trade with agriculturalists and overseas traders
for tools and starch food.
The accumulation of evidence, then, leads us to favor
the interdependent model for the history of the Philippine
~ e g r i t o s . ~Some bands possibly did live seasonally
far from and independent of non-Negrito farming populations,
but even these groups moved at times to locations
in which they could trade with farmers. Most
Negritos, however, interacted intensely with their Austronesian-speaking
neighbors to the extent that they
not only learned the languages of those neighbors but
actually adopted them as their own. The interdependence
of Negritos and farming populations observable
today has existed much longer than most scholars have
thought. There is no question that the ancestors of the
present-day Agta were at one time Paleolithic huntergatherers.
What we are arguing is that this Stone Age
life-style ended long ago, probably by the middle
Holocene, and that prehistoric Negritos probably moved
into the Neolithic at more or less the same time as their
neighbors.
6. To advocate the isolate model would require hypothesizing
either that the Negritos were not the original inhabitants of the
Philippines but rather immigrated there concurrently with the
various groups of Austronesian immigrants some 5,000 years ago
or that the homeland of Proto-Austronesian was the Philippines.
The latterhypothesiswould imply that there had always been both
Negrito and non-Negritopeoples in the islands, bothgroupshaving
evolved biologically from some earlier type of H.sapiensor perhaps
even H. erectus, and that their earliest language was ProtoAustronesian.
To our knowledge, no one has seriously proposed
either of these hypotheses.
Since the appearance of the 1980film The Gods Must Be
Crazy, millions of moviegoers have been convinced that
the San Bushmen are the sweetest, most innocent, and
most contented people on earth-still lacking, in this
age of airplanes and Coke bottles, any knowledge of
property, money, or the outside world. Other powerful
media continue to perpetuate this myth. A 1985 article
in Newsweek (January28, p. 66)depicts the San as untouched
until, "early in this century, they encountered
Civilization." In a recent human ecology text [Campbell
1983) this view is reinforced: "San lifestyle probably
changed little over the course of hundreds of thousands
of (p. 124).In accord with this is another, more
recent Newsweek article reviewing the latest scientific
theorv on modem man's common ancestor. a woman
they are calling Eve who lived about 200,000 years ago
and "probably [lived] much like today's Bushmen in
southern Africa" (January11, 1988, p. 5 I].Johnson and
Earle (1987:38-54) make no mention of the !Kung San's
involvement with outsiders or with food production, describing
them as pure foragers and asserting that "until
the mid-1g6o1s,the San were relatively isolated from the
outside" (p. 38). Konner and Shostak (1987:11) extend
this date another decade, saying that "the !KungSan . . .
were subsisting primarily by traditional methods of
hunting and gathering into the 1970s~"and suggest that
their life-style may be "relevant to the interpretation of
some aspects of human adaptation during the paleolithic
~eriodof human evolution." [Fora review of many other
references describing the San in isolationist terms, see
Hitchcock 1987.)
When Richard Lee first described the !KungSan in the
1960s~he too presented them in terms of the isolate
model. The !Kungwere in fact popularized through Lee's
writings and the Marshalls' (e.g., Thomas 1959) as the
classic example of "real" hunter-gatherers because of
their apparent isolation and independence of food production.
But it was Lee himself who later discovered
that "the !Kung were no strangers to agriculture and
pastoralism" (Lee 1979:409; see also Lee 1984:135).He
found that the !Kunghad been doing no planting at the
time of his first visit (1963-64) simply because of a
drought; on his return (1967-69) he found that 51% of
the men planted fields (p. 409; see also 1976:18;
198I :I 61.' Wiessner describes, too, the way some extremely
acculturated !Kung groups may return to what
appears to the outsider to be a completely unacculturated
state-a "common occurren~e" among them
( 1 9 7 7 : ~ ~ ) .This observation is supported by Guenther
(1986).According to Wiessner "it was impossible . . . to
infer anything about degree of acculturation of a family
from current lifestyle." Gordon (1984:219) states the
problem clearly: "It is not that Lee is wrong in his representation
of reality. Indeed he has shown himself to be
7. This is a figure much higher than for Casiguran Agta men, of
whom 24% did some minor cultivationfor themselves in 1983,an
average year (Headland 1986:483).
48 ( C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, Number I, February 1989
quite flexible on the issue of contact and interaction. ...
the problem lies in how others interpret Lee's state-
ments."
In fact, Lee's 1984 book on the !Kung shows how
closely tied the Dobe !Kung were to food producers
when he first encountered them in 1963. The 466 Dobe
!Kung were then living in nine camps, eight of which
were within a 20-km radius. What students often fail to
note is that there were then living within that same area
340 blacks and thousands of livestock. In eight of the
nine camps, the !Kung were living with black herders,
for whom they worked part-time as herders. Only at one
camp, Dobe, were !Kung living with no non-!Kung or
livestock, and even these "frequently visited" the blacks
at Mahopa, only 10 km away, "to ask for some milk"
(pp. 16-17, 123). In 1963 trucks were passing through
the Dobe area-"about one truck every six weeks" (p.
18)-and a minority of Dobe !Kung men had worked in
the mines at Johannesburg (p. 138).In spite of this, Lee
sometimes overemphasizes the "relative isolation" of
the !Kung (pp. vi, 129). It seems an overstatement for
him to claim that the Dobe !Kung were living "almost
entirely by hunting and gathering" (p.vi)when he found
them or that "by 1960 the !Kung still remained huntergatherers
without herds or fields" (p.119, but seep. 135,
where he acknowledges that most !Kung had practiced
both herding and agriculture in the past]. And he continues
to reject the thesis of Schrire (1980)and Wilmsen
(1983) that !Kung society had been fundamentally altered
by interaction with herders many hundreds of
years ago (p. 130).
From Silberbauer's (1981) description of the neighboring
Glwi San, they seem as close to the archetype of
the "isolated" hunter-gatherer society as one could hope
to come. Brooks (1982)~however, casts doubt on this
characterization. She points (personal communication,
1986)to a statement by Tanaka (1976:1m)that the same
Glwi, whom Tanaka studied only a year after the period
represented by Silberbauer's study, "do keep herds of
goats and donkeys." According to Wilmsen (1983:17),
"Accumulating evidence overwhelmingly renders obsolete
any thought of San isolation even before European
colonial intrusions into their native arenas. Early Iron
Age agropastoralist economies were active in all parts of
the Kalahari and its surroundings at least for the past
millennium. . ..To ignore this is illusion."
Schrire (1980)~who believes that the San have been
practicing sporadic pastoralism for hundreds of years,
reviews a good deal of evidence that contradicts any theories
about the existence of pure hunter-gatherers anywhere
in southern Africa. Denbow (1984:178) shows
that "foragers and food producers have been enmeshed
in networks of interaction and exchange for ~,oooyears
longer than was previously suspected. Over 1,200 years.
ago these networks reached into the heart of the Dobe
!Kungarea" (seealso Denbow I 986, Denbow and Campbell
1986, Denbow and Wilmsen 1986).Volkman (1986)
presents the San as having long practiced a mixed economy
that included crop planting and animal husbandry
as well as hunting and gathering. Finally, after reading
Gordon's (1984)startling descriptions of the intense interaction
between African herders and Kalahari San in
the last hundred years, it is hard to believe that the
groups described by Silberbauer and Tanaka were as
isolated and "untouched" as they seem to have thought.
These groups are indeed "hunter-gatherers," but in the
sense of Leacock and Lee (1982a:4, 7-9)-not because
they are isolated primitives who eat only wild foods and
not because of their mode of subsistence (i.e., hunting,
fishing, gathering]but because of their unique foraging
mode of production, characterized by sharing, communual
ownership of land and resources, and egalitarian
political relations [Lee 1981). Today's hunter-gatherers
engage in minor food production and eat traded starch
foods, "but their relationship to their environment continues
to be predatory and opportunistic" (Keesing
1981:512). Above all, as Guenther (1986) points out,
they manifest flexibility and adaptability, as the same
bands may move sequentially over a generation or two
from serfdom to food production to mining to pure foraging
to employment as mercenaries as they adjust to
ecological and political changes in their environments.
As Parkington (1984:172) says, "We know now . . .
that all hunter-gatherers in southern Africa have shared
the landscape for at least 1500 years with pastoralists
or agriculturalists." Wilmsen (1983:16) cites a wealth
of data to support this view for the Kalahari and says
that "in the nineteenth century, the !Kung homeland
was already laced by a network of trade routes supplying
local products to the European market." Denbow
(1984:188)points out that, though anthropologists like
Lee, Silberbauer, and Tanaka have tried to find independent
foraging groups to study in the Kalahari, "in fact
there has probably been no such thing here, in an historical
or processual sense, for almost 1500 years." The
recent reviews by Hitchcock (1987) and Denbow and
Wilmsen (1986)on the issue support the idea of hundreds
of years of San interethnic symbiosis. We may accept
Vierich's (1982:2 I3)proposition that "if the hunting
and gathering way of life has survived in the
Kalahari, it is not because of isolation."
THE CENTRAL AFRICAN PYGMIES
Moving north to central Africa, we find Campbell
(1983:32-33) describing the Mbuti pygmies as untll recently
"independent forest groups." For him, "there is
no doubt of [the]ability [of the Mbuti] to survive without
[trade]." Turnbull, of course, argued a quarter of a
century ago that the Mbuti were not economically dependent
upon farmers because they could and sometimes
did live independently on wild foods (1963:35;
1965:34; but see Vansifia 1986:436). Indeed, he maintains
this position today (1983, 1986))despite the failure
of anthropologists to find a single case-either ethnographic
or in the archaeological record-of a pygmy
group living independently of village farmers anywhere
in Africa and the evidence that the African rain forests
would not provide sufficient wild foods to sustain hu-
H E A D L A N D AND R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present ( 49
man foragers for long periods (Hartand Hart 1986,Headland
1987, Bailey and Peacock n.d.).
Cavalli-Sforza(1986)paints a somewhat less isolationist
picture of pygmy life. While he suggests that pygmies
(albeit imperfectly) represent Upper Paleolithic living
conditions (p. xxii; see also pp. 378, 422, 424, 425))he
does acknowledge that "there probably are no Pygmies
living in complete isolation" (p.369)and "seem to be no
Pygmieswho have truly zero contact with African farmers"
(p. 422; see also p. 362).He argues, however, that
they "continue living in an economic system presumably
similar to that of our earlier ancestors" (p. xxii),
"have not, or only very recently, adopted farming as a
major source of food" (p. 18),"live, or presumably lived
until a short while ago, exclusively as hunter-gatherers"
(p. 201, and "live still basically unaffected by contact
with the modem world" (p.422).Although he points out
that Bantu farmers "probably made early contacts with
Pygmies . ..zoo0 years ago or earlier" (p. 3621, he minimizes
the effect of those contacts on pygmy culture and
feels that pygmies "retain substantial independence"
even today (p. 362).
In contrast, Bahuchet and Guillaume ( I982)argue for a
long history of interethnic trade between the African
pygmies and their agricultural neighbors. Concerning
the Aka, they call into question "the widespread image
of pygmies living confined and isolated in their forest
C O C O O ~ , ~ 'saying that "the linguistic affiliations of Aka,
and the long process of differentiation, imply the existence
of ancient contacts which must have been more
extensive than mere occasional exchanges of material
goods" (p. 191; see also Bahuchet and Thomas 1986,
Bahuchet 1987).' Morelli, Winn, and Tronick (1986:744)
go a step farther to propose that "forest living for the
Mbuti may be a relatively recent phenomenon" (after
they were forced into the forest by warring tribes).
OTHER HUNTER-GATHERER GROUPS
Recent evidence suggests that-with the possible exception
of the arctic and subarctic peoples-most late
Holocene hunter-gatherer societies were not isolated at
all but engaged to some degree in interethnic trade with
neighboring societies and, in many cases, part-timefood
production. There is some evidence of intense trade, at
least in Europe, during the late Pleistocene. The archaeologist
Olga Soffer, referring to Cro-Magnonpeoples, has
recently been quoted as saying, "You have something
like a prehistoric Hudson Bay Co.," with elaborate networks
of exchange between clans (Newsweek,November
10, 1986, p. 71).Soffer (1985)argues for much more
complexity in social organization among Upper Pleistocene
hunter-gatherers than has heretofore been
8. Berry et al. (1986:26)make the same argument for the Biaka
pygmies. A brief review of other such linguistic references may be
found in Cavalli-Storza [1986:367-69). In this light, Tumbull's
(1983:21]argument that the Mbuti recently "lost their own language
and adopted those of the immigrant peoples" is unaccept-
able.
recognized. For the Holocene, Wobst (1978)cites several
references to widespread interregional trade among "late
paleolithic hunter-gatherers" on several continents.
McKinley (n.d.)has a book in press to be titled Stone Age
World Systems, and Gregg (n.d.)is editing a collection
of papers on interaction-in small-scale societies. Both
volumes will emphasize the worldwide extent of the
interaction model we propose here. Several papers
in a volume edited by Francis, Kense, and Duke (1981)
show the complexity of long-range trade networks in
Amazonia in prehistoric times. The papers collected by
Mathien and McGuire 119861 describe reh historic net-. - ,
works linking Mesoamerica and the ~oithwest.Schrire
(1984:14-17) and Speth and Spielmann (1983:20)review
the writings of others on the idea of more general interethnic
Gade in North America long beforeuthe arrival
of Europeans, including Eskimo interchanges across the
Bering Strait. For insular Southeast Asia in particular,
Dunn (1975:120-37) reviews evidence suggesting that
inland-coastaltrade was established on the Malay Peninsula
by 8000 B.C. and that by zoo0 B.C. Malayan forest
peoples living far inland may have been tied into overseas
trade networks. And Hoffman (1984, 1986)dispels
any idea that the hunter-gatherers in the interior of Borneo
were independent "wild people of the woods," arguing
that these "Punan groups .. .arose initially from the
demand for various jungle products desired by Chinese"
more than ~,oooyears ago ( I986:102).Accordingto Hoffman,
"it is time for anthropologists to stop thinking of
Borneo as though it were another New Guinea" (p.103).
We should not, then, continue to consider the
"hunter-gatherers" of the last 2,000 years or so as
isolated or as people who eat no domestic foods (Coon
1971:xvii), practice strict "Pleistocene economies-no
metal, firearms, dogs, or contact with non-hunting cultures"
(Leeand DeVore 1968:4),live in patrilocal bands
(Service I 97I ),or have no agriculture of any kind (Murdock
1968:15).As Lee and DeVore have stressed, such
definitions would effectively eliminate most, if not all,
of the foragingpeoples described over the last century as
"hunter-gatherers." Even prehistoric Australian Aborigines
evidently practiced various types of simple plant
cultivation, including burning, seed planting, replanting
of wild yam tops, fertilization, and irrigation (Campbell
1965).
Explaining the Persistence
of the Isolate Model
A French journalist who visited an Agta Negrito band in
the northern Philippines for a week in I 979reported that
there was "no evidence that the tribe practiced any kind
of agriculture" (Evrard 1979:38)and described their fear
of his mirror, tape recorder, and camera, "obviously the
first they had ever seeno-considering himself "the first
white man to intrude upon them" (p.39).A I 98I report
on these same Agta by the Commissioner to the NonChristian
Tribes for Cagayan Province (appointedby the
governor and given that title in the late '70s) describes
50 1 CURRENT A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, Number I, February 1989
them as a "Newly Found Tribe" of "cannibal[s] in the
upper Sierra Madre" and even quotes one Agta as saying
that "the most delicious meat is the liver of human beings"
(Cortez n.d.). He describes them as "the most
primitive, wild, fierce and dangerous group ...a generation
from the Stone Age" and speaks of their having no
clothes, being fond of eating raw meat, and being ignorant
of days, weeks, months, and years; their children,
he says, are "unwanted and unloved," and "idolatry and
adultery are supreme." These are the same Agta among
whom one of us had been living since 1962. They have,
of course, long been quite used to white people, cameras,
and mirrors, they love and care for their children, and
they have interacted with outsiders for many hundreds
of years.
Ethnocentric and racist statements such as these still
appear in print, and the prejudice they reflect continues
to be widely held (forsummary compilations of examples,
see Headland 1986:445; Headland and Reid n.d.;
Hoffman 1986:2-4, 8, 46, 57, 95-96; Rosaldo 1982;
Guenther 1980).While few if any anthropologists today
would accept any part of the 19th-century evolutionary
theories of Tylor and Morgan or of Frazer's creation of
"an atmosphere of romantic savagery" (Strathem
1987:256), many lay people continue to believe in the
anthropological fiction that Tylor and Morgan
codified-that human peoples evolve culturally from
savagery to barbarism to civilized status. Implausible as
this viewpoint is in the light of new archaeological, linguistic,
archival, and ethnographic data, it continues to
overshadow recent scientifically sound analyses based
on these data.
Some anthropologists have recently attempted to explain
why this myth of the "Savage Other" persists. Pandian
( 1985:63),who reviews anthropology from the perspective
of the history of Western thought, concludes
that "the psychological needs of people are met by the
symbol of the wild man." Fabian [1983:164)takes a more
political position, showing that anthropology tends to
view contemporary tribal cultures as if they were separate
from us in time and place. He sees this as a political
use of anthropology that maintains and reinforces a relationship
between dominant and dominated societies. He
views what we call the isolate model as an ideological
tool for exploitation and oppression-for "intellectual
imperialism." Dove ( I983:85) discusses the persistence
of the belief that swidden cultivation is primitive and
wasteful and that swiddeners (no less than huntergatherers)live
in isolation, "completely cut off from the
rest of the world," and, with Fabian, sees the reason as
political: "These myths ...have been used since colonial
times to justify the exploitation of a . . .vulnerable
peasantry by . . . [a]more powerful urban and governing
elite" (p. 96).
Behar (1987) shows how the Spanish colonizers of
northern Mexico emphasized the savagery of local
hunter-gatherers as a justification for driving them off
desired lands or enslaving them. Many Spanish settlers,
in their petitions to authorities in Mexico City and
Spain, described the wildness and brutal nature of the
Amerindians and proposed genocide as a solution.
Rosaldo (1978:242) notes the same situation in the
Philippines and sees "the dominant motive . . .[as]control";
colonizers view indigenous lifeways as dangerous
to the goals of "civilization" in that they threaten the
establishment of roads and towns in frontier areas.
Guenther (1980:I 35) reviews the 18th-and 19th-century
pejorative attitudes and destructive actions of European
colonists against the San in southern Africa and accounts
for the persistence of negative stereotypes as an
"ideological mechanism . . . [that]justified the denial of
land, freedom and life to the Bushman." Volkman (1986)
reports that the Namibian government continues to
treat the San in the same way, making political decisions
for them based on their "primitiveness." Finally,
Taussig (1987)shows how the colonial representation of
the Colombian Indian as Wild Man led to the torture and
killing of Indians by colonists in the early years of this
century.
Sponsel (1985:96-97) suggests that anthropologists in
particular perpetuate the isolate model because of the
high value they place on the "primitiveness of the culture
studied," "the traditional in 'primitive' culture,"
"cultural purity," and the depiction of the people as "our
contemporary ancestors." On the same theme, Martin
(1986:420)says that the folklorization of ethnographic
inaccuracies is the result of "exoticism" in anthropology.
Ramos (1987) believes that this is why the
Yanomamo are so famous today, at the same time espousing
Fabian's political explanation (pp. 298, 299).
Rosaldo (19821,focusing on the Philippine Negritos, suggests
that they are mythologized as "utter savages" to
make them more fascinating "objects of scientific
value." He is probably right in saying, "Had Negritos not
existed perhaps they would have been invented" (p.32I).
Wobst (1978:304) argues that anthropologists "reinforce
the overwhelming ethnographic stereotype that
hunter-gatherers articulate exclusively with local variability,
and that regional and interregional process
among hunter-gatherers is a symptom of degeneration
and culture contact." It is his view that "all huntergatherers
in the ethnographic era were intimately tied
into continent-wide cultural matrices" (p.303)but that
"the literature is remarkably silent" (p. 304)on this because
anthropologists have done a kind of "salvage ethnography"
on them, trying to reconstruct the "ethnographic
present-the imaginary point in time when the
studied populations were less affected by culture contact."
In short, Wobst says, anthropologists have filtered
out behaviors involving interaction between hunters
and their surrounding nation-states, and therefore "theethnographic
literature perpetuates a worm's-eye view
of [hunter-gatherer] reality." Cowlishaw (1987) shows
for Australian Aborigines that anthropologists have denied
their history and authenticity by focusing on the
"traditional" in their cultures.
Wolf [ I982:14) blames functionalist anthropology,
with its static view of cultures, for misleading anthro-
HEADLAND A N D R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present I 51
pologists into treating tribal cultures as "hypothetical C ~ m m e n t ~
isolates." We suggest that the more ecologicallyoriented
neofunctionalists of the 1970s have made the same mistake.
As Mintz (1985:xxvi-xxvii) explains, M. G. B I C C H I E R I
Cultural or social anthropology has built its reputa- Department ofAnthropology, Central Washington
tion as a disci~linewon the studv of. . .what are University,Ellensburg, Wash. 98926, U.S.A. 17VIII 88
labeled sbcieties. ...i ~ h i s ]has unfortuantely
led anthropologists, .. .occasionally, to ignore
information that made it clear that the society
being studied was not quite so primitive (orisolated)
as the anthropologist would like. .. .[thusgiving the
impression]of an allegedlypristine primitivity, coolly
observed by the anthropologist-as-hero. ... One anthropological
monograph after another whisks out of
view any signs of the present and how it came to
be.
Conclusion
The historical and philosophical reasons for Western
civilization's fascination with savagery may be more
.complex than all of these suggestions combined. As we
learn from Stocking (1987)~this Western world view of
the Savage Other probably evolved from an 18th-century
Victorian anthropology, and aspects of this view continue
to be fed by both anthropological writings and
popular works today.9
We have argued that small indigenous societies are as
fully modem as any 20th-century human group, that
many hunter-gatherer groups have been involved in
minor food production for thousands of years, and that
many of these latter were also participating in interethnic
and possibly international trade long before
the 16th-centuryEuropean expansion. The foraging societies
we know today remain in their "primitive" state
not because they are "backward" but because they are
kept there by their more powerful neighbors and because
it is economically their most viable option in their very
restricted circumstances. Westerners have chronically
failed to understand such societies because they continue
to see them as fossilized isolated hunters rather
than as "commercial foragers" carrying on a life-style
not in spite of but because of their particular economic
role in the global world in which they live. Until this
anthropological bias is corrected, our image of huntergatherer
culture and ecology will remain incomplete and
distorted.
9. An example of this was the worldwide excitement created in
1971when a group of scientists claimed to have found a lost Stone
Age tribe of Tasaday cavemen in a dense rain forest in the southern ,.
Philippines-a story that, according to several 1986reports, may
have been a hoax (see e.g., Newsweek, April 28, 1986, p. 51;
Asiaweek, August 31, 1986, pp. 60-61; Anthropology Today
2[6]:23-24;see also the official position of the University of the
Philippines Department of Anthropology [University of the Philippines
19881).
Headland and Reid do a good job of increasing our appreciation
of cultural variability among hunter-gatherers
and airing justifiable analytical concerns. Having applauded
the substance of their contribution, I would like
to turn my attention to its "reprimanding" tone, which
is typical of the contemporary wave of criticism directed
at past studies of simple human collectives. Criticisms
of hunter-gatherer cultures as pristine isolates have become
so pervasive as to command the attention of the
"Research News" section of Science, in which the "very
simple but persuasive model of hunter-gatherer life" is
challenged and Irven DeVore acknowledges the error of
viewing such societies as pristine (Lewin 1988).This debunking
should be directed more at media images of the
modem noble savage than at the paradigms that became
part of the anthropological scene in the sixties. As a
participant in the Ottawa symposia on band organization
(1965)and cultural ecology (1966)and the Chicago
symposium "Man the Hunter" (1966)~I find it difficult
to dismiss them as having fostered the idea of huntergatherers
as "primitive isolates." I feel that, while present
in the studies of sim~lesocieties of the last several
decades, the "affluent sa;age isolate" is receivingfar too
much press relative to the total ethnographic and ethnological
context.
While the data base generated and utilized by Headland
and Reid is fundamentally good, their treatment of
the Western "Savage Other" myth and their claim to be
the rightful heirs to evolutionary-adaptive theory are
questionable. In their use of teleological language they
display the very Eurocentrism they decry in others.
What we need are pliable categories of ecological adaptation
that refer to population/space ratios. On such a
basis one would postulate that many thousands of years
ago some small-scale societies ran out of the space necessary
to subsist by food collection and had to shift to
the more laborious and less reliable food production.
We must perceive variability and predictabilitychange
and resistance to change-as intrinsic and complementary
tendencies of human adaptiveness and,
therefore, hold that culture change and the attendant
variability are universals. We must study rates and
forms of change, not argue over its existence, and accept
the fact that biocultural viability implies the coexistence,
not the mutual exclusiveness, of "identifiable
units." At a more specific level, it is important that we
acknowledge the differencebetween material and social
need-resolvingtechnologies so that, noting the ease with
which material cultural elements can cross societal
boundaries, we can marvel not at the interdependence
and "impurity" of small-scale societies but at their per-
sistence.
52 1 C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, Number I, February 1989
In the analysis of human adaptiveness, useful categories
and labels are rooted (within the confines of
finiteness and relativism)in concepts such as integrated
change, probabilism, and change meeting change. For
instance, the advent of storage in material technology
and of complex kinship forms in social technology
should be recognized as indicators of an overall trend
from simple to complex, not as revolutionary inventions
that made civilization possible. Headland and Reid
should have put less stress on chastising the proponents
of unpalatable views and more on demonstrating the
presence, historically and prehistorically, of more interdependence
of food collectors and food producers than
had been thought. I favor synthetic approaches couched
in positive terms, as exemplified by the writings of Barnard
and Ingold, in which criticism is offered in a manner
that engenders constructive dialogue rather than
polemics.
C H A R L E S A. B I S H O P
Department of Anthropology and Sociology,
State University of New York at Oswego,
Oswego, N.Y. 13126, U.S.A. 15 VII 88
This is a good article that challenges the isolationist
view of hunter-gatherer societies. Despite a huge
amount of evidence to the contrary, there remains the
tendency, deliberate or unconscious, to see recent
hunter-gatherer lifeways as representative of an ancient,
uninfluenced and unchanging past. But clearly t h s
model has also been assumed to apply to many smallscale
horticulturalists. Diamond (1988))for example,
stresses the extreme isolation of parts of New Guinea
due to the difficulty-at least for Europeans-of travel.
This may well explain why the Dani did not have faceto-face
contacts with Europeans until the 1938Archbold
Expedtion, but it does not mean that they were not
influenced by their neighbors, an impression he conveys
in discussing variations in materials, art forms, and language:
"New Guinea shows linguists what the world
used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own
language, until agriculture's rise permitted a few groups
to expand and spread their tongue over large areas" (p.
3I).In all fairness I must point out that Diamond, not an
anthropologist, considers village isolation to have been
generated by intergroup warfare rather than simply the
difficulty of travel. The point is, however, that cultural
and linguistic diversity in New Guinea is due to interdependent
relationships among often hostile neighbors
who have forced upon each other a degree of social isolation
that otherwise would not have existed. These and
similar types of relationships tend to generate tribal
boundedness (Fried 1975) and may have led some anthropologists
to assume, incorrectly, that the particular '
groups they were studying after hostilities ended had
little to do with surrounding peoples. Whatever the
causes of warfare, groups appear to have known much
more about the world beyond their villages than reports
suggest. For instance, the Dani are said to have had an
"obsession with cowrie shells" that were obtained from
distant areas.
If in 1988 scholars can still write that there were
"isolated" horticulturalists until 50 years ago, how
much more isolated hunter-gatherers must appear to
some! Naive romanticism, the value of emphasizing the
primitiveness of a people, the theoretical neatness of
closed-systemanalysis, and an emphasis on salvage ethnography
to gather information on an assumed aboriginal
past in which time is collapsed into the ethnographic
present are among the reasons given by
Headland and Reid for the isolate model's appeal. In regard
to the last of these, while historical research has
demonstrated ethnological misrepresentation, sometimes
it has not gone far enough. Once aboriginal
baseline sociocultural systems were reconstructed
through ethnohistorical techniques, scholars, particularly
nonarchaeologists, treated them as if they extended
indefinitely into the past. The intergroup trade and warfare
evident in the archival/ethnographic accounts were
often assumed to be post-Western-contact phenomena
stemming from the introduction of new technologies.
For example, Subarctic Algonquian and Athapaskan Indians
who live in less productive regions have often been
treated as if they were immune from the effects of trade
prior to European influences. In fact, however, there is
archaeological evidence of widespread dissemination of
ideas (Wright I 987:9-I I 1. Even before direct European
contact, various peoples later designated Cree traded a
variety of materials with the Nipissing and Ottawa, who
in turn exchanged them for horticultural products obtained
from the Huron and Petun. Complex trade chains
and middleman systems extended throughout most of
the eastern Subarctic (Bishop1986))and similar systems
existed among the prehistoric Athapaskans of British
Columbia (Bishop 1987)and other inland Athapaskans
(Rube1and Rosman 1983).Thus, there is no evidence
that Subarctic peoples were "possible exceptions" to the
interdependent model. Indeed, certain features of their
sociopolitical organization can best be explained in
terms of the intensity and regularity of intergroup relationships
(Bishop I983, I 986).
I have only one criticism of this article: it does not
carry the argument far enough. At one point Headland
and Reid refer to Soffer's attribution of ranking in the
Upper Paleolithic in part to involvement in trade. This
to me is significant because it demonstrates that societal
complexity does not simply depend upon food abundance
(Bishop 1983, 1987)or, contrary to Testart (1982,
19881, on storage. Moreover, given that involvement in
politically and sometimes economically motivated exchange
was important to hunter-gatherers, then if Soffer's
argument is correct it undermines the view that
most Holocene hunter-gatherers were egalitarian in the
ways outlined by Leacock and Lee (1g82b:7-13). In fact,
the only conclusion that can be reached is that the majority
of hunter-gatherers during at least the last 12,ooo
years were socially stratified. The only exceptions may
have been groups such as the Paleo-Indiansthat began to
occupy new areas for the first time. Within the last few
H E A D L A N D A N D R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 53
centuries, overexploitation of environmental resources
for a capitalist market system and economic and political
dependency have levelled and atomized traditional
hunter-gatherer social systems, generating the apparent
egalitarianism of many groups. It has also, I suggest,
created the illusion of isolation.
R O B E R T B L U S T
Department of Linguistics, Universityof Hawaii,
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, U.S.A. 17 VIII 88
Headland and Reid defend a thesis that is both inherently
plausible and empirically well-supported. To a
linguist such as myself their defense seems almost
superfluous, since the linguistic evidence for their position
is abundant and has been known for decades.
The distribution of click languages is a case in point.
The use of clicks as phonemes is rare in the world's
languages. Apart from some marginal examples in men's
secret language among the Lardil of Mornington Island,
Australia (Dixon I980:66)) phonemic clicks are restricted
to the Khoisan languages of southern Africa (including
Hatsa and Sandawe of Tanzania) and to a small
number of Bantu languages belonging to the Nguni and
Sotho groups (Greenberg 1966). According to Ruhlen
(1987))the Niger-Kordofanian language family (towhich
the Bantu languages belong) contains some 1,064 languages.
Since the Bantu and Khoisan languages belong to
distinct language families and the only Bantu languages
with clicks are those in closest geographical proximity
to Khoisan, it is generally inferred that the clicks in
languages such as Zulu or Xhosa are indicative of
prehistoric linguistic borrowing by horticultural/pastoral
Bantu-speakers from hunting-gathering Khoisanspeakers.
So apparent is this conclusion in considering
the distributional evidence that it commonly is treated
as an inference without need of special justification (e.g.,
Greenberg 1966:66).
The earliest explicit statement I have been able to find
regarding the origin of the clicks in Bantu languages is
that of Junod (1927:30 n. 2), who notes that "the Zulu
clicks are, as is generally believed, of Hottentot origin."
Junod's statement may seem to offer hope for the isolationist
position, since the Hottentot, after all, are not
hunter-gatherers but pastoralists. This fact, however,
simply raises the issue of long-standing huntergatherer-food-producer
contact in another guise. Nama
( = Hottentot) generally is regarded today as a Central
Khoisan language, most closely related to such "Bushman"
languages as Hai.n//m, Kwadi, and Gllabake
(Bleek 1929, Greenberg 1966, Ruhlen 1987).How can
this linguistic fact be reconciled with the cultural differences
between the Nama and other Central Khoisanspeakers
unless we assume either ( I ) that the Nama .
were originally hunter-gatherers who adopted a pastoral
mode of life from the Bantu or (2)that the Nama were
non-Khoisan-speaking pastoralists who adopted a
Khoisan language? The first of these views is generally
favored, but either view implies intensive prehistoric
contact between hunter-gatherers and pastoralists.
Acceptance of the foregoing thesis does not, of course,
imply anything about possible contact between other
Khoisan-speakers and sedentary non-Khoisan-speaking
groups: one need assume only that the pre-Nama acquired
pastoralism from ancestral Nguni- and Sothospeakers
and that the latter acquired clicks from the preNama.
Other Khoisan-speaking groups could have
remained relatively or even completely aloof from Bantu
influences in the premodern period.
Even this weak form of the isolationist position, however,
breaks down in considering the Pygmies of equatorial
Africa and the Southeast Asian Negritos. Murdock
(1959:48) maintained that the economic symbiosis of
hunting-and-gathering Pygmy and horticultural nonPygmy
peoples in central Africa goes back "about z,ooo
years." Whatever the time depth for such contact, the
Pygmies, unlike Khoisan-speakers, do not speak languages
belonging to a distinct family. Rather, their languages
are genetically varied, and this variation correlates
geographically with the distribution of their
symbiotic "patrons" (e.g.,Benga, spoken by Pygmies of
the Atlantic equatorial littoral, is a Northwest Bantu
language located among other Northwest Bantu languages
spoken by non-Pygmy horticulturalists, while
Aka of the Ituri rain forest is an East Sudanic language
bordered on the north and east by other East Sudanic
languages spoken by food producers. There are basically
two positions that can be defended in relation to these
distributions: ( I )that the Pygmies have always spoken
languages such as they now speak but have undergone
physical and cultural changes that set them apart from
their food-producing linguistic relatives and (2)that the
Pygmies have always been physically and culturally distinct
from their sedentary neighbors and were once linguistically
distinct from them but have everywhere
adopted the languages of their patrons. The latter alternative
is almost universally accepted. Stated differently,
the isolationist view of hunter-gatherer-food-producer
relations is almost universally rejected (albeit sometimes
implicitly) in discussions of the languages of the
African Pygmies (seeGusinde 19s5, Murdock 19s9, and
the culture-historical implications of the linguistic
classifications in Greenberg I 966 and Ruhlen I987).
The Negritos of Southeast Asia fall into three major
groups: [ I ) those of the Philippines, (2) those of the
Malay peninsula, and (3)those of the Andaman Islands.
Only the latter (viz., the geographically most isolated)
speak languages that are not clearly related to those of
neighboring non-Negrito peoples. All Negritos in the
Philippines speak Austronesian languages, and all Malayan
Negritos speak Austroasiatic languages of the
Mon-Khmer group. If, like the African Pygmies, the
Southeast Asian Negritos have always been physically
and culturally distinct from their sedentary neighbors
and were once linguistically distinct from them [as is
generally assumed),when and how they adopted the language
of their "patrons" become matters of some interest.
Reid (1987a)has recently addressed this issue in
relation to the Philippine Negritos. Omitting less
significant details, there are four broad possibilities: ( I )
54 1 C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, Number I, February 1989
there was one borrowing early in the contact period,
(2)there was one borrowing late in the contact period,
(3)there were many borrowings early in the contact period,
and (4)there were many borrowings late in the
contact period.
The languages of the Malayan aborigines all belong to
the South Mon-Khmer group of Austroasiatic languages
(Ruhlen I 987).Within this group they apparently form a
highly discrete unit ("Aslian"). Such a distribution is
most simply explained by a single language replacement
soon after Proto-Mon-Khmer had differentiated into
North, East, and South groups. The situation in the
Malay peninsula is complicated by the fact that the
hunter-gatherers of this area represent more than one
distinct physical type, only one of which is Negrito.
Moreover, the Malayan aborigines have not within recorded
history been in contact with Austroasiaticspeaking
"patrons." Rather, contact has been overwhelming
with Malays, a fact reflected in the large and
probably growing number of Malay loanwords in various
of the Aslian languages (Benjamin 1976).
The languages of the Philippine Negritos exhibit a
very different pattern of relationship: although all are
Austronesian, they belong to different major subgroups
within the Philippine group of Austronesian languages.
This observation eliminates Alternative z; if there had
been a single borrowing late in the contact period, all
Negritos in the Philippines would today speak closely
related languages. If there had been one borrowing early
in the contact period, no Negrito language would subgroup
closely with the language of a non-Negrito group.
Since this is contradicted by cases such as that of the
Negrito speakers of Sinauna Tagalog (Reid 1987)~Alternative
I can also be eliminated. If Alternative 4 were
true, the Negrito languages of the Philippines could exhibit
considerable diversity but would always be closely
related to the language of a neighboring non-Negrito
group. This has been a persistent view of the languages
of Philippine Negritos throughout much of this century,
apparently first propagated by such writers as Schadenberg
(1880)and Kern (1882)~but one that has more recently
been modified in the direction of Alternative 3.
The recent work of Reid suggests that the adoption of
Austronesian languages by Philippine Negritos not only
has occurred repeatedly (and in some cases perhaps serially)
but has varied considerably in time.
Needless to say, none of these conclusions fits well
with an isolationist model of primitive hunter-gatherers.
Languages are not replaced without intimate and intensive
contact. Some linguists view the wholesale replacement
of one's native language by a foreignlanguagewith
skepticism, and we must keep in mind that the language-replacement
model is predicated on the assumption
that the hunter-gatherers in question are not only .
culturally but also racially distinct from their sedentary
linguistic relatives. Where such an assumption is not
made, as with the nomadic Punan and Penan of central
Borneo, a different conclusion is reached: it is not language
but rather culture that has been replaced (Blust
1972, Hoffman 1986).
I have so far considered only the claim that huntergatherers
have on the whole had little contact with food
producers in the premodern era, but the case of the Punan
and Penan raises another issue. Headland and Reid
argue that there are few ethnographically attested instances
of "pure" hunter-gatherers-that at least marginal
food production is practiced by nearly every human
society. In some cases this situation may reflect the fact
that a hunting-and-gathering population is descended
from food-producing ancestors. Many anthropologists,
no less than laypersons, evidently find it difficult to believe
that a food-producing society could "revert" to a
hunting-and-gathering economy. This attitude-which
often flies in the face of considerable evidence to the
contrary-almost certainly owes its strength to the
depth and significance of the idea of progress in
the Western world. The Moriori of the Chatham Islands
lost horticulture and were at the time of European discovery
living almost exclusively by hunting, fishing, and
gathering (Skinner 1923).While examples such as this
might be attributed to limitations imposed by a changed
environment, such an explanation is often not available
in the tropical world.
Hoffman (1986)documents and then dismisses as unfounded
the common belief that the Punan and Penan
are Neolithic survivals of a state of culture once more
prevalent among Austronesian-speaking peoples in
Southeast Asia. The linguistic evidence on this point
supports him entirely: Proto-Austronesian-speakers ca.
4000 B.C. built houses with ridged roofs and floors raised
on houseposts, cultivated rice, millet, and a variety of
tubers, domesticated the dog, pig, and chicken, wove
cloth on a simple back loom, probably made pottery, and
may have had some knowledge of metallurgy (Blust
1976).If they are not a physically, culturally, and once
linguistically distinct people who, like the Negritos of
the Philippines, adopted Austronesian languages, the
Punan and Penan are hunter-gatherers whose ancestors
were food producers. The same holds true for other physically
"Indonesian" Austronesian-speakers who have
been characterized as "Neolithic survivals," for example,
the Mentawei islanders (Schefold1986).Anthropologists
who choose to address ethnological questions
cannot afford to ignore the evidence of language:
whether they like it or not, ethnology and linguistics are
as inextricably interwoven as language and culture.
NICHOLAS E. F L A N D E R S
The Center for Northern Studes,
Wolcott, Vt. 05680-9726, U.S.A. zo VIII 88
The points that Headland and Reid make concerningprehistoric
trade apply equally to the Inupiat and Yup'ik
Eskimo in western Alaska. The Inupiat traded blubber,
thongs, and sealskins for Chukchi reindeer hides from
Siberia. People from both Siberiaand Alaska travelled to
trade fairs on the Anadyr River in Siberia and at presentday
Kotzebue. The mutual intelligibility of the Inupiaq
language in Barrow with Kalaallit in Greenland suggests
HEADLAND A N D R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 5s
a recent separation between these Eskimoan dialects.
The Inuit lived in mobile populations, travelling great
distances both to subsist and to trade. Their precontact
culture had evolved within the previous I,SOO years and
was still evolving. They participated in the commercial
whaling of the 19th century and worked for wages during
the Nome Gold Rush (Foote 1964).Finally, the federal
government's introduction of reindeer onto the
Seward Peninsula in 1894 was a temporarily successful
attempt to turn the Inupiat and Yup'ik into pastoralists.
The Polar Eskimo may be the only group to fit the
isolation model. When a party of English and southern
Greenlanders contacted them in 1814, they believed
themselves to be the only people on earth (Gilberg1984).
Their culture, however, was probably a local adaptation
to the effects of the Little Ice Age (fromabout A.D. 1000
to 17001 and could not be considered re~resentativeof
that 'of ~leistoceneforagers. They had lost their knowledge
of the kayak and bow and arrow. Interestingly, a
group of Inuktutut Eskimo in Canada heard about them
and set out to reintroduce them to Inuit cultural traits
such as the kayak.
Thus, even though no evidence exists of their producing
food, the Inupiat and Yup'ik were involved in longdistance
trade and used a pastoral product, reindeer
hides, to make clothing. How recent a development was
all this? Probably some trade occurred in the past. Ray
(197~:99),however, argues that the trade in reindeer
hides did not begin until after 1788, when the Chukchi
and Russians reached a truce in their century-old conflict.
Onlv then could the Chukchi have raised enoughreindeer
to trade across the Bering Strait. The European
goods that followed made long-distance trade significant:
necessities could be found reasonablv close to
most groups in Alaska. The early ~ussian'explorers
found obvious trade goods wherever they went. By 1833
the native trade was extensive. When the RussianAmerican
Company tried to establish a northern trading
post, it could not compete with the trans-Bering Strait
native traders.
I cannot. however. think of a scholar who assumed
that these people we;e isolated. In addition to Foote and
Ray, Burch (197s: chap. 7)has made clear the effects of
contact on Inupiat social organization. If northern anthropologists
have erred, it has been through emphasizing,
as Spencer (1959)did, what they believed to be the
remaining "traditional" characteristics, leaving the impression
of isolation.
When Headland and Reid demonstrate that several societies
believed to be isolated were not, they perfom a
valuable correction. When they attempt to explain the
intellectual history behind these mistakes, they do an
injustice. They draw upon the writings of a few anthropologists
and several missionaries, journalists, and gov- ,
ernment officials to condemn the discipline as a whole.
Their version of the intellectual history of the isolationist
model is also faulty. They recognize but do not give
credence to the two reasons anthropologists wanted to
find isolated foragers or at least sift out the "traditional
traits" from the modern: ( I )to record these cultures in
the belief that they were disappearing and (2)to h d
analogies useful for understanding the evolution of human
society. Anthropologists were looking not for the
exotic but for the pristine. The editors of Man the
Hunter clearly stated these purposes in their introduction
(Lee and DeVore 1968).These research strategies
were legitimate at the time that they were formulated.
Only through experience have we learned that forager
cultures were not quaint but viable adaptations to existing
conditions. Only hindsight makes clear the contribution
of these research strategies to the repression
of indigenous people and to the misunderstandings of
laymen. Headland and Reid suggest different, political,
and psychological motivations, but, by Ockham's Razor,
we need no Other explanation.
I am left wondering about their ultimate epistemological
point. They draw no conclusions about existing interpretations
of foraging societies except to imply that
they must be understood through their commercial relations
with the larger world. Does this mean that we
must analyze all of a foraginggroup's culture through its
role in the world economy?Are we left with no data that
might provide useful analogies with the past? Headland
and Reid need to clarify these points in their reply.
PETER M . GARDNER
Department of Anthropology, University of
Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Mo. 65211 U.S.A.
4 vrrr 88
Headland and Reid mar a thought-provoking paper by
overstating their findings and by disregarding wellknown
ethnographic and theoretical challenges to the
isolate model.
Conclusions ignore much and are strangely worded.
For instance, it is clear that the authors did not consider
Alacaluf, Aleut, Anaktuvuk, Andamanese, Aranda, . . .
Wakashan, Washo, Wintun, Wiradjuri, and Yahgan
when concluding that "the foraging societies we know
today remain in their 'primitive' state . ..because they
are kept there by their more powerful neighbors and because
[being "commercial foragers"] is economically
their most viable option. . . ." The categorical wording
tells us that this is a theory in need of testing, not a
conclusion in the ordinary scientific sense.
Headland and Reid open with an inexplicably truncated
history. They trace criticism of the primitive isolate
model of foragers back only to Dunn's 197s monograph
and works published since 1981-to "recent
writings of several anthropologists who began to challenge
it at about the same time as we did." This breathless
announcement of a new model ignores anti-isolationist
studies published decades earlier.
Early this century Parker and the Seligmanns, who
otherwise drew upon each other's expertise, clashed as
to whether at least some Veddas were isolated, pristine
primitives. The Seligmanns acknowledged Parker's ethnohistorical
evidence of Veddas' having had over I,SOO
years of external trade (Seligmann and Seligmann
56 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY V O ~ U R I ~30, Number I, February 1989
1911:42o-21)) but they emphasized Stone Age technology
(pp. 18-24, 415) and some Veddas' use of rockshelters
(pp. 33, 35, 81-87, 420, etc.) in arguing that Veddas
were aboriginally primitive. Parker admitted that he
might be wrong in supposing "retrogression of the present
Forest Vaeddas" ( I ~ o ~ : I I I ) ,yet archaeological and
linguistic data led him to favor that view over the isolate
theory (pp.I I 1-12). Surely pertinent to this debate, Veddas
exhibit close economic, social structural, and other
similarities to South Indian swidden cultivators, e.g.,
K*ikkiir, rather than South Indian foragers (Krishna
Iyer and Kunjan Pillai 1935:219-29, 231-35, 238;
Krishna Iyer I937:1-79). Indeed, when the Seligmanns
mentioned Bailev's introduction of swidden cultivation
to one small Vedda group in 1855 (p.234),they ignored
his statement that the other "wild" Veddas already had
it (Bailey 1863:281-82). Among other case studies warranting
mention are Bose's report on Birhor's having
been driven by Indian neighbors into "specialized dependence
on the jungle" (1956:6),even their nomadism being
"guided by the needs of trade" (p.5); two reconstructions
of devolution since 2,500 B.C. of the simpler,
nomadic Tupi-Guarani, Arawak, and Panoan tropicalforest
groups under pressure from competitors (LeviStrauss
1952, Lathrap 1968); Morris's accounts of
Malapandaram, "forest traders" from ancient times,
who, like other such people in India and Southeast Asia,
have previously, incorrectly, been "described as if they
were isolated hunter-gatherers" (1977:225; 1982); and
Peterson's (1978a,b) descriptions of what may be a several-thousand-vear-old
"tandem svstem" com~risedof
Agta and thei; farming neighbors. Peterson, kith the
others, specifically rejects the common assumption that
a culture may be studied "as if it existed in isolation"
(1978b33483
Kroeber, who questioned the isolation of Philippine
Negritos years earlier (1919)~devoted his 1945 Huxley
Memorial Lecture to a sweeping survey of the "interwoven
set of happenings and products" one finds in Eurasia
and Africa, the ancient OikoumenC (1946).He says of
the Vedda, Bushmen, Sakai, and Aeta (1946:18),"To infer,
as is frequently done implicitly, that these peoples
still are basal 'primitives' through having somehow remained
such automatically for the last ten thousand
years, completely insulated or in a geographicalvacuum,
seems contrary to the probability of our total experience
of history."
Other surveys bear mention. Service (1962)treats a
shorter time scale than Headland and Reid, but he
( I962:661, Gardner (19661,and Woodburn ( I980)propose
looking at cultural environments; they hold that many
foragershave relativelv unstructured svstems because of.,
centuries of external pressure. Curiously, Service's second
edition is cited by Headland and Reid only to be .,
dismissed in a phrase over Service's characterization of
less disturbed foragers.
Several kinds of theoretical literature have been disregarded.
( I ) Headland and Reid cover ecological anthropology
selectively. Had they looked at classics by
Birket-Smith (1929)~Barth (1956), or Helm (19621, they
might have appreciated the long history of ecological
concepts such as "oecumene" and "ecological niche,"
which take long-term relationships with neighboring
cultures into account. (2) During the 1960s~several
scholars called for reexamination of definitions of cultural
types, units, and boundaries: Fried's (1966) and
Barth's (1969)contributions are well known, and Fox's
(1969) is especially pertinent. Fox criticizes na'ive assumptions
regarding the primitivity and isolation of
South Asian foragers. He maintains that they became
"enclaved in and exploited by a pre-industrial" system,
persisting for centuries because of "patterned interaction"
as "marginal, non-tribal, occupationally specialized
social adjuncts of an agrarian state" (1969:139,140,
143, I 58). His very title, "professional primitives,"
derives from Seligmann and Seligmann (I 9I I :401, insight
about the subject being far from new. (3)Headland
and Reid note reports on San's cycling in and out of food
production, but they seem unaware of a wider literature
on such cycles and the factors which may regulate them
(Gardner 1983, 1985; Sandbukt 1986).
These are merely selected examples of the overlooked
literature. They show, nonetheless, that the chorus asking
for a change in anthropological perspective is older
and more diverse than Headland and Reid realize. Now
that they have added their voices to it, perhaps two of
the things most needed from them are additional careful
case studies (newor reanalyzed) and ways of testing the
various theories before us.
KARL L. HUTTERER
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109-1079, U.S.A. 22 VIII 88
Headland and Reid follow through on an idea that has
slowly been gaining ground: that contemporary and historically
attested hunter-gatherers, rather than representing
societies and forms of organization that evolved
during the Palaeolithic or Mesolithic and have persisted
unchanged, are the products of ongoing evolutionary
processes that involve interaction with other populations,
including farming societies and complex sociopolitical
systems. While previous observations in this
regard have been made primarily with reference to
specific geographical or ethnic contexts (e.g., Bahuchet
and Guillaume 1982, Denbow 1984,Dunn 1975, Schrire
1980, Wilmsen 19831, the statement by Headland and
Reid is sweeping, universal, and, as such, polemical. In
spite of some specific quibbles, I am in full support of
what they say and think that it needed to be said in such
a general way.
Now that this insight has been stated both in particular
and in general, it seems almost self-evident, and it
becomes necessary to look beyond it to its implications.
I would like to suggest just a few points:
I. It is important to recognize that the nature, context,
and intensity of interaction between hunter-gatherers
H E A D L A N D A N D REID Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 57
and other populations have varied enormously over time
and from place to place. This is obvious when one compares,
for instance, northern Australia, which had lowlevel
contacts with horticultural societies in New
Guinea and later with seafaring populations from Indonesia;
Tasmania, effectively isolated by the end of the
Pleistocene; Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers, who
likely had contact with agricultural societies for several
millennia and with state societies for as much as 2,000
years; southern Africa, where contact with Iron Age
herders can be documented for some 1,500 years;
Amazonia, which evolved a unique and complex cultural
mix of its own; the Arctic, which was colonized by
hunting populations relatively late in prehistory; and so
on. This diversity, combined with questions of adaptation
to vastly different habitats and population movement
into new territories, means that one must expect a
great variety of evolutionary histories, ranging perhaps
from the conversion of marginal social units in farming
and complex societies into "professional primitives"
(Fox 1969) to transformations between different hunting-and-gathering
organizations.
2. For archaeologists, the thorny issue arises of how
the ethnographic record of contemporary huntergatherers
can be used in building models for the organization
of prehistoric hunting societies. It is highly unlikely
that any living hunter-gatherer group can serve as
a ready-made model for a prehistoric situation. However,
while the ethnographic record is in itself clearly
not an archive of earlier evolutionary forms, it can be
used as an arena within which to investigate organizational
relationships among sets of variables relevant to
the formulation of models for prehistoric situations. In
this way, it is possible for us to wean ourselves from the
"tyranny of the ethnographicrecord" (Wobst1978)without
denying its importance. Demythologized, huntergatherer
ethnography has its own limitations. In the area
of subsistence organization, for instance, the roles of
scavenging, hunting vs. collecting, meat vs. plant food,
etc., cannot be realistically modelled unless the political
economy of contemporary hunter-gatherersis taken into
account. This political economy may include outside
inputs into the subsistence economy through trade,
wage labor, scavenging, or "theft," social storage in outside
communities, economic safety nets provided by association
with agricultural communities, and so forth.
3. Classical and neo- evolutionists have attempted to
construct models of social organization for the earliest
stages of human evolution by boiling the ethnographic
record down to a set of social common denominators,
extracting from it the notion of bands and hordes. Although
the ethnographic data have always resisted tidy
classification, the idea of band society as the first stage
of social evolution for some time commanded broad consensus.
Clearly, the continuousand diverse evolutionary '
histories of hunter-gatherer populations account, to a
large extent, for our difficulties in reducing their organizations
to a single social type (seeSteward 1936, 1955).
Ironically, Service (1962, 1966) seemed to realize the
connection between social variability and population interaction
but failed to see its historical depth.
4. It is not only hunter-gatherers that must be seen
within a broader and more realistic historical perspective.
Fried (1975)proposed some years ago that "tribes"
are no more than forms of organization that tend to
spring up throughout history on the peripheries of chiefdoms
and states under the influence of the centripetal
social, economic, and political life of these systems.
Thus, rather than being evolutionary precursors of chiefdoms
and states, tribes may be consequences of the interaction
of the latter with societies living within their
sphere of influence (see Hutterer n.d.1. What Headland
and Reid sayhere about hunter-gathererscan also be said
about many other organizational abstractions arrived at
through comparative analysis of a statistically perceived
ethnographic record and used to build schemes of evolutionary
stages and sequences. As grand an idea as the
"comparative method" was when it was first proposed
(seeMaine 1861,Tylor 187I),it has proven untenable in
the face of more adequate ethnographic, ethnohistorical,
and archaeological information.
ARKADIUSZ M A R C I N I A K
Instytut Prahistorii, Uniwersytet im. A. Mickiewicza,
ul.Marchlewskiego 124/126, 61-874 Poznari, Poland.
7 VIII 88
Headland and Reid's article is an interesting way of looking
at hunter-gatherer societies. Most of it is empirical
in nature, and the facts are marshaled in support of an
"interdependent model" for the majority of huntergatherer
societies.In my opinion, this part of the work is
reliable. The authors are still, however, far from explaining
any concrete situation, and some of their assumptions
may have serious consequences.
We must bear in mind that the general characteristics
of a given population result from the biological and cultural
(material, energetic, and informational) requisites
for its creation and reproduction and the possibilities
presented by its exploitative abilities and the environmental
conditions. In this context the authors are correct
in pointing out that the character of a huntergatherer
society's culture is a result of long-term
adaptational strategies. It seems that several types of adaptation
can be distinguished among these societies,
each of which must have been constantly evolving, in
some cases leading to specialization. The article wisely
stresses the food supply, an aspect of the functioning of
human populations that is often overlooked in examining
prehistoric groups.
The thesis that contacts among the groups under
examination were mutually profitable (cf. Pianko's
"mutualism") is too general. To get at the core of the
phenomenon, it is necessary to answer such questions as
whether the interaction was constant, whether it was
exclusive (there being no contacts with other groups),
58 1 C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y V01~lllle30, Number 1, February 1989
whether the environment's resources were altered by
other than human activities, etc. The issue here that
interests me most is why some groups that formed
mutually profitable contacts with agricultural societies
accepted the new mode of subsistence while others did
not. If the Agta knew how to cultivate the soil, why did
they not change their mode of subsistence-given that
the adoption of production is the most important factor
of change and that presence or absence of cultivation
serves as the main criterion for classification of prehistoric
societies!
This article is certainly another piece of evidence in
support of the need for revision of the concept of huntergatherer
society. I agree, however, with the authors' conclusion
(citing Vierich 1982) that "if the hunting and
gathering way of life has survived in the Kalahari, it is
not because of isolation."
R O B E R T F. S C H R O E D E R
~iv;'sionof Subsistence, Alaska Department of Fish
and Game, luneau, Alaska 99802, U.S.A. 23 VIII 88
Headland and Reid have admirably described anthropology's
fascination with alleged isolated hunting-andgathering
societies. I agree with them that the hunt for
the "Savage Other" serves Westerners' psychological
need to believe in a primitive purity and their moral
need to justify wholesale appropriation of huntergatherers'
land and other natural resources. Anthropology
may have been caught in this trap of its own con-
struction.
A Yupik living in Nunapitchuk in the lower Kuskokwim
River delta sets up his fish camp at a bend in the
river that his kin group and extended family have used as
long as can be remembered. While patching his set nets
and rebuilding his drying racks, he ponders U.S. government
efforts to limit the high-seas catch of the salmon
upon which he relies. A Tlingit chief from Hoonah takes
his grandson to their clan territory in old-growth spruce
and hemlock forest on Chichagof Island for the first deer
hunt of the season. Perhaps this year the boy will learn
how to call the deer. By the time this boy is a man,
however, the deer may be gone. The chief believes that
destruction of the forest will restrict subsistence hunting
and fishing. Any day now a federal court may rule on
the suit he has brought against the U.S. Forest Serviceto
stop the clear-cutting. An Inuit whaling captain from
the small community of Kivalina pores over the latest
satellite photos showing the location of leads in the pack
ice that will channel the bowhead whale migration. He
and his crew are camped on the ice at a lead, alert. At the
sight of bowhead whale they can quickly and silently
slide their walrus-hide-coveredskin boat into the water,
paddles in hand, harpoon ready. A few days earlier the '
captain attended meetings of the International Whaling
Commission in New Zealand, where the Eskimo representatives
successfully argued for a revised quota for the
coming year's hunts.
We could, of course, argue that the cultural complexity
that these three vignettes illustrate is a strictly modem
phenomenon and search for data from a less complex
era on groups not "spoiled" by contact with the larger
world society. Leaving aside the epistemological paradox
presented by the idea of contacting an uncontacted
group, finding cultural groups that have not experienced
major interaction with colonial powers is problematic
even with Arctic societies. Should we try to reconstruct
Arctic hunting-and-gathering societies before the impact
of the late 19th-century gold rushes in Alaska, before
Russian colonization and the fur trade, before the
exploration of Hudson Bay, or before the reestablishment
of European colonies in Greenland around ISOO!
Even if we reach into this past, we find significant trade
and contact within and between ethnic groups, with
reindeer skins and other furs being traded across the Bering
Strait, whale skin and other marine mammal products
inland across ethnic boundaries, and canoes and
slaves up and down the coast of southeastern Alaska. A
romantic, isolated ethnographic present for hunters and
gatherers, if it ever existed, is simply not accessible to
us.
With Headland and Reid, I think we have been on the
wrong track in trying to find or create the isolated hunting-and-gathering
society and should look to extant
hunting-and-gathering groups for data relevant to the
general phenomena of hunting and gathering. The rich
corpus of academic and grey literature concerning contemporary
hunters and gatherers in the North American
Arctic and Subarctic may provide better theoretical
foraging than speculation less well grounded in field
data. Burch's (1975, 1985)work among modem hunters
in Kivalina, documenting subsistence hunting and
fishing and patterns of land use, Nelson's (1969, 1973)
studies of Athapaskan and Inuit subsistence strategies,
Wolfe's (1981)description of the subsistence economies
of lower Yukon River societies ca. 1978, and my own
work documenting contemporary subsistence harvesting
areas for Kotzebue Sound Inuit (Schroeder, Andersen,
and Hildreth 1987) and for Hoonah Tlingit
(Schroederand Kookesh 1988)are but a few of the dozens
of Arctic and Subarctic studies [see Damas 1984) that
record a continuity of hunting-and-gathering cultural
traditions. These studies are not about remnant populations
or the continuation of Neolithic adaptations but
about how hunting, fishing, and gathering take place
with the technological tool kit currently available and
how indigenous Eskimo and Indian peoples maintain access
to the natural resources and the land-userights that
are the basis of their cultures.
We may do well to remember that cultural anthropologists
have always studied their contemporaries and
to look to Yupik, Tlingit, Inuit, and other living societies
to advance our understanding of hunting and gathering.
Perhaps we, as neighbors of modem hunter-gatherers,
may learn not only something of the structure of the
hunting past of humankind but greater responsibility as
temporary caretakers of diminishing natural resources.
H E A D L A N D A N D R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 59
STEFAN S E I T Z
Znstitut fur Volkerkunde, Universitat Freiburg,
Werderring 10, 0-7800 Freiburg, Federal Republic
of Germany. 10 VIII 88
Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies have
indeed often neglected the historical depth of attempts
at agriculture. As Headland and Reid point out, even
studies of symbiosisbetween foragersand farmers do not
consider the long-term character of this contact. Most
anthropologists have not denied these early interactions
but more or less intentionally neglected them, not only
for psychological or political reasons but also because of
their irrelevance to or interference with a cultural approach
to the problem.
Studies of hunter-gatherers from the historical viewpoint
have been predominantly concerned with the
question of the antiquity of these cultures, and they
have been presented as not influenced by their peasant
neighbours even when the fieldwork has been biased by
the perspective of those neighbours. Structural-functional
studies have tended to regard such societies as closed
systems, considering their interdependence with farmers
but paying no attention to the duration of the relationship.
For ecological studies the historical perspective
is not of interest either, and farmers have often been
excluded because only foragingstrategies focus upon the
relevant biotope. Nor have studies of culture change recognized
the long-term relationship between foragers and
farmers, focusing instead on their present situation.
Most anthropologists have not assumed the total isolation
of hunter-gatherers, a tendency frequently apparent
in the popular literature; they have simply neglected the
question of the duration of contact. Indeed, most scholars
dealing with the topic have not denied the possibility
of early trade, some of them even believing in a form of
"silent trade" that could, however, never be demon-
strated.
Refemng to the examples given by Headland and Reid,
which are very convincing in their linguistic, ethnohistorical,
and ethnoarchaeological argumentation, I would
like to add some further points from my observation of
the ethnic groups mentioned:
The Negritos of Zambales, where shifting cultivation
can be traced back to pre-Spanish times, bear out Headland
and Reid's theory: Here aspects of the pre-Spanish
peasant Zambal culture lost in the process of change to
the Christian Filipino culture, such as certain rice ceremonies,
marriage customs, magical practices, and healing
procedures, are preserved in the contemporary Negrito
culture (Seitz 1984:296, 297). The same is true in
the case of the Penan, and the question arises whether
all non-Negrito groups in insular Southeast Asia might
not originate from an agricultural base and constitute a
phenomenon of devolution (Seitz I98I).
Contacts can, however, assume quite different forms.
In insular Southeast Asia, long-distance trade may indeed
have played an important role for the interactions
between foragers as collectors of forest products and
farmers as intermediaries in this trade (Hoffmann 1984,
1986). In Central Africa the interdependence between
Pygmies and Bantus may date to the earliest times,
when farmers invaded the forest and the Pygmies, as is
suggested by some Bantu oral traditions, probably served
as their guides. They still share membership of their
clans. The Pygmies are also a convincing example of the
integration of hunter-gatherers into state formation,
namely, the divine kingship of Central Africa, in which
they constitute the lowest social level. Finally, the first
Europeans to encounter Pygmies noted small-scale agricultural
activities among most of them, though these
reports were overlooked by later scholars constrained by
the hypothesis of isolation (Seitz 1977).
T H O M A S N. H E A D L A N D A N D L A W R E N C E A. R E I D
Dallas, Tex./Honolulu,Hawaii, U.S.A.28 IX 88
We thank the commentators for their constructive criticisms
and suggestions. While some of them raise important
questions or state reservations about points in our
argument, all reject the isolate model of prehistoric
Holocene hunter-gatherers and concur with our interdependent
model.
Several commentators strengthen our caseby referring
to recent anthropological writings cast in the isolationist
mold (e.g., Bishop's discussion of Diamond's 1988
isolationist view of New Guinea).Several also add support
to our argument by citing cases that we did not
discuss of prehistoric interaction of supposedly isolated
peoples. Flanders and Schroeder show that the model
applies to prehistoric Arctic Eskimo, and Bishop and
Schroeder point out that Subarctic Indian groups cannot
be considered "possible exceptions." Blust reviews several
bodies of linguistic evidence which support our
model for Africa (see our n. 8).Hutterer contributes to
our thesis by pointing out some implications for huntergatherer
model building. We must recognize, he says,
that foragerlfarmer interaction has varied enormously
over time and space, that hunter-gatherers today can
hardly serve as models for a single social type in prehistory,
and that "tribes" as well as "bands" may be the
consequences of influence from states rather than their
evolutionary precursors. Seitz makes an important contribution
to our discussion of Philippine Negritos by
pointing to evidence of prehistoric contact between
Zambales Negritos and non-Negrito farmers.
Marciniak asks two important questions: ( I )Why did
some groups form a new mode of subsistence with food
producers while others did not? The reasons seem to be
food and ideology.Hunter-gatherers in food-scarceareas
may develop contacts with food producers sooner than
those living in areas where wild food is abundant. Some
groups (e.g.,the Tunebo of Colombia]reject contact with
60 ( C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 30, Number I, February 1989
outsiders for religious reasons while others (e.g.,groups
in highland New Guinea]actively seek it for similar reasons.
(2)Why, if the Agta knew how to cultivate, did
they not adopt that mode of subsistence? One of us has
devoted a separate paper to this question (Headland
1988~).Though there are several reasons, including
ideology,the major one is that the dominant non-Negrito
peoples of the area have prevented them, usually by depriving
them of land.
Bishop agrees with our thesis but suggests that we do
not carry it far enough. He brings out an important point
which is only implicit in our paper: that if our model is
correct, then most Holocene hunter-gatherers may have
been socially stratified rather than egalitarian. The implications
of this are significant, since anthropologists
have used such hunter-gatherers to model the way Pleistocene
humans must have lived.
In his discussion of our linguistic argument, Blust
points out that there are two possible views as to what
happened in prehistory to have caused the language picture
we have today: either ( I )the African pygmies (and
the Asian Negritos) always spoke the languages they
now speak and were phenotypically identical to their
present-day farming neighbors until they underwent microevolutionary
genetic change after they moved into
the forest to take up foraging or (2) they were always
physically distinct from their neighbors and were once
linguistically distinct from them but at some time in the
past adopted the languages of their patrons. We of course
hold to the latter view, as does Blust. Rambo (1988)is
the only anthropologist we know of who has seriously
proposed the former.
Blust outlines the four alternatives for the history of
the Negrito languages and agrees with us that the one
that best accounts for the linguistic evidence is that the
various Negrito groups independently, and sometimes
repeatedly, adopted the languages of their "patrons."
These events have continued over thousands of years,
ever since Negritos first came into contact with immigrating
non-Negrito agriculturalists (in the Philippines,
sometime after 3000 B.C. [Blust 1984-85:56]).
Blust may be overstating the case when he says that
the linguistic evidence for our position "is abundant and
has been known for decades." This may be true for the
language situations of some hunter-gatherers in Africa,
but it certainly is not for Philippine Negritos. Although
it has long been known that they speak Austronesian
languages, prior to recent work by Reid (1987)and Headland
(1986:174-78) no one had addressed the question of
when the switch to speaking Austronesian languages
took place or what the implications of this might have
been for the prehistory of these peoples. Even for Africa,
too many anthropologists have written about huntergatherers
without taking into serious account the references
that Blust cites. We hope that our paper will help
remind anthropologists of the value of looking more
closely at the linguistic data as a tool, along with archaeology,
for reconstructing the past.
Blust misinterprets us as defining "pure" huntergatherers
as people who practice no food production. We
should have made it clearer that a "pure" huntergatherer
group is one without any dependence on produced
foods. There may be hunter-gatherers today that
practice no cultivation or animal husbandry of any kind,
but they are not "pure" because they depend at least
seasonally on produced foods that they secure through
trade.
Three of the commentators raise more serious criticisms.
Gardner makes the strongest negative comments.
We concede that we may have overstated our findings
when we implied in our conclusion that all foragers live
by symbiotic commercial foraging. We should have said
that "most foraging societies we know today" live that
way. We appreciate Gardner's pointing out certain
groups that may be exceptions, such as the Andamanese
and some 19th-centuryAustralian groups (butnote Hutterer's
comment on Australia and our discussion of the
Australian findings of Cowlishaw [1987]and Campbell
[1965]].In any case, we agree with Gardner that our
model is a theory in need of testing, not a conclusion.
We should not have implied otherwise.
Gardner also faults us for not covering everything in
ecological anthropology, such as the concept of the
d'oecumene," niche theory, and the works of Fox (1969)
and Barth (1956).Space precluded that, but one of us has
discussed the implications of all of these elsewhere
(Headland1978, 1986, 1988a,b].He concludes by stating
that one of the things now most needed from us is careful
case studies. We feel we have provided such a study
in our work on the Agta and in the linguistic studies on
the Arta and Alta Negritos. Marciniak, too, says that we
are "far from explaining any concrete situation." We
suggest that the Agta is such a concrete case.
We do not think that our paper reads as a "breathless
announcement" of a new model which ignores earlier
anti-isolationist studies. We specifically stated that we
were not the first to question the myth of the primitive
isolate. Likewise, we do not, as Bicchieri suggests,
"claim to be the rightful heirs to evolutionary-adaptive
theory." We are thankful for Gardner's addition of references
to earlier studies (especiallyfrom India]which we
had missed in our search, but our explicit references to
the numerous writings of other anti-isolationistsshould
have made it obvious that we did not mean to ignore
anyone or try to make it appear that we were the first to
reiect the view of hunter-gatherer isolation. Gardner's-added references strengthen our argument, because they
substantiate what we wish to point out, that scholars
and lay people alike have disregarded what even anthropologists
such as Kroeber (1~46:18)were saying years
ago. Incidentally, though Peterson (1978a,b)did well in
pointing out the importance of the symbiosis of Agta/
farmer interaction, her study was ahistorical. Gardner is
mistaken in implying that she referred to "what may be
'-aseveral-thousand-year-old 'tandem system.' "We refer
Gardner to a careful critique of her study (Headland
1978)which points out both her contribution and her
misinterpretations of the Agta culture.
Bicchieri claims that we should have put more emphasis
on "demonstrating the presence, historically and pre-
HEADLAND A N D R E I D Hunter-Gatherers from Prehistory to the Present 1 61
historically, of more interdependence of food collectors
and food producers than had been thought." This is in
fact the emphasis throughout our paper. More detailed
"demonstrations" of interdependence from the Philippines
may be found elsewhere (Headland 1978, 1986,
1987; Reid 1987, 1988a, b; Headland and Reid n.d.,
1989).
Flanders says that we draw no conclusions about existing
interpretations of foraging societies except to imply
that they must be understood through their relations
with the larger world. That, indeed, was our main point,
and we appreciate his helping us to make it explicit. We
are not saying that the present data do not provide useful
analogies with the past, but, as Hutterer brings out, the
analogies are not nearly as close as we all once assumed.
Bicchieri and Flanders criticize us for putting too
much of the blame for the popularization of the isolate
model on anthropologists. They rightly point out that
the perpetuation of that view comes morefrom the work
of missionaries, journalists, government officials, and
the media than from that of anthropologists. True
enough. But we think that we have cited enough anthroGlogical
works in our paper to substantiate thve role
of anthropologists in keeping alive the outdated isolate
view. Flanders disagrees, too, with our suggestion that
anthropologists perpetuate the isolate model because of
their emphasis on exoticism, saying that they "were
looking not for the exotic but for the pristine." Call it
what you will, the search for the pristine has led too
many anthropologists to describe various small-scalesocieties
as if they were more isolated than they really
were. And other anthropologists, as Seitz points out,
without assuming the total isolation of huntergatherers,
"have simply neglected the question of the
duration of contact."
In fact, some have not only neglected but denied it.
According to one anthropologist, "It is the fondest
dream of every ethnologist to discover and establish
friendly contact with one of the few genuinely isolated
and unacculturated societies that still survive in the
modem world" (Lukesch 1976:9).In his ethnography of
the Asurini in the Xin@ Park area of Brazil he says, "We
were the very first investigators to enter the pristine
world of this particular population" (p. 101. The dust
cover of his book states, "This book provides significant
documentation of a first encounter with an aboriginal
Indian tribe in the 20th century. It was in this case an
anthropologist with many years of experience among Indians
who .. .entered . ..as the very first the untouched
world of a forest people." How isolated were the Asurini?When
Lukesch visited them they already had a few
iron tools, some cotton clothing, glass bottles, latex
bags, mosquito nets, commercial buttons and beads, and
"objects of aluminum and plastic" [pp. 113-IS, 120).
They also had gardens which they cleared with steel
axes (p. 113).This is exactly the kind of ethnographic
writing that we are reacting against.
Our argument appears to be part of an emerging movement
of reaction against isolate descriptions of "pristine"
hunter-gatherer societies. The increasing momentum
of this reaction is reflected in a recent report in
Science (Lewin 19881, in an unpublished paper by Howell
(1988)~in a forthcoming book edited by Spielmann
(n.d.1, and in several chapters of a two-volume work
edited by Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn [1988].We were
unaware of these until after our paper was in press, and
none of those authors have heard of our work; yet they
are making the same epistemological point as we are.
Lewin's key statement is that "modem hunter-gathering
is a largely post-Pleistocene phenomenon. Rather than
being an adaptation ancestral to food production, it is a
parallel development . . . [with]agricultural systems"
(p. 1147). The three chapters that we have seen from
the Ingold et al. work reflect this same revised view of
hunter-gatherers. Foley (1988)suggests that Homo sapiens
sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic were morphologically
so different from today's hunter-gatherers that
their subsistence and mating strategies must have been
very dissimilar. The chapters by Bender and Morris
(1988)and by Bird-David (1988)also reflect our thesis in
their main points. Howell's 1988 paper is especially revealing,
because it is a confession of an anthropologist
who helped popularize the isolationist myth in the '70s
(Howell 1979).She now apologetically admits that she
and her Harvard colleagues badly skewed the nowpopular
view of the !Kung by failing to recognize their
long "history of experiences with agriculture, herding,
trading, warring, and banditry" (Howell 1988:18).
Whether or not we want to call this shift of theory an
emerging paradigm, it is certainly a fast-developing idea
moving farther and farther away from the orthodox view
of Holocene hunter-gatherers as isolated, timeless, pure
foragers.As Bird-David (1988:18)says, "There has been a
snowballing increase in acknowledging and examining
the significance of contact with other people." In spite of
Gardner's criticism, we see this interdependence theory
as "new." This is not because no one has stated it before
(asboth we and Gardner have pointed out)but because
the few who did state it in the past were not heeded.
Today, however, we see a theory finally coming of age.
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