Apache Farmers, Agta Hunters and Bunong Elephant Keepers: a Career in Ethnoarchaeology

Abstract

I spent much of my life interested in prehistoric and modern hunter-gatherer, or forager, societies. This professional exploration has led me through concepts, tools, and passions of many aspects of ethnoarchaeology. An ecological approach and material focus to modern hunters has led me to seek both the basis of today’s humid tropics foragers, and to consider the many models associated with human biocultural evolution, from the Plio-Pleistocene through the development of farming. I believe that a broad four-field anthropology, with considerable seepage and cross-fertilization into related fields, has given archaeologists and ethnographers a solid platform for researching our hunter-gatherer or forager basis of becoming, and being, human. Ethnoarchaeology, like anthropology, is properly a broad, diverse and multi-faceted field for joining attempts to ‘know how we know’ a cultural present and a past through patterned material remnants. Ethnoarchaeology, as I comprehend its power, focuses on seeing the behavior extractable from patterns in the present that may build theoretically solid and testable alternative models of humans’ patterns in the past. I will tell you in the following pages how I first began and now many years later continue my journey through anthropology and ethnoarchaeology. Much of my story is one of good luck, good timing, and many supportive teachers, colleagues and students.