Some Food-gathering Implements. A Study in Mesolithic Tradition

Abstract

Communities which depend for their existence wholly or largely on food-gathering (agriophages)—hunting, fishing, and the gathering of wild vegetable products—use implements that differ somewhat from those used by food-producing peoples (trophogens) who live by agriculture and pastoralism. Actually it is seldom, if ever, possible to draw a hard-and-fast line between the two economies; we ourselves, for instance, with our highly industrialized food-production, still depend to a very large extent on an equally industrialized form of food-gathering, viz. fishing. This is because we have not yet learnt how to domesticate the herring. Archaeologically, however, the distinction can be made, as is now well known, between the food-gathering economy of the Mesolithic and earlier periods, and the food-producing economy of the Neolithic and later phases.