ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapter 1, the most widely embraced explanation for the archeological sites at Olduvai and other Plio-Pleistocene localities is that they represent home bases, or campsites. This traditional view has broad implications about early hominid behavior and, consequently, about the origins of several distinctive human characteristics. The home base is an interpretive concept invoked traditionally by archeologists to account for clusters of artifacts and animal bones uncovered by excavation. As Isaac (1983a) points out, the campsite interpretation of very old sites has been a simple, uncritical extension of the home base concept that applies to modern, including late Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers. In formulating ideas about home bases and overall land use patterns of ancient hominids, archeologists undoubtedly have been guided strongly by the studies of hunter-gatherers that commenced during the 1960s, especially research on the !Kung San in Botswana (Lee, 1979; Lee and Devore, 1976). Many researchers tend to treat the foraging of tropical latitude hunter-gatherers as a single type of adaptation, a unitary phenomenon shaped by a long evolutionary past. However, it appears inappropriate to characterize the land use patterns of all tropical foragers by reference to one or a few contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Unfortunately, some of the generalizations that have emerged in the archeological literature concerning tropical hunter-gatherer land use are difficult to check due to limited ethnographic information.
