ABSTRACT

Mobility is perhaps the most striking feature of hunter-gatherer life, and has received a good deal of attention, particularly in the last decade. The stimulus for much of the work on hunter mobility, especially the ecological analyses, has come from ethnoarchaeology, which attempts to interpret the past in the light of data collected on contemporary hunter-gatherers. Recent work has corrected many false impressions about hunters: that they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, laboured long hours, and wearily wrested their living from the land as they wandered endlessly leaving exhausted resources in their wake. While hunters accept more environmental constraints than agriculturalists, they are not dependent on such a meagre subsistence and they put in a relatively short workday (three to five hours). Since 1968 we have more adequate descriptions of hunter mobility, and systematic investigation has addressed, directly and indirectly, the questions of why they move, the patterns of movement, and the frequency of moves (e.g. Yellen 1977a: 3748; 1977b: 64–76; Williams 1974: 71–8; Yellen and Harpending 1972: 245–9; Harpending and Davis 1977; Lee 1972).