ABSTRACT
Research into the archaeology of northern hunter-gatherers has tended to concern itself with the identication of functional interactions between populations, technology and the changing ecology of resource environments (Binford 2001; Jordan 2006; Kelly 1995). Ethnoarchaeological studies of present-day forager groups have been central to the development of these “materialist” perspectives on forager behaviour, exploring the relationships between higher latitude mobility patterns, procurement activities and surviving material remains. In contrast, archaeological interest in developing more resolutely social and symbolic dimensions to huntergatherer adaptations has been slower to develop, in part hindered by a dearth of eld studies that adopt a “material culture” perspective to examine the potential signatures of cosmology and belief in present-day hunter-gatherer societies. This paper aims to redress the lingering bias in hunter-gatherer research, and presents a case-study from northwest Siberia, which examines how ritual practice also structures land-use and generates enduring material remains. Hunter-Gatherers, Anthropology and Archaeology
Primary inspiration for ecological approaches in anthropology and archaeology can be traced back to the work of Julian Steward (1955), who pioneered use of adaptive models in the study of hunter-gatherers. Steward’s central concern was to account for why cultural formations took on particular forms. Through examination of general patterns of behaviour, Steward (1955) came to believe in a general, determinant relationship between technology and the material environment which “set the stage” for different lines of social development (Kelly 1995:42). In advocating the development of this “materialist” perspective on human behaviour, Steward’s “culture ecology” bridged Leslie White’s more theoretical abstractions about the control of energy by different categories of society (White 1949), and the prevailing Boasian paradigm of “historical particularism” which had concerned itself with description of the contingent traits and attributes of individual culture groups. In the 1950s and 1960s culture ecology proved very attractive to a new generation of scholars attracted to the development of a natural science perspective on human behaviour.
