ABSTRACT

The history of hunter-gatherer archaeology could be viewed as a progressive climb up the “ladder of inference” Christopher Hawkes (1954) dened more than a half century ago. Hawkes argued that inferences concerning technology and economy were relatively easier and more secure than those concerning social organization, and were least secure and most difcult to achieve with regard to topics such as religion. Commensurate with these inversely related scales of difculty and reliability, much of hunter-gatherer archaeology has been and is still rmly rooted in studies of technology and subsistence, but the effort to climb above this base of relatively direct inference is also evident, for example, in the increasing attention devoted to studies of emergent and increasing inequality as a measure of cultural complexity (e.g. Price and Brown 1985). Recent attention to the archaeology of hunter-gatherer religion, particularly the identication of shamanism or evidence of shamanistic practices (e.g. Price 2001) could also be seen as an effort to climb further up this inferential ladder. From this perspective, the studies in this volume might appear to represent another stage in this inferential climb, proposing to go beyond technology and economy, social organization and religious practice and belief to capture the essence of something even less tangiblestructures of perception and thought. Of course, the effort, however laudable, would put these studies and any that follow similar directions into the realm of the least secure of Hawkes’s inferences, with the least direct supporting evidence. In some respects, this is true, but in other ways the directions taken in these studies and those that might follow are not based on less or less substantial evidence, but rather on the integration of far more evidence than is ever marshalled in support of simpler and more direct inferences of subsistence, social complexity or religion. Research directed toward writing archaeological histories and developing understandings of past hunter-gatherers are beginning to develop simultaneously with analyses that continue to seek to identify and compare the economic, social and religious characteristics of hunting and gathering cultures and the circumstances and processes of their development over time. Studies that follow this new direction in archaeological research do not constitute the higher and less substantial inferential rungs that Hawkes may have envisioned. They should not be characterized as seeking to step beyond the heights of reliable inference, but rather as efforts to step off the ladder entirely, to better view the accumulated knowledge of hunter-gatherer archaeology, secured by the same evidentiary base, but used in very different ways.