In past millennia, foraging (hunting, gathering, or fishing) proved a highly successful method of adaptation, allowing humans to spread and survive over most land areas on the planet. In the analysis of preindustrial societies, it is tempting to group together all foraging societies because they operated in quite different ways from those based primarily on agriculture. But, as I show herein, more insights can be gained by looking at their different types of economic systems.

Given the fact that very few “pure” foraging societies now exist, it is necessary to rely on how these societies functioned at some pinpointed date many years ago. As a result, this is an exercise in historical analysis, utilizing the vast store of ethnographies written over the past centuries to arrive at new insights. Because all of the societies in my sample have greatly changed since the pinpointed date, I use the past tense in discussing them. The sample, reviewed in detail, includes forty-four different foraging societies from Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

The major conclusions can be readily stated: Foraging societies reveal six quite distinct economic systems, whose different organizing principles are readily interpretable. Such economic systems are, in most cases, unrelated to those ecological, social, and political variables that have received the bulk of attention by anthropologists. In brief, these economic systems are independent entities worthy of study by themselves.