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9 - Human hunting seasonality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2009

By
Rebecca Bliege Bird  and
Douglas W. Bird
Edited by
Diane K. Brockman  and
Carel P. van Schaik
Rebecca Bliege Bird
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropological Sciences Stanford University Stanford CA 94305–2117 USA
Douglas W. Bird
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropological Sciences Stanford University Stanford CA 94305–2117 USA
Diane K. Brockman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Carel P. van Schaik
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
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Summary

Introduction

Human hunting strategies, like those of many non-human primates, vary seasonally with fluctuations in prey abundance, encounter rates, and profitability (Winterhalder 1981; Smith 1991). Temporality in resource supply has profound social effects as well, and some of the earliest studies of hunter–gatherers emphasized the impact of seasonality on settlement size, mobility, general economic organization, and even property rights, religion, family structure, and the sexual division of labor (Mauss & Beuchat 1906; Thomson 1936). For Mauss and Beuchat (1906), seasonality meant temperature: they suggested that Inuit families were organized very differently in the summer than in the winter as a result of the nature of changes in foraging opportunities. For Thomson (1936), seasonality meant rainfall, commenting that the effect of distinct wet and dry seasons in northern Australia might lead one to think that they were observing two different “tribes” of people. Anthropological interest in seasonality and its effects on human social organization has waned since then, frustrated by an inability to find correlations between seasonality and human behavior. Our goal in this chapter is to explore the utility of two approaches to understanding the relationship between seasonality and social behavior. One attempts to use comparative ecological data across groups to explain differences in aspects of social and economic behavior such as mobility and land tenure decisions; the other examines how different individuals within a group may respond differently to resource seasonality.

Type
Chapter
Information
Seasonality in Primates
Studies of Living and Extinct Human and Non-Human Primates
 , pp. 243 - 266
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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