The Architecture of Hunting, by Ashley Lemke, is a refreshing and eminently readable contribution to a complex archaeological undertaking that challenges every aspect of what we know about hunters and hunting in North America. The discovery of the Alpena-Amberly Ridge (AAR) archaeological complex, which includes evidence of caribou hunting and domestic architecture deeply submerged under the waters of Lake Huron, Michigan, situates terrestrial hunters as environmental manipulators nearly 10,000 years ago. Although the AAR is the main focus of the book, Lemke frames it broadly and cross-culturally.
The book begins with a deceptively simple question: When is a hunter simple or complex? Lemke embarks on a discussion of variables archaeologists use to reveal structure in the hunting enterprise: labor, group size, leadership, ownership of tools of production and products, consumption patterns, and, more to the point, landscape modification. The distinction between simple and complex hunters, Lemke suggests, might be moot because hunting is an inherently complicated affair requiring humans to develop intimate relationships with prey and place, as well as close relationships with one another. And to do so, hunters have, for millennia, devised and built permanent and semipermanent hunting architecture.
The real meat of the book is in the presentation and discussion of the AAR case study in Chapters 3–6. There is a careful discussion of Rangifer (caribou), which was harvested in this region just after the Pleistocene-to-Holocene transition when conditions led AAR to become a refuge for the species that was not otherwise adapted to expanding forests in warmer and wetter climates around the Great Lakes. Lemke's review of Great Lakes paleoenvironments and culture history is particularly useful: if you teach courses on North American archaeology, this synthesis alone makes the book worth purchasing. The AAR case study contains lavishly illustrated descriptions of early archaic caribou hunting architecture and associated archaeology. The AAR archaeological complex was originally discovered by John M. O'Shea and colleagues, and this book details the interdisciplinary underwater recovery that followed, as well as Lemke's original contributions to it. The sheer technological complexity of this undertaking is staggering, but the author's prose and impressive analysis render it reachable.
A global survey of hunting architecture in Chapter 2 brings the reader to the realization that hunters are agents of their own success: ecological engineering and niche construction are concepts Lemke throws into the mix to elaborate on the fact that hunters manipulate prey by fashioning the hunting ground to cultural and ecological specifications. The Architecture of Hunting thus invites us to abandon simplistic predator–prey models and instead to embark on a study of the human landscape that highlights hunters’ needs to structure future opportunities by making hunting outputs more predictable. Lemke derives a suite of variables, hypotheses, and material expectations from this survey to ascertain the relative complexity embedded in hunting architecture. She then applies this framework to the analysis of the AAR complex. In Chapter 7, Lemke compares the study's empirical findings against her frame of reference. Which variables worked? Which did not? Here, Lemke focuses closely on architectural design and its social implications. Finally, she asks whether and how hunters’ complexity is revealed through the materiality of hunting architecture.
It would have been useful to take a deeper view and perhaps explicitly acknowledge that hunter-gatherer complexity is the daughter of historical contingency, which tends to defy cross-cultural generalization. When combined with cultural dispositions and decisions, internal and external pressures and specific challenges or opportunities could result in the rise of complex organization of which architecture is only one manifestation, and vice versa. For example, certain Plains hunting specialists who intensified bison harvests at the onset of the Little Ice Age (around AD 1350–1650) through large-scale landscape modification developed strict corporate mechanisms of social control and wealth management. In contrast, their intermountain neighbors, who not only hunted bison at that time but also built and used game drives, did not. The answer might be that the latter maintained a diversified economy or that they chose to disperse rather than aggregate and submit to social controls. Although there is value in comparative analysis, I suggest that finding common ground across disparate examples of hunting architecture worldwide dilutes the richness of social histories they represent. Landscape modification might be “a common solution to a common problem” (p. 2), but often that is where meaningful commonality ends. In Chapter 8, Lemke correctly concludes that hunting architecture can be used as a proxy for complexity only under specific circumstances.
The Architecture of Hunting is an outstanding rendition of caribou hunting history that highlights and honors the venerable age of traditional ecological knowledge among Arctic and Subarctic peoples. The project has tremendous potential in the present and future for helping Native communities revitalize their culture and recapture their deep past. Lemke and colleagues are already doing so.
