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Some Food-gathering Implements. A Study in Mesolithic Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

E. Cecil Curwen
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Extract

Communities which depend for their existence wholly or largely on food-gathering (agriophages)—hunting, fishing, and the gathering of wild vegetable products—use implements that differ somewhat from those used by food-producing peoples (trophogens) who live by agriculture and pastoralism. Actually it is seldom, if ever, possible to draw a hard-and-fast line between the two economies; we ourselves, for instance, with our highly industrialized food-production, still depend to a very large extent on an equally industrialized form of food-gathering, viz. fishing. This is because we have not yet learnt how to domesticate the herring. Archaeologically, however, the distinction can be made, as is now well known, between the food-gathering economy of the Mesolithic and earlier periods, and the food-producing economy of the Neolithic and later phases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 15 , Issue 60 , December 1941 , pp. 320 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1941

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References

1 The probability that agriculture may have been discovered independently in geographically isolated areas, such as America, does not affect the question under con sideration here.

2 See O.E.D., s.v.

3 A subsidiary reason for the absence of multiple barbs may lie in the greater strength of the iron barb used in Europe and Asia, as compared with those of wood and bone commonly used in food-gathering communities. These being more fragile needed réduplication.

4 According to O.E.D. the earliest sense of ‘harpoon’ was ‘barbed dart or spear’ (17th cent.). Its restriction to the implement with detachable head and thong dates only from the end of that century. The word comes from a root meaning to clutch or secure something.

5 Grahame Clark, The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936), 116.

6 e.g. Clark’s types 9, io, 12A and 15.

7 B.M. Ethnographical Collections (1925), 62, 78, 195, 261–4, 271, 302

8 ANTIQUITY, 1940, XIV, 134–5.

9 Clark, op. cit. 150–1, fig. 55, 7, 8 and 9.

10 ANTIQUITY, 1940, XIV, 133.

11 ibid. 134–5.

12 F. Turville-Petre, J.R. Anthr. Inst. (1932), LXII, 272 and plate XXVIII; D. A. E. Garrod, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel (1937), 1, 37 and plate XII, Ï5–17.

13 W. M. Flinders Pétrie, Tools and Weapons (1917), 37 and plates XLIII, 52–58, XLIV, 24–51.

14 Francis Buckley, Microlithic Industry, Marsden, Yorks. (1918), 11.

15 From information kindly supplied by the excavator for inclusion in this article. See also Petch, Ancient Man in the Huddersfield District.

16 Clark, op. cit. 89, 203–4.

17 B.M. Etknog., fig. 256.

18 Clark, op. cit. 116–7, fig. 41 (types 21–25), and plate V, 6, also figs. 55 (6), 61 (8), 62(1).

19 J. Royal Anthrop. Inst. (1932), LXII, 261, 265, plate XXII (2), and fig. C (15–21) ; also pp. 271–2, plate XXVII (1), and fig. F (6–11) ; D. A. E. Garrod, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel (1937), 1, 31, 34, 37–8, plates IX (15–21), XII (6), XIII (1, 3).

20 ANTIQUITY, 1935, IX, 63–5.

21 For drawings see ANTIQUITY, 1930, IV, 181.

22 ANTIQUITY, 1935, IX, 62.

23 Proc. Prehist. Soc (1938), IV, 29–32.