The Evolution of Complex Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological Evidence from the North Pacific

Complex hunter-gatherers have captivated anthropological and archaeological interest in the past two decades. Where it was once commonplace to view hunting and gathering as little more than a starting point for social evolution, today scholars appreciate great diversity in past and present hunter-gatherer societies. The challenge of explaining the development of complexity in hunter-gatherer groups breathes new life into hunter-gatherer studies, focusing not only on adaptive variation but also on evolution and history. This book makes a contribution to the developing field of complex hunter-gatherer studies with an archaeological analysis of the development of one such group. This book examines the evolution of complex hunter-gatherers on the North Pacific coast of Alaska. It strives to account for the dynamics and processes that transformed a population from low density, disaggregated, relatively mobile, and relatively egalitarian organizations into the demographically dense, sedentary, aggregated, militaristic, and ranked/stratified populations around the North Pacific by the time of ethnographic contact. To do so, this book examines seven thousand years of archaeological history on the Kodiak Archipelago - a region that 250 years ago was part of a broader phenomenon of complex hunter-gatherers ringing the North American Pacific Northwest Coast from California to the Aleutian Islands. This is one of the first books available to examine in depth the social evolution of a specific complex hunter-gatherer tradition on the North Pacific Rim. As such, it provides readers with an intimate look at archaeological evidence integrated into a problem-oriented study of emergent complex hunter-gatherers. It will be of interest to professional archaeologists, anthropologists, students of archaeology and anthropology, and general readers interested in social evolution, complex hunter-gatherers, and/or Alaskan prehistory.