Challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity.

This is a primer on foraging models relevant to the study of hunter-gatherers.

The author wrote this book primarily for his archaeology students, to show them how dangerous anthropological analogy is and how variable the actual practices of foragers of the recent past and today are. His survey of anthropological literature points to differences in foraging societies' patterns of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, exchange, gender relations, division of labour, marriage, descent and political organisation. By considering the actual, not imagined, reasons behind diverse behaviour this book argues for a revision of many archaeological models of prehistory. From the reviews "[A]n excellent overview of key issues in hunter-gatherer studies." Alan Barnard in American Ethnologist "Not since Man the Hunter has there been such a synthesis and such a mix of stimulating ideas. This will be the authoritative work on hunter/gatherers for a good number of years." Brian Hayden in Canadian Journal of Archaeology "[A]uthoritative, comprehensive, and highly readable. . . . A well-worn and heavily annotated copy should be the companion of anyone claiming an interest or expertise in present or past hunter-gatherers." Bruce Winterhalder in American Antiquity Prepublication praise "The Foraging Spectrum [is] a well-written, scrupulously researched synthesis of modern approaches to foraging behavior, both past and present." David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History "A tour de force of scholarship in behavioral ecology." Mathias Guenther, Wilfred Laurier University

4: Twenty-First-Century Hunting and Gathering among Western and Central Kalahari San / Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli -- 5: Why Do So Few Hadza Farm? / Nicholas Blurton Jones -- 6: In Pursuit of the Individual: Recent Economic Opportunities and the Persistence of Traditional Forager-Farmer Relationships in the Southwestern Central African Republic / Karen D. Lupo -- 7: What Now?: Big Game Hunting, Economic Change, and the Social Strategies of Bardi Men / James E. Coxworth

This volume includes new research on the theoretical implications regarding the mechanisms of change in the geographical distribution of hunter-gatherer settlement and land use. It focuses on the long-term changes in the hunter-gatherer settlement on a global scale, including research from several continents. It will be of interest to archaeologists and cultural anthropologists working in the field of the forager/ collector model throughout the world.

Gregg (archaeology, Southern Ill. U.) argues that the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural communities in prehistoric Europe involved a wide variety of interactions for over a millennium. She considers the ecological requirements of crops and livestock, develops a computer simulation to identify an optimal farming strategy for early Neolithic populations, and models the effects that interaction with the farmers would have had on the foragers' subsistence-settlement system. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Information and its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy. The fundamental goal of the volume is to bridge disciplines and subdisciplines, open discussion, and see if some common ground-either theoretical perspectives, general principles, or methodologies-can be developed upon which to build future research on the role of information in hunter-gatherer bands.