African Foragers: Environment, Technology, Interactions (review)

As thoroughly colonialist and imperialist constructs, the technology and culture (and evolution) of foraging societies (aka hunter-gatherers) have been enigmas for social scientists. Since we define modernity in Western terms, the paradoxical coupling of the world's simplest material technologies with some of its most complex kinship and symbolic systems causes more than a few classificatory and explanatory problems.

Sibel Barut Kusimba's African Foragers is a clearly written undergraduate textbook that highlights environment, technology, and social interactions among ancient (and modern) African foragers. It touches on a vast array of historical, conceptual, analytic, and interpretive topics: chapters 1- 4 explore general issues in the study of foragers, while chapters 5-8 focus on the forager prehistory of Africa. The preface and first chapter neatly review the analytic and descriptive frameworks that an odd assortment of moralists and academics have developed over more than a century, then summarize the significant typological and terminological debates—most notably the "revisionist" debate and the conceptual baggage embedded in the term "hunter-gatherer."

Given that the concept of the "ethnographic present" and use of ethnographic analogy pervade all forager research, I found Kusimba's treatment of these topics shallow. The absence of sustained discussion of how archaeologists (in particular) construct evolutionary models for the one mode of production said to account for "99% of the human past" is troubling, as is the problematic but continual reference to a variety of contemporary African foragers when describing Early (ESA), Middle (MSA), and Late Stone Age (LSA) technologies and subsistence practices.

What this book does better than most is weave the environment, technology, and social interactions of foraging peoples into an integral whole. In the early chapters, Kusimba rightly stresses that sharing, reciprocity, and "permission granting" are the hallmarks of foraging subsistence and mobility practices. Refreshingly, she also argues that this ethos is fundamental to their material technologies. While she tends to describe specific MSA and LSA stone (lithic), bone, and food-processing technologies in materialist terms, she does at least introduce the concept of chaîne opératoire and take a few pages to describe the sociosymbolic and constructivist arguments familiar to readers of Technology and Culture.

Chapters 5-7 discuss specific sub-Saharan ESA, MSA, LSA, and Neolithic technologies and land-use patterns, but mostly in terms of typologies and issues of raw-material availability and choice. Sociosymbolic factors concerned with sharing and permission granting are treated as something of an afterthought. To be fair, Kusimba's focus on a narrow range of materialist factors impacting and constituting forager (lithic) technologies reflects the state of most archaeological research on African technology (with the notable exception of constructivist studies of ironworking, none of which are mentioned here).

What seems out of place in an introductory textbook, however, are the two case studies presented in chapters 6 and 7. Here, the implications of (technosymbolic) "modernity" are evaluated in terms of (1) the remarkably early dates of microliths in the Howieson's Poort (MSA) assemblage at Nelson Bay Cave (South Africa, circa 65,000 years b.p.), and (2) the notable changes in raw material acquisition and transport evidenced in the LSA (Robberg) assemblages at Lukenya Hill (Kenya, circa 20,000 years b.p.). These case studies are so detailed, yet without sufficient background, that the import of Kusimba's own research on both assemblages is pretty much lost. (Her research concerns clear evidence of "modern" knapping techniques practiced in the MSA, and how the transport of raw materials and land-use patterns changed dramatically in the LSA—both "probably" due to changes in social relationships and band interactions.) These discussions read like an oil-and-water mixture of Marvin Harris's excessive materialism and environmental determinism, with a dash of social and symbolic claims about how technologies are shaped by social values and relationships. The mix does not work, which is why I fear the reader will come away with a traditional (materialist) appreciation of African MSA and LSA...