Hunter-Gatherer Adaptation and Resilience

Explores the variety of ways in which hunter-gatherer societies have responded to external stressors while maintaining their core identity.

Readers will appreciate how hunter-gatherer societies have changed through time in ways that actively resist the notion of an evolutionary drive toward food production. This work creates a theoretically grounded 'bioarchaeology of hunter-gatherers' that advances our knowledge of lifestyles that dominated the human experience for most of prehistory.Hunter-gatherer lifestyles defined the origins of modern humans and for tens of thousands of years were the only form of subsistence our species knew. This changed with the advent of food production, which occurred at different times throughout the world. The chapters in this volume explore the different ways that hunter-gatherer societies around the world adapted to changing social and ecological circumstances while still maintaining a predominantly hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Couched specifically within the framework of resilience theory, the authors use contextualized bioarchaeological analyses of health, diet, mobility, and funerary practices to explore how hunter-gatherers responded to challenges and actively resisted change that diminished the core of their social identity and worldview.