Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers, Archaeology and Popular Culture

Through my work I have been part of several ethnoarchaeological projects aiming to explore the diversity in human social and ecological behaviour and how different contemporary contexts might help us to think of different possibilities for past societies. However, this should be done with caution as my work demonstrate the misuse of 'hunter-gatherers' in popular culture.

In a recent paper, together with Alice Rudge and Graeme Warren (Lavi et al. 2024), we examine how hunter-gatherers are imagined in popular debate in Britain and Ireland. We show that in debates about topics such as physical health, mental health, bush-craft and survivalism a stereotypical account of how hunter-gatherers past and present behave is recruited to support and sell claims. Acting like a hunter-gatherer is argued to re-wild us through reconnecting us with our supposedly ancestral condition – the ‘inner hunter-gatherer’ that represents our evolved sense and is lost and misplaced in the modern urban world. We demonstrate how the image of the hunter-gatherer in many of these debates is constructed through nostalgic, colonial views of human nature. These are then commodified within a contemporary neoliberal context. Understanding the types of claims being made by this recruitment of the idea of hunter-gatherers is a valuable lens for considering the problems people perceive in modern urban life. But these stereotypes of hunter-gatherers often repeat and sustain damaging perceptions of hunter-gatherer lifeways and equally damaging and misleading assumptions about human nature and the significance of our evolutionary past. They therefore require critical attention.

We cannot simply imply an analogy between past and present hunter-gatherers, or suggest that contemporary foragers are a relic of the past. However, contemporary foragers offer an exceptional context to study how unique social notions and ecological behaviours can be associated with specific material evidence and patterns of material formation processes. The interpretative framework produced by work developed together with David Friesem was then applied in archaeological sites to test how similar or different the archaeological evidence is and what are the implications for interpreting past social behaviour.