What Is a Hunter-Gatherer?

Kusimba, S. 2005. What Is a Hunter-Gatherer? Variation in the Archaeological Record of Eastern and Southern Africa. Journal of Archaeological Research 13, 337-366.
[December issue]

It was a very interesting paper, which I regard as tending towards being a summary of the different models and their weaknesses for the most part, bringing together and highlighting the diverse ethnographic and historical material on the different means of food extraction and production followed by various societies.

Kusimba is, as far as I am aware, a Late Stone Age and Holocene archaeologist. The publication of hers you may be familiar with is:

Kusimba, S. 2001. The Early Later Stone Age in East Africa: Excavations and Lithic Assemblages from Lukenya Hill. African Archaeological Review 18, 77-123

Otherwise she has written papers such as:

Kusimba, C. M. and Kusimba, S. B. 2003. East African archaeology : foragers, potters, smiths, and traders. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. (1st)

My reading of the paper was that its aim was not to examine the extent and degree of culture, but rather to illustrate the inherent problems in terms such as "hunter-forager" or "pastoralist". By recognising the diversity and revising terminology accordingly, one can better escape the confirms of determinism and also avoid the pitfalls in the resulting symbiosis models. For the symbiosis models, Kusimba cites Smith (1992 and 1998). That is Andy Smith, my former professor at UCT, who still holds to a form of it. This is one of the areas where I disagree with Andy and agree with Kusimba.

The strength of the argument for the MSA is that one should not take faunal extraction patterns, like Klein does for Klasies River, and expect there to be a precise match if the inhabitants were behaviourally modern. Attempting such precise match-ups, as per Klein for Klasies and John O'Shea for Levantine stone tool assemblages, misses the inherent diversity which is apparent and is based upon questionable assumptions about innovation. I don't see how the paper is applicable to the MSA and ESA beyond this very important point.

Instead, I see the main value of the paper as lying in the realm of Holocene African archaeology; a view reinforced by the way the historical and archaeological records are employed. Her point on pages 352-3 reminded me of Pieter Jolly's Current Anthropology paper on the interaction between Bushmen and Sotho in the Drakensberg.