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8
Richard Potts, “Home Bases and Early Hominids,”
American Scientist
72 (1984); Binford,
Bones.
For recent research and debate on home bases, hearths, and nuclear family living arrangements, see Walde and Willows,
Archaeology of Gender;
Stringer and Gamble,
In Search of Neanderthals;
Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution”; Klein,
Human Career;
Rose and Marshall, “Meat Eating, Hominid Sociality, and Home Bases Revisited.”
9
Christopher Tilley,
An Ethnography of the Neolithic: Early Prehistoric Societies in Southern Scandinavia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Roberta Gilchrist,
Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past
(New York: Routledge, 1999); Jenny Moore and Eleanor Scott, eds.,
Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology
(New York: Leicester University Press, 1997); du Cros and Smith,
Women in Archaeology;
Hager,
Women in Human Evolution;
Leibowitz,
Females, Males, Families;
Rhoda Halperin, “Ecology and Mode of Production: Seasonal Variation and the Division of Labor by Sex Among Hunter-Gatherers,”
Journal of Anthropological Research
36 (1980), p. 391; Joan Gero, “Genderlithics: Women’s Roles in Stone Tool Production,” in Gero and Margaret Conkey, eds.,
Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory
(Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
10
Renfrew and Bahn,
Archaeology;
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Zihlman, “Sex Differences and Gender Hierarchies Among Primates.” See also Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle,
The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987 and 2000). Author Robert Foley argues that early hominids lived in male-headed harems and that the invention of bands and pair bonds did not occur until modern humans replaced Neanderthals, but even in this scenario, humans lived in bands longer than any other social formation. Foley, “Hominids, Humans and Hunter-Gatherers.” Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle make the case for focusing on camps rather than bands in the 2000 edition of their book.
11
In reconstructing the social life of early humans, many archaeologists supplement their fossil evidence with observations from foraging groups that were observed in more recent times. For a thoughtful discussion of what we may and may not extrapolate from recent hunter-gatherers to the past, see Johnson and Earle. Even Robert Kelly, who warns against attempts to reconstruct prehistoric foraging life from ethnographies of more recent foraging bands, agrees that similar ecological and social constraints created some patterns in the past that would have been similar to those of more recent foragers. Kelly,
The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1995). My discussion of life in band-level societies draws on many of the works cited earlier, along with James Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,”
Man
17 (1982); “Stability and Flexibility in Hadza Residential Groupings,” in Lee and DeVore, eds.,
Man the Hunter;
and Peter Gardner, “Foragers’ Pursuit of Individual Autonomy,”
Current Anthropology
32 (1991), pp. 550, 556. See also Lee,
The !Kung San;
Colin Turnbull, “The Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo,” in J. L. Gibbs, ed.,
Peoples of Africa
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965); Lynne Bevan, “Skin Scrapers and Pottery Makers, ‘Invisible’ Women in Prehistory,” in Moore and Scott, eds.,
Invisible People and Processes;
Turnbull,
The Forest People.
See also Mark Cohen and Sharon Bennett, “Skeletal Evidence for Gender Hierarchies in Prehistory,” in Miller,
Sex and Gender Hierarchies;
Gerhard Lenski and Jean Lenski,
Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974); Naomi Quinn, “Anthropological Studies on Women’s Status,”
American Review of Anthropology
6 (1977), p.18; Shelton Davis and Robert Matthews,
The Geological Imperative
(Cambridge, U.K.: Anthropology Research Centre, 1976).
12
Brian Hayden, “Pathways to Power: Principles for Creating Socioeconomic Inequalities,” in T. Douglas Price and Gary Feinman,
Images of the Past
(New York: Plenum Press, 1995); Polly Wiener, “Risk, Reciprocity and Social Influences on !Kung San Economics,” in Leacock and Lee,
Politics and History in Band Societies;
J. O’Shea, “Coping with Scarcity: Exchange and Social Storage,” in Alison Sheridan and G. N. Bailey, eds.,
Economic Anthropology: Towards an Integration of Ecological and Social Approaches
(Oxford, U.K.: British Archaeological Reports, International Series 96, 1981); Richard Lee, “Politics, Sexual and Non-Sexual, in Egalitarian Society,” in Leacock and Lee,
Politics and History in Band Societies.
13
Bruce Winterhalder, “Open Field, Common Pot: Harvest Variability and Risk Avoidance in Agricultural and Foraging Societies,” in Elizabeth Cashdan, ed.,
Risk and Uncertainty in Tribal and Peasant Economies
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), p. 82, and “Optimal Foraging: Simulation Studies of Diet Choice in a Stochastic Environment,”
Journal of Ethnobiology
6 (1986); Brian Hayden and Rob Gargett, “Big Man, Big Heart?: A Mesoamerican View of the Emergence of Complex Society,”
Ancient Mesoamerica
1 (1990), p. 4; Elizabeth Cashdan, “Egalitarianism Among Hunters and Gatherers,”
American Anthropologist
82 (1980). See also Hillard Kaplen, Kim Hill, and A. Magdalena Hurtado, “Risk, Foraging, and Food Sharing Among the Ache,” in Cashdan, ed.,
Risk and Uncertainty;
Paul Graves-Brown, “Their Commonwealths Are Not as We Supposed: Sex, Gender, and Material Culture in Human Evolution,” in James Steele and Stephen Shennan, eds.,
The Archaeology of Human Ancestry: Power, Sex, and Tradition
(London: Routledge, 1996).
14
The
!
indicates a click sound not present in European languages. More recently, anthropologists have taken to calling the Bushmen the name they apply to themselves, the Dobe Ju/’hoansi. Lorna Marshall, “Sharing, Talking and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions Among !Kung Bushmen,”
Africa
30 (1961), p. 236; Albert Myers, ed.,
William Penn’s Own Account of the Lanni Lenape or Delaware Indians
(Somerset, N.J.: Middle Atlantic Press, 1970 [1683]), p. 333. For more on the sharing and hospitality traditions of the Indians of northeastern America, see my
Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900
(London: Verso, 1988) and Eleanor Leacock, “The Montagnais-Naskapi Band,” in D. Damas, ed.,
Contributions to Anthropology: Band Societies
(Ottawa: National Museum of Canada Bulletin 228, 1969).
15
Polly Wiessner, “Leveling the Hunter: Constraints on the Status Quest in Foraging Societies,” in Wiessner and Wulf Schiefenhovel, eds.,
Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
(Providence: Berg Books, 1996), pp. 182-83.
16
Brian Hayden,
Archaeology: The Science of Once and Future Things
(New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1993).
17
Quoted in Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 [1949]), p. 481.
18
Richley Crapo,
Cultural Anthropology
(see chap. 1, n. 20); G. Robina Quale,
A History of Marriage Systems
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1988).
19
Marvyn Meggitt,
Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). In addition to the reading cited in my other notes, I was helped in my understanding of this by personal communications from Brian Hayden, Simon Fraser University, and Allen Johnson, University of California at Los Angeles, in March 2003.
20
Johnson and Earle,
Evolution of Human Societies;
Henry Sharp, “Women and Men Among the Chippewyan,” in Laura Klein and Lillian Ackerman, eds.,
Woman and Power in Native North America
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). See also Peter Gardner, “Foragers’ Pursuit of Individual Autonomy,”
Current Anthropology
32 (1991); James Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,”
Man
17 (1982) and “Stability and Flexibility in Hadza Residential Groupings,” in Lee and DeVore, eds.,
Man the Hunter.
21
Lévi-Strauss,
Elementary Structures of Kinship,
pp. 485, 116.
22
For women’s important productive and reproductive value, see Margaret Ehrenberg,
Women in Prehistory
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Rita Wright, “Women’s Labor and Pottery Production in Prehistory,” in Gero and Conkey,
Engendering Archaeology.
On the use of marriage to control and exploit women, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Reiter,
Toward an Anthropology of Women,
p. 175; Collier,
Marriage and Inequality;
Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” in Lydia Sargent, ed.,
Women and Revolution,
(Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 18; Elizabeth Moen, “What Does ‘Control over Our Bodies’ Really Mean?,”
International Journal of Women’s Studies
2 (1979); Lisette Josephides,
The Production of Inequality: Gender and Exchange Among the Kewa
(London: Tavistock, 1985). See also the articles in Zillah Eisenstein, ed.,
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); Shulameth Firestone,
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
(New York: Morrow, 1970); Heidi Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle,”
Signs
6, no. 3 (Spring 1981); Ulku Bates, Florence Denmark, Virginia Held, et al.,
Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices: An Introduction to Women’s Studies
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 249-50.
23
Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard,
Familiar Exploitation
:
A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies
(Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 1, 100, 258-60; Iris Marion Young,
Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Power
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 102, 105-06; Jaclyn Geller,
Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique
(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001), pp. 18-19.
24
Alan Klein, “Adaptive Strategies and Process on the Plains: The 19th Century Cultural Sink” Ph.D dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1976, p. 103.
25
Pekka Hamalainen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,”
Journal of American History
(December 2003); Klein, “Adaptive Strategies” and “The Political Economy of Gender: A 19th Century Plains Indian Case Study,” in Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, eds.,
The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women
(Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983); Oscar Lewis, “Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture,”
Monographs of the American Ethnological Society
6 (1942); George Catlin,
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians
(New York: Gramercy, 1973) 1; Klein, “Political Economy of Gender”; Patricia Albers, “Sioux Women in Transition: A Study of Their Changing Status in Domestic and Capitalist Sectors of Production,” in Albers and Medicine,
The Hidden Half.
26
Karen Sacks,
Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Gender Inequality
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Diane Bell, “Desert Politics: Choices in the Marriage Market,” in Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock,
Women and Colonization
(see chap. 2, n. 17); Christine Gailey, “Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender Hierarchy,” in Hess and Ferree, eds.,
Analyzing Gender,
p. 48; Jack Goody, “Marriage Prestations, Inheritance and Descent in Pre-Industrial Societies,”
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
1 (1971), p. 4; Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Reproduction of Patriarchy in Feminist Anthropology,” in Mary McGanney Gigen, ed.,
Feminist Thought and the Structure of Knowledge
(New York: NewYork University Press, 1988), pp. 55-56; Kathleen Gough, “Variation in Residence,” in David Schneider and Gough,
Matrilineal Kinship
(see chap. 2, n. 9); Karla Poewe, “Matriliny in the Throes of Change,”
Africa
48 (1978); C. Lancaster, “Gwembe Valley Marriage Prestations in Historical Perspective,”
American Anthropologist
83 (1981); Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies,
Female of the Species
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Jill Nash, “A Note on Groomprice,”
American Anthropologist,
80 (1978); Alice Schlegal,
Sexual Stratification: A Cross-cultural View
(see chap. 2, n. 9).
27
Suzanne Frayser,
Varieties of Sexual Experience,
p. 27 (see chap. 2, n. 12); Cashdan, “Egalitarianism Among Hunters and Gatherers”; Lepowsky, “Gender in an Egalitarian Society” (see chap. 2, n. 21); John Noble Wilford, “Sexes Equal on South Sea Isle,”
New York Times,
March 29, 1994, pp. C1, C11; Barry Hewlett, “Husband-Wife Reciprocity and the Father-Infant Relationship Among Aka Pygmies,” in Barry Hewlett, ed.,
Father-Child Relations: Cultural and Biosocial Contexts
(New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992); Karen Endicott, “Fathering in an Egalitarian Society” ibid.; Barry Hewlett,
Intimate Fathers: The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Eleanor Leacock, “Introduction,” in Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie, eds.,
North American Indians in Historical Perspective
(New York: Random House, 1971), p. 23; Frederick Eggan,
Social Organization of the Western Pueblos
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Lurie, “Indian Women: A Legacy of Freedom,” in Charles Jones, ed.,
Look to the Mountain Top
(San Jose, Calif.: H. M. Gousha, 1972); Karen Anderson,
Chain Her by One Foot
(New York: Routledge, 1991); Baron LaHontan,
New Voyages to North America,
[1703], ed. Reuben Thwaites, (New York: B. Franklin, 1970) vol. 2, p. 463; Cornelius Jaenan,
Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1976) p. 86; Theda Purdue,
Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Marvin K. Opler, “The Ute and Paiute Indians of the Great Basin Southern Rim,” in Leacock and Lurie,
North American Indians.

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