Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Session Leader : Peter Jordan
External Discussant : Madonna Moss
General Background to the Session
The Baikal Archaeology Project (BAP) has an integrated archaeological, environmental and ethnoarchaeological focus on northern hunter-gatherers. Over the last decade the project has assembled a wide range of archaeological evidence for how the prehistoric hunter-gatherers around Lake Baikal were engaging with their environments – these large datasets include evidence for human diet and mobility, subsistence strategies, mortuary practices and settlement systems.
Since the emergence of hunter-gatherer studies as a distinct sub-discipline in the late
1960’s scholars have tended to adopt an ecological and adaptive perspective on the investigation of forager behaviour, for example, in relation to understanding variability in settlement systems, subsistence activity and reproductive strategies.
Research in this vein has attempted to measure and explain observed relationships between human populations and their resource environments by deploying optimality models, an approach drawn from behavioural ecology.
In contrast, an alternative set of approaches to the study of hunter-gatherers have stressed the importance of cosmology and symbolism in the way that forager communities engage with their resources and environments.
In this BAP workshop session we will attempt to integrate insights from these two divergent research traditions through discussion of the very rich archaeological and environmental datasets from Lake Baikal, drawing also on ethnographic parallels from hunter gatherers in northern Eurasia and beyond. Our overall goal is to develop a comprehensive understanding of Baikal’s prehistoric hunter gatherer populations and their long-term histories.
We will employ the analytical concept of landscape to facilitate these discussions. In recent years, landscape research has continued to expand and diversify, and now occupies a central position in the humanities, spanning archaeology, social anthropology, geography and history, and embracing the study of economics, social relations and cultural perceptions.
Recent years have witnessed several salient topics emerge into the forefront of landscape research, including the social and symbolic ‘construction’ of space through routine practice, and the idea that landscapes reflect long-term historical process, with meanings, values and power structures embedded within their materiality and traditions of use. More generally, the key strength of the landscape approach appears

to lie in its ‘useful ambiguity’ and in its capacity to connect rather than divide divergent themes and theoretical perspectives, for example, the analysis of behavioural adaptations to ecological environments alongside the study of cultural landscape perceptions.
Anthropological studies of cultural landscapes have been of crucial importance in opening out a deeper appreciation of the immense range of diversity that characterizes human engagements with the environment. In particular, landscape-based studies of
Australian hunter-gatherer communities have provided a fundamental challenge to simplistic notions of a clear-cut division between ‘natural’ environments and human culture. For Aborigines, the physical landscape is understood at all times as being social, symbolic, ritual and practical, serving on a conceptual level as both a moral code and tribal encyclopaedia. In turn, the abundant literature on Aboriginal
‘Dreamtime’ landscapes has gone on to make a particularly significant contribution to interpretive archaeology, occasionally providing explicit -- but more often implicit -- inspiration for seeking out new and more ‘humanised’ ways of exploring the form and content of prehistoric social worlds.
The concept of landscape is therefore most useful as a medium of a reflection, an entry point into the exploration of wider connections, rather than a precise research methodology – this is essentially the mode in which it will be deployed in this BAP
Workshop .
Main Discussion Points
1.
Assembling the base data
: (a) what do we know about Baikal’s prehistoric ecology and environment; (b) how were people settling and inhabiting these landscapes and how (c) did these adaptations change over time?
2.
Climate change and human response : How was the environment and climate changing – what impacts and opportunities might this have generated for human populations, for example, how would a fall in rainfall and temperatures affect the availability of prey and the success of older foraging strategies?
3.
Settlements dynamics: How far can we reconstruct changing settlement and mobility dynamics – what was driving these changes? How were peopling using and moving around the landscape during different periods?
4.
Subsistence: How were people using local animal and fish resources – can we identify the extent to which these patterns were influenced by cosmological as well as practical considerations?
5.
Landscape and identity : Are there any links between landscape, land-use and prehistoric social identity?
6.
Hunter-gatherer cosmologies: How far can we reconstruct prehistoric cosmology and sacred landscape geography? How were ‘routine’ and
‘ritualised’ aspects of landscape and land-use integrated and how did these patterns change over time?
7.
Prehistoric social life: Can we develop detailed reconstructions of prehistoric cultural landscapes around Lake Baikal and their long-term dynamics? What do these tell us about prehistoric social life around Lake Baikal in the mid-
Holocene?
Suggested Readings

Burch, E.S. 2005. Alliance and Conflict. ( Read: Introduction and Conclusion )
Fitzhugh, B and J. Habu (2002). Beyond Foraging and Collecting: Evolutionary
Change in Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems. New York: Kluwer. ( Read:
Foreword; Chapters 1 and 2 ).
Haakanson, S. Jr. and P. Jordan (in press / 2010). 'Marking the Land': Sacrifices,
Cemeteries and Sacred Places among the Yamal Nenets. In: P. Jordan (ed),
Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia . London: University College London
Institute of Archaeology Publications
Jordan, P. (in press / 2010). Landscape and culture in Northern Eurasia: an introduction. In: P. Jordan (ed), Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia . London:
University College London Institute of Archaeology Publications
Nagaoka, L. The effects of resource depression on foraging efficiency, diet breadth, and patch use in southern New Zealand. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21
(2002) 419–442
Smith, EA, Bliege Bird R and DW Bird (2003). The benefits of costly signalling:
Meriam turtle hunters. Behavioral Ecology Vol. 14 No. 1: 116–126
Zvelebil, M and Jordan, P (1999). Hunter Fisher Gatherer Ritual Landscapes:
Questions of Time, Space and Representation. In: J. Goldhahn (ed), Rock Art as
Social Representation . BAR International Series 794. Oxford: Hadrian Books Ltd pp.
101-127.