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Book Review
| Survival by Hunting: Prehistoric Human Predators and Animal Prey. By George Frison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xix + 266 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.
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| George Frison has had a distinguished career as an archaeologist of Paleoindian hunting sites on the Great Plains. He came late to the table of professional archaeology, beginning college at age 37 following decades in the family ranching and outfitting business, during which he developed a passion for excavation. Over the next forty years Frison amassed an enviable record of publications on buffalo traps and jumps, antelope and sheep hunting sites, and Clovis, Folsom, and other technologies in the Plains and montane West. Survival by Hunting amounts to a reflection on his career and what Frison considers as his advantage of extended experience as a hunter in interpreting the behavior of hunters in the past. Frison intends this book to correct ethnographic, archaeological, and artistic interpretations of human hunting that fail to acknowledge the ethological knowledge requisite to success as a hunter; he admits (p. 32) that for him, this is an old saw. |
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In nine chapters, Frison takes us though his life and career as well as the hunting, by Indians, of bison, pronghorn antelope, sheep, deer, elk, and other animals. He sees all these topics as intertwined. The first two chapters are largely autobiographical, as Frison details early experiences as a hunter. The next six chapters are about Paleoindians and extinct animals; Indian hunting of buffalo, antelope, sheep, deer, elk, and other animals; and prehistoric technology. |
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