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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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Survival by Hunting is at its best on the archaeology of hunting large animals: for example, on bison bone beds at traps and jumps and corrals and on big-horn sheep traps—log structures scattered throughout the mountains. The larger the animal the more the detail; smaller mammals and birds are largely ignored. Frison identifies traits useful in stalking and hunting animals, such as the well-known curiosity of pronghorn antelopes. |
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Even though Frison labored under the disadvantage of hunting himself when certain species were for all practical purposes off limits, their populations at historic low levels or locally exterminated, he argues, rightly I believe, that an experienced hunter can raise and answer pertinent questions about the behavior of hunters in the past. Yet even if sympathetic to this point of view, inferences are problematic because of vast differences in ethnicity, culture, and historical circumstance, not to mention in animal populations and behavior through time. While close observation of prey (and predator) species is a crucial skill, and ethological knowledge invaluable, I wonder how far wrong one can go extrapolating from non-Indian hunting techniques in the 1930s to prehistoric Indian behavior and culture. Frison is not unaware of the problem. For instance, in looking for "shamanic" activity in archaeological sites, he signals an awareness of the need to incorporate indigenous thought into his analysis. |
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But the analysis in Survival by Hunting often seems to fall short. For example, while it is interesting to state that Indians wished to prevent crippled animals from escaping from the base of a jump (p. 11), it would have been far more satisfying to speculate why. It is one matter to claim that an experienced hunter's responses are "automatic" (p. 17) but are they in the same way automatic regardless of ethnicity or culture? While hunters known by Frison in his youth might have been "a competitive and arrogant bunch" (p. 22), is not generalizing this to other hunters (including Paleoindians), as Frison implies, fraught with difficulty? As for the notion that "true hunters rarely indulge in the wanton killing of animals" (p. 33), what, precisely, is meant by true or wanton? It is surely a leap to conclude that because no one Frison knew ate horse meat, then Paleoindians could not have (p. 49). Does Frison really believe that a "competent hunter would be too proud" to kill an animal debilitated by injury or age (p. 117) or that canons of edibility were similar regardless of culture (pp. 18, 118)? |
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As a work of personal reflection, Survival by Hunting is typical of a genre loose in style and substance predisposed unwittingly, perhaps, to questions like these. Such queries need not diminish this accomplished archaeologist's long career. In fact, that they might be posed (or have answers) is in large measure due to excavation, by Frison and others, of sites revealing American Indian behavior prior to times accessible through documentary and other forms of evidence. |
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Shepard Krech III is professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Brown University and author of The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W.W. Norton, 1999), Spirits of the Air: American Indians and Birds in the South (Georgia, under contract), and other works. |
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