The Game of Choice: Patterns of Indian and Colonist Hunting in the Neotropics

Anthropologists have collected data on hunting by humans to test a number of different hypotheses, including that of protein limitation (Gross 1975), the ideas on taboos advanced bv Ross (19781, the , , efficiency of different weapons (e.g., Hames 1979), and optimal foraging by humans (e.g., Hawkes et al. 1982). These data revealthe astonishing range of game species taken by Neotropical human hunters. This paper does not address the hypotheses listed above, but instead examines the difference between hunting by Indians and hunting by colonists. In particular, we test the null hypothesis that there were no differences between Indian and colonist hunting in terms of nature and intensitv. Anv differences found were examined in light of various biological and cultural factors. We have restricted our analysis to human communities living in tropical forests in South America, though the specific type of forest ranges from subtropical forest in Paraguay to the riverine forests in Peru. We classified each of the communities in our study as either "Indian" or 6 6 colonist," although we recognize that this greatly oversimplifies the different levels of acculturation found among com" munities. We included only communities in which game was never or infrequently sold outside the community. Methods