Structured Worlds: The Archaeology of Hunter-Gatherer Thought and Action

L BINFORD'S CONTINUUM OF hunter-gatherer mobility strategies is an epitome of a materialist, reductionist processual archaeology. Mobility patterns play significant roles in structuring the hunter-gatherer archaeological record; mobility patterns are strongly determined by a few environmental variables and human population densities (Binford, American Antiquity 45:4-20; Binford Gonstructing Erames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Hunter-Gatherer and Environmental Data Sets, 2001). The book at hand offers an alternative or complementary view, or views, making the strong claim that the archaeological record is structured by patterned quotidian human bebaviors wbich flow from "cosmology, social relations, perceptions and values" (p. 1). It seeks to show this through a set of empirically grounded case studies. A central issue for such an approach is overcoming the well known archaeological inferential hierarchy (e.g., Hawkes American Anthropologist 56:155-168) which was perhaps most elaborately developed by MacWhite (American Anthropologist 58:3-25) who recognized 10 levels of archaeological inference, the lowest being "taxonomic and mechanical"—artifact classification—and the highest "Psychological"—"complex inferences from material culture to the behavioral and ideological culture of a social group or individual person." For MacWhite the lowest levels are pretty inferentially firm, limited mainly by data gaps, wbile for the highest levels— thought to be farthest from our data— inferences are increasingly hypothetical and reliant on intuition. The book seeks to make the case and demonstrate that this is incorrect; that the material record is a record of human thoughts, actions and intentions and can tell us as much about world view as it can about economic strategies. The book also contributes to a literature, strongly inspired by the work of Tim Ingold, that seeks to demonstrate that hunter-gatherers are not more pragmatic, not more economically rational, not more optimizing than the rest of us because they are somehow closer to Nature and hence more subject to its whims. Rather, it is argued that huntergatherers, like all of us, live in worlds constructed out of symbols and, like tbe rest of us, they act in those worlds. The book grew out of a symposium that Cannon organized for the 69th Annual SAA meetings in Montreal in 2004 with three additional contributions. It contains twelve chapters, including Cannon's introduction and concluding, wrap-up chapter. Cannon's